Last week Tracy and I flew to Orange County to train three new resellers, or as we’re calling them, Fanminder Solution Providers (FSPs, natch!)

Without much fanfare, we now have five total FSPs. The FSP Program is a top priority of ours because these providers have demonstrated to us an ability to quickly create sales and sales opportunities from their deep community ties. Now if you told me six months ago, “Paul, I think you should give up some control over your brand, customer experience, margin, and mobile marketing results to people you’ve never met before!” I would have errr, chuckled, to say the least.

I probably would have said “You’re crazy. Our plan is focused around direct-to-small business sales channels like the internet, our own inside salespeople, and business development.” Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.

We got experience.

You can’t read a book on start-ups or hear from founders without hearing “be nimble. learn. go where the opportunity is.” And so we are. Our new FSP partners are a wonderfully eclectic mix of salt-of-the-earth salespeople, brokers, and business professionals (not mutually exclusive!!) with a newfound passion for mobile marketing. Interestingly, in at least two cases, they’re former print broker, promotional specialties salespeople, and advertising brokers who realize the days of print are waning fast and it’s time to jump to the new wave coming in. Nice insight. Ahoy!

Our FSPs are doing a fantastic job adding to the Fanminder family. They are adding eight new clients this week alone without breaking a sweat. Dozens more are already deep in the pipeline. And three of them just got trained and don’t even HAVE a pipeline yet. Plus we have some doozy prospective customers in the hopper. Zig!

As for zagging; Building the FSP Program is new to us at Fanminder. With this new-ness, I’m learning about reseller vs. affiliate agreements, sales targets, training programs, FSP economics and incentives, co-branded websites, invisible billing mechanisms, and most difficult of all, how to take a back seat to others’ selling efforts. The other day I got a call from a FSP who said “I just signed up a mall.” A mall?!!? Made me pretty happy. But for a guy who likes to be really close to customers, boy, was that a strange feeling. I have a feeling I better be getting used to it…

If you’d like to learn more about the Fanminder Solution Provider Program, give me a ring at Paul@Fanminder.com.