Channel Sales Enablement Part 5

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

Channel Sales Enablement Part 5

I have an interest in Growth Hacking, making a company grow by acquiring users, customers or revenue. The problem I usually face is that in channel sales, the number of agents is not a viable metric.

The Channel looks at it as the more feet on the street we have, the better sales will be. NO! Then we compound the problem by giving recruiting quotas to the channel managers. NO! Channel sales is Not a numbers game. (But then sales isn't really either.)

Today, with all of our Big Data analytics, we know who buys our stuff. We can determine the profile of the most profitable customers. THAT is where the time and effort should be spent. But for some reason sales organizations don't do that. As long as revenue goes up, we are good. (Even when some of that revenue is bad or low margin.)

Every project I worked on this year in the channel was about making the channel sell more. That never equates to bringing on more agents. That approach doesn't scale. The busy work piles up; the channel managers get overwhelmed; and you will miss real deals because you are too busy to notice or help.

Find out what makes a good agent. What criteria goes into a win-win scenario.

Who buys your stuff? Who is your best customer?

Why do they buy your stuff?

All to often, agents will sign an agreement (especially with no quota or commitment) because there is a deal in the funnel that MIGHT close some day. Why sign that agent up? At least, wait until the contract has been pulled.

There are too many vendors, little differentiation, and that is really what is getting in the way of sales growth. Your sales channels need tools in order to find the most profitable customers, get referrals, close deals, demonstrate competitive advantage, etc. That's sales enablement.

In Growth Hacking, sharing, content and social are integrated with automation, APIs, PR and other marketing. If marketing is done right, sales is easy.

Millions of people are in love with Apple. Apple (under Jobs) understood design, engineering, innovation and marketing. Simon Sinek says that Your Marketing is Backwards.

Back in the day, in a Jeffrey Gitomer sales class, he said that if car dealers talked about what it was like to own the car and what service would be like, the price of the car would matter a lot less. Very true. How many hours do you want to spend at the dealership for service? Not very many. That's the whole point.

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I kind of touched on this in Part 2.



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