If you ask your resellers what is the most important thing you can do for them, they are going to say “give us leads”! And they really mean “Send us sales-ripe people who are ready to buy!” You can craft a plan to help reliably deliver those: Best Bet: Driving Qualified Opportunities Through A Channel.
Another thing that helps them is to give them a reason to reach out to their current customers. New industry information, a new use for your product or an incentive program are three great vehicles. Package this program for them, including a suggested conversation opener or two; the incentive, new industry trends, or information about how to use your product in a new way; and follow with some sentences about why this is important to your reseller’s customer.
A best practice would be to reach out to your resellers in this way at least twice a quarter, in the first 2 months of the quarter. Remember that a typical reseller will carry between 6 to 40 products, and most resellers are very small businesses. (CRN tracks the VAR 500, and in 2013 the 500th VAR had $18M of revenue. There are 127,000 VARs in the U.S, so that means that 126,500 of them are doing less than $18M annually!) Extend yourself to help them sell your product, keep building the relationship and trust with them and it will pay off in business you never would have gotten without them.