Demand generation for a regional VAR: build own marketing

How to grow your regional value-added reseller (VAR) company beyond technical subcontracts and maintenance services? How to build a successful and independently growing business?

How to grow your regional value-added reseller (VAR) company beyond technical subcontracts and maintenance services? How to build a successful and independently growing business? You need to learn and to do the own marketing. Here is how you can start a digital demand generation for a regional VAR or a local system integrator.

Enterprise automation software is booming; the opportunity is calling.

Enterprise software market is $439B in 2019, growing at 8.3%, according to Gartner. Despite the online revolution, enterprise software is still sold by the army of sales professionals in suits and ties. They are supported by sales engineers (SEs) and product experts, who equipped with product and technical marketing materials. SEs perform live product demos and POCs (proofs of concept) – often necessary steps in the long and expensive sales cycle. And this is a significant growth barrier for every vendor. How can enterprise software vendors scale their business faster?

At some point, most of the successfully growing enterprise software vendors begin to rely on regional partners. VARs and local system integrators sell and implement their solutions. Custom implementation of enterprise software is a significant challenge. This creates an excellent opportunity for local technical gurus to start and grow software VARs (value-added resellers) and system integration companies on a regional level to claim a cut of $1,034B services market.

Why do you need to expand from technical to marketing expertise?

However, unlike software vendors, local VARs and system integrators don’t have access to the same deep pockets of VC investors; so their sales and marketing resources are limited:

• no army of sales professionals in suits and ties

• no recognizable brand name

• limited marketing budget

What VARs do have – is technical expertise to deploy the software and implement custom solutions. But how do you grow business beyond the initial projects and find new customers?

Let’s say your task is to grow business for a regional VAR. If you are lucky to sign an exclusive agreement for the particular region, you may enjoy a steady flow of new leads from the vendor. However, this is rare. The vendor gives you exclusivity if there is hardly any business in the region so that you can build it. If there are an existing business and a steady flow of new requests, the vendor would prefer multiple partners to address this demand. Healthy competition among partners ensures a higher quality of customer service and project implementations. That is why the vendor will support numerous partners in the region and split incoming requests among them.

Setting up the demand generation for a regional VAR.

How can you, as a regional VAR or a system integrator, run the own demand generation machine? It will help you to grow your business faster, gain a competitive advantage in the region, or scale business to the other regions. The best way is to leverage your local knowledge and connections as well as support from the vendor. This combination is compelling: local contacts give you access to the buyers while the vendor’s support helps to convert buyers and close business.

Each enterprise software vendor is equipped with content and marketing materials: videos, social cards, white papers, recorded product demos, and webinars. They describe the customer’s problem and offer a solution based on the vendor’s products. You may leverage those materials to run your content marketing campaigns targeting the local buyers and generating demand for your services. You may also leverage the vendor’s set of sales tools: presentations, product brochures, demos, sales training, etc. This will equip you for face-to-face meetings with your prospects at the later stages of the sales cycle.