The Truth about Channel Management

Educating Resellers, like Selling, Must Never Stop

When manufacturers are grappling with how to get more of their products sold at a lower cost, they will often turn to channel management programs – and for good reason.  Relying on several different channels is a necessity to reduce costs of sales cycles, penetrate vertical markets, gain critical insight into how to better manage pricing and contracts, and stay in front of prospects – many of which are deciding which channels they will prefer to purchase from in the future.

Multichannel management is the 21rst century equivalent of the no-brainer strategy, the “must do” if any company wants to stay relevant, grow and be challenged on how to sell more effectively and with greater insight into customer needs.  Add in the mercurial change that social networking brings to channel management and the entire set of assumptions of how channels operate changes radically.

Growing Trusted Advisors during Turbulent Times

In watching manufacturers execute their channel management strategies one can see those that clearly get it – they are passionate about getting their customers to their goals – making an impact and seeing lasting change for their customers’ clients too.  This intensity is what makes their channel management strategies resonate and come alive with the excitement of learning.

Best of all, companies doing this are showing their resellers why the critical connection of how much you knowledge you have about products, solutions, systems and processes that can be applied to customers’ problems is directly related to how much you can earn.

Knowledge sells, generates trust, guides resellers on how best serve – and it must never stop as a passion for any company with a channel partner program.  Trust is the new currency, and to the extent your company can earn, keep, grow, be worthy of, and continually honor and respect the trust of resellers is the extent to which more sales can be made.  In this mindset transactions are not the endgame, but the chance to always be of service and be an integral part to a customers’ business is.

Beyond Kumbaya to Results

With so much riding on getting resellers up to speed on products, combined with the accelerating rate of information being sent through social networks, companies need to embrace a systematic approach to sharing, updating and verifying information resellers have is accurate.  The credibility of each reseller is at stake depending on how the information is used.  Here are lessons learned on how to get beyond Kumbaya to results:

• Always be educating – through all channels possible on a 24/7 basis. The use of weekly webinars in Cisco to keep their resellers, an online library and the development of roles-based use of their quoting and product configuration systems has made Cisco one of the more effective channel educators in the market.

• Your channels are a classroom, not just a source of revenue. The highest performing companies have this mindset that educating their channel partners – and for that matter foreign subsidiaries – is more about continually looking to strengthen their channels with intelligence and less about just pushing pricing or availability data to them.

• Measure your own and channel partners’ performance. You can create a balanced scorecard that quickly shows if you are being successful in keeping your channels knowledgeable or not.  From the simple measures of request for assistance to the growth of certifications, it’s critically important to measure performance not just from a selling, but also from a learning standpoint as well.

• Realize that the technologies your products or services are based on may be incredibly difficult to understand for your channels. This is the case with one statistical software company which is a perennial challenger to SAS and SPSS.  The company has created online tutorials of their products specifically for resellers so they can practice demos on laptops with no Internet connection.  These Java-based demo tools have increased demo performance by over 67%!

• Be the most aggressive company in your industry when it comes to sponsoring thought leader events with the world’s leading colleges and universities. The alliance of AMR Research with Stanford University is a case in point, where the two organizations have created unique, highly valuable supply chain events that are thought provoking and also participated in by many of the world’s most well run organizations.  Go in this direction and gain trusted advisor status not only with your channels, but with your customers as well.

Bottom line: Trust is the new currency and to earn it a company has to recommit to enrich, grow, strengthen and passionately serve its channels with intelligence, insight and knowledge.  Only by finding that resonating passion to make your channels grow stronger with knowing how best to use your company’s products, services, programs and expertise to overwhelming solve customers’ problems can new sales be earned.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tylerdurden/411048096/

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