Recruiting and managing channel partners that really perform well is difficult (apparently also in Latin America). That’s why I wrote the book “Building Successful Partner Channels” and based on the sales of the book and the number of emails that I receive from my readers the book has addressed an area that has largely been unexplored to date.

A book can never give the reader a precise roadmap for what he or she should do in his or her specific situation, and therefore many of the emails that I receive are asking for specific advice. I cannot take the time to research each and every situation and I therefore mostly refer to my white papers, posts and videos that deal with the questions asked.

Just recently I received an unusually detailed description of a challenge facing one of my readers and thought it could be valuable to share the content and crowd-source some reflections on what options my reader should consider.

Here is the question:

Dear Hans Peter,

My software company has been in business for over two decades. We’ve always sold into Latin America, and our model up until now is that we have a distributor in Latin America who receives a margin and they often utilize resellers. This has worked out well because they speak both English and Spanish (and my Spanish is limited).

Any incoming emails, calls or web download trial of our software come through me, and then I pass them over to this distributor for follow up. We have a Spanish version of our website as a resource to increase sales in Latin America.

In spite of this, sales with our distributor have been pretty non-existent. In general, the only orders I receive are maintenance renewals that I send them to follow up on. They have not put us on their website. I send them emails my department localizes in Spanish, and they state they are sending these to their database, yet nothing ever comes of these efforts.

I pose two questions to you:

• How can I find a distributor partner that will learn our software, and have specific sales people that work with the customers in Spanish? It has been very difficult to find resources for companies that would do this in Latin America. I’ve scoured the internet, sent emails to colleagues, including you. And to be perfectly frank, just finding potential new partner(s) to just speak with seems impossible.
• Secondly, in North America you can easily find contacts to target at companies based on SIC codes, etc. This seems to be non-existent in Latin America. Are there any resources available to find contact names/emails to specific verticals in the Latam countries?

Any advice you have would be sincerely appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Best regards

Peter Nelson

Based on the information provided in the email what would you recommend my reader to do?

If you find it hard to offer any recommendations based on the information provided then what additional information would you need to suggest a direction to take ?

PS. The name is not Peter Nelson and I have removed all company information.