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Some of your partners are still quoting a product you discontinued
Updates travel as forwarded PDFs, scattered emails and WhatsApp messages. Some regions hear things late, some never hear them, and every distributor ends up telling a slightly different version of your company.
Rebuild your channel communication See the cycle
- Typical duration
- 6 to 8 weeks to build
- Then
- Runs on a fixed monthly rhythm
- Owner
- Marketing, not regional sales
- Most missed piece
- The withdrawal notice
Manufacturer with regional distributors · channel
The distributor network that received information too late
A manufacturer depending on distributors across multiple regions. Product information reached partners unevenly and nobody could say who knew what.
Product updates travelled through scattered emails, forwarded PDFs and informal WhatsApp messages. Some partners were selling discontinued products. Others had never heard about the new ones. Regional managers each had their own habits and the good ones covered for the system's absence.
A distributor communication system: scheduled updates, approved content, launch kits, training sessions and a central asset library.
Every distributor could tell the same current story without waiting for someone at head office to forward the right attachment. The regional variation in what customers heard closed.
This is unglamorous work and it is frequently the single highest-return thing a manufacturer with a channel can fix.
The cycle that keeps it current
Five components on a repeating monthly rhythm. Predictability is what makes partners actually read it, which is why the date matters more than the design.
The withdrawal notice is the piece almost nobody builds, and it is why discontinued products keep appearing in quotations two years after they stopped being made.
Ownership belongs with marketing rather than regional sales. Left to sales it becomes whichever manager is most diligent, which reproduces exactly the unevenness you are trying to remove.
What gets built
A central asset library
One location, always current, that a partner can reach without asking anybody. Removing the request step is most of the value.
A scheduled update
Same format, same day, monthly or quarterly. What is new, what changed, what is being withdrawn, what is coming.
Launch kits for the channel
The launch kit adapted for partners, who need the argument more than your own team does because they carry forty other lines.
Approved messaging
What partners may claim, in their own language, so they stop writing their own version and you stop finding surprises in their brochures.
Training that repeats
Short and recorded. New salespeople join distributors constantly and nobody re-trains them, which is why year-three partners often sell your year-one story.
A withdrawal process
How a discontinued product gets removed from partner material, with a confirmation step. Almost nobody has this.
Co-marketing rules
What support is available, against what activity, with what outcome agreed. Funding partner marketing while your messaging is inconsistent simply multiplies the inconsistency.
Before you ask
Our distributors are small and not very digital.
Then the system meets them where they are. A monthly WhatsApp broadcast with a link to one current price and product sheet is a system. The failure is not the channel, it is the absence of a schedule and a single source.
How do we stop them using old material?
Make the current material easier to get than the old material is to find, and date-stamp everything. Partners use old decks because the old deck is on their laptop and the new one requires an email to head office.
Who runs it after you leave?
Usually your marketing executive, and the system is built so that it can be. Fixed format, fixed date, a calendar and a checklist. If it needs a consultant to keep running, it was designed wrong.
Should distributors get marketing funds?
Only against a defined activity with an agreed outcome, and only once the communication system exists. Order matters here.
Ask three distributors the same question
Ask them to describe your newest product. If you get three different answers, or two blanks, there is a contained piece of work here with a fast return. Tell me what they said.
Rebuild your channel communication See case studies
Kunal Waghmare · Padmavati Hills, Mokai Vasti, Bavdhan, Pune, Maharashtra 411021
office@quiamo.com · +91 90216 02686