Administering a successful Authorized Dealer Program requires many complex, ongoing tasks. To cite just a few:
- Processing and reviewing applications from prospective dealers.
- Drafting and executing contracts with dealers, wholesalers, and distributors.
- Developing and updating lists of approved resale locations for each dealer.
- Maintaining a library of approved assets for resellers, such as sales copy, logos, product images, videos, technical specifications, warranties, owner’s manuals, etc.
- Maintaining an up-to-date “Do Not Sell” list of both authorized dealers who’ve violated your agreement and unauthorized sellers you’ve caught advertising your products without permission.
- Maintaining and distributing an up-to-date “White List” list of authorized dealers that your distributors may sell to, and where those dealers are authorized to sell your products.
- Disseminating your updated Do Not Sell lists to wholesalers, distributors, and your internal sales team.
- Administering a dealer badging program in which authorized online dealers can display trust icons alongside product listings to demonstrate they are in fact official resellers of your products.
If you try to manage all of these responsibilities on an ad hoc basis, your Authorized Dealer Program won’t be as streamlined or successful as it could be. For example, emailing PDF-based agreements to each dealer for signature can lead to version-control confusion, difficulty in quickly locating a dealer’s up-to-date contract, and the potential for a signed agreement to be lost or forgotten in an email thread.
What happens if you create new product images and want to make sure your resale partners are using them in all of their advertisements and product listings? Sending out emails with those pictures to your list of dealers poses the same logistical risks.
The best solution to manage your Authorized Dealer Program is to let technology do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Specifically, the answer is to use an automated dealer distribution portal. In this lesson, we will discuss what a dealer distribution portal is, and how it can improve the effectiveness of your Authorized Dealer Program.
What Is a Dealer Distribution Portal?
A dealer distribution portal (sometimes called a dealer management portal) is a web platform that helps you automate the administration of your Authorized Dealer Program. For example, an effective portal will let you:
- Set rules for your application process and automate the review process and next steps for approval or rejection for dealers who apply.
- Enable your resellers to digitally complete and sign forms such as applications to join the program as well as Authorized Dealer (or Distributor) agreements.
- Create a centralized digital library for all reseller assets, such as images and trust icons.
- Create a central repository of product information, which can be shared with your dealers in custom formats via an automated data feed.
- Offer dealers self-serve access to these assets, according to their authorization status.
- Update your channel automatically when there are new or updated assets or when your product information changes.
- Integrate the data you generate in your dealer portal with your company’s CRM or ERP system.
- Trigger automated enforcement procedures when a dealer violates one of your compliance policies.
Dealer distribution portals vary in terms of capabilities and feature sets, but these are among the must-have tools you should expect from the portal you select.
4 Benefits of a Dealer Distribution Portal
Now that you have an idea of what an effective dealer distribution portal should offer, let’s discuss why such a solution should be part of your Authorized Dealer Program.
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Improve relationships with your dealer partners
The easier you make it for authorized dealers to sell your company’s products, the more satisfied and loyal those resale partners will be. A user-friendly dealer portal can improve your relationships with dealers by speeding the application and signup process to join your reseller network, and making it easier for dealers to receive your latest assets and product information updates.
Even something as simple as allowing your dealers to access their account profile in the portal anytime to update their company’s key contact information, such as adding a new email addresses to send notifications to, can make working with your company a lot more appealing.
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Protect your brand value
If your company is planning to implement an Authorized Dealer Program, chances are your key reasons include gaining better control over your resale network, plugging “leaks” in the distribution channel of your product inventory, and protecting your brand’s reputation.
The right dealer portal will give you several tools to accomplish these goals. For example, it will allow you to:
- Tighten controls over your digital assets (such as product images) by embedding an invisible and trackable digital-rights-protection code into every asset you share with your authorized resellers.
- Limit which dealers may sell your products on a channel-by-channel basis, and enforce those rules automatically.
- Ensure all dealers receive notifications of all relevant updates to your brand’s operations. These would include each time you want to share a new or updated marketing-related to your resale partners, whenever you update your products’ price grids, anytime you update one of your company policies, etc. This will help you reduce the chances of dealers advertising your products using outdated information, which over time will protect your brand.
With all of these built-in tools (and others) working together, you can limit the likelihood that your products, sales content, and other assets end up in the hands of unauthorized sellers who could undermine your brand. Even better: When your dealer portal is integrated into a comprehensive reseller-monitoring and enforcement application, you’ll be taking significant steps toward protecting your brand.
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Increase sales and consumer confidence
Another key component in your dealer portal is the ability to issue Verified Authorized e-Tailer badges to your dealers, which will both help them distinguish themselves from unauthorized resellers, boosting consumer confidence, and help your company increase legitimate product sales from trusted dealer partners.
To derive the most value from your Verified Authorized e-Tailer badges, you won’t want to make them static icons. Even unauthorized resellers can paste those into their ads and product listings.
Instead, you’ll want to give your authorized dealers badge icons that are clickable, live links, allowing an online shopper to verify, in real-time, that the retailer is in fact a member of the manufacturer’s official network of resale partners. The mockup below, pulled from TrackStreet’s Dealer Distribution Portal, illustrates how such a live badge would work.
Note: Some online marketplaces, most notably Amazon, disallow these types of third-party trust icons on sellers’ product listings.
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Save time and resources on dealer management
Finally, all of these administrative tasks required to run a successful Authorized Dealer Program, the application process, executing agreements, distributing product update notifications, responding to dealer requests for digital assets, can take a great deal of time to manage manually.
Leveraging the technology of an effective dealer management portal can alleviate a lot of these time-consuming hassles, freeing your team up to focus on more strategically important and profitable initiatives.