• Joint Business Planning
  Traditionally, manufacturer is responsible for building the brand awareness that partners capitalize on to move products. With the death of interruption advertising and the changing customers’ preferences, this approach alone is not productive enough. A joint marketing approach where a partner and the manufacturer collectively plan on tactics to reach a target market is the best way forward.

  In joint marketing, manufacturer’s value propositions move from supplier to the trusted advisor committed towards the success of its partner. This automatically demands the same level of commitment from the partners hence creating a real strategic alliance a win-win situation.

  Growing trend in joint business planning is to create custom marketing campaign to generate new leads within the partner’s target market. This is the best use of manufacturer’s MDF’s (Marketing Development Funds) and the best example of think big act local. This approach has many advantages including:

  • More qualified leads that results in quick close
  • Minimized channel conflict
  • Strong partners’ commitment
  • Enhanced partner productivity
     
• Partnersourcing Programs
  Who came up with the idea for Big Mac? If your answer is McDonald, than I am afraid you’re off the mark. It was McDonald franchisee– the front line people working directly with the end customers – who came up with this winning product idea. As a manufacturer build strong partner base, it increasingly become distant from the dynamic of marketplace and loses touch with the needs of their customers. Establish a good channel feedback program and rewarding partners for their winning suggestion is the sure shot way to increase their productivity.

  There are many ways to collect channel partner feedback including surveys, face-to-face interviews, and structured ‘partner leadership councils’. Each of these methods has their own strengths. For example, survey are easy to administer, but do not provide enough insight into shifting perception in customer base, sources of big new revenue etc. face-to-face structured interview allow you to collect strategic intelligence but are difficult to get the buy-in for new programs to capture the new identified marketing opportunity. The ‘partner leadership councils’ brings the best of the both world. It is the forum that provides the voice to your partners to share new market opportunities, advice on new product development, and adjust go-to-market strategies.

  It doesn’t matter how you collect this information. The real trick is to act on it and award partners for proactively supporting you.

Summary

Indirect (Partner) channels are one of the best ways to increase revenue growth and reach diverse markets. They are also one of the most complex parts of the integrated multi-channel go-to-market system. Once implemented, however, they guarantee the success of business because partners can deliver sales and support at relatively low costs and reach more customers.

Though, partners come in many shape and sizes with different labels, fortunately, the process of building this channel and managing is straightforward and simple. It is:

1. Build the organizational structure to execute the partner strategy. This including hiring right staff and empowering them to execute the strategy. Documenting clear policies and procedures and finally developing an attractive value propositions for partners
2. Recruiting right partners and enabling them with right tools to effectively achieve their targets. Since partners can play different roles in a sales cycle it is critical to clearly define and communicate expectations and put in place a holistic scorecard to monitor partner and change their behavior by incentivizing the right activities.
3. Improve the sales productivity by becoming real strategic partners in building joint business plans and engaging partners in product development – a key tool in increasing the productivity. 

The success of indirect channel depends on the level of commitment that the manufacturer makes towards its partners and vice versa. The indirect channel will not produce results if the partners are left without proper training, sales and market and service support.

Related:

• Table of Content
• Red Queen Effect – An Introduction
  
• The Billionaire Code
  
• Cracking the Code
  
• Implementation Plan
• Sales Force
• Partner (Indirect) Sales Channel
  • Building Partner (Indirect) Sales Channel
  • Building Organizational Capabilities
    • Build the management team
    • Define the role of the channel partners
    • Establish the scope of the indirect (partner) channel
    • Establish the polices under which the indirect (partner) channel will operate
  • Partner Selection & Enablement
    • Build a strong partner base
      
    • Build a partner support infrastructure
      
    • Develop a partner scorecard, and
    • Communicate and manage expectations

1. Focus sales force activity on large account acquisition

The big issue in most sales forces today is that field reps spend lot of their time on small transaction with existing customers. This is because reps feel more at home dealing with familiar customers than with going out and acquiring major new accounts. These small transactions in existing accounts is a colossal waste of highly-skilled, highly-compensated sales reps. Therefore, the first step in a sale force redesign for integrated multichannel selling should be to pull your sales force out of these under-leveraged situations and push them into right types of sales opportunities. This can be achieved by:

• Redefining sales force territories in terms of large accounts instead of geographies or industry verticals, which will force your sales force to concentrate on major accounts.
• Defining "right" opportunities with precision, so that sales reps can focus their activities on the best opportunity. There are many ways to define a right opportunity, most common of which are:
  • customer size (in sales, number of employees, etc.),
  • potential purchase volume (e.g., > $2M/year), and
  • specialized need (e.g,. high customization)
• Reducing the number of accounts that reps can manage at any given time. This encourages them to spend less time on existing customers and to look for new high-potential businesses.
• Eliminate sales force’s role in fulfillment and post-sales support.
  Nothing can get the sales force back into the street and over to new customer sites faster than prohibiting their participation in an account after the sale has been closed.
   

2. Use other channels to offload low-value selling tasks

In a multichannel system, a sales force's time should be spent primarily on high-value selling tasks. These tasks include account planning, negotiation, and sales closure. These are high-level tasks which result in closed sales and require the highest level of skill. Other tasks are important but generally have a less direct relationship to actual revenue production. These tasks include lead generation and qualification, proposal writing, fulfillment, and customer support. These tasks take up an awful lot of sales rep's time—often over 50 percent of total sales rep working hours. Getting some or all of these tasks off their plate is a key source of leverage and the reason for sales force productivity.
 

3. Provide field reps with more extensive technology support / information

Large, complex account selling requires a consultative approach. A sales rep needs to position herself before clients as an expert partner. This is only possible if she has access to up-to-date business development focus data, including: customers’ industry data, key facts, buying issues, breaking news, customer purchasing events, customer promotions, key account movements, departures, competitor wins, awards, new sales opportunities, etc.

This business development focused information helps sales reps move a sale in the process and perform a realistic account planning. Most of this information is available freely. The trick is to gather and deliver it to sales reps using reliable technology. Customer relationship management (CRM) and other database systems are major tools in improving the productivity of a sales rep. Social CRM is the next evolution of traditional CRM packages.
 

4. Redesign sales force training

Within a multichannel selling environment, your sales force is not only working with high-end customers—who are notorious for their distaste for tricky closing techniques and sales scripts—they are also navigating the account along with other channels. Reps have to know how and when other channels should be included, excluded, managed and integrated in the completion and support of a sale. All of this exponentially increases the complexity and difficulty of a sale rep’s job. Traditional training won’t do any justice to your sales force's retooled role. Your sales force will need more sophisticated training in: basic customer need analysis, large account management, multichannel selling, and emerging social media tools. Only when your sales force is empowered by such coaching will you have a real leveraged sales force.
 

5. Align performance measurement and compensation with a large account focus

As in any organizational initiative, performance management and compensation play a critical role in realigning sales force behavior towards the new objective of key account development. In particular, compensation system should be redesigned to reward reps for focusing on larger accounts, selling more effectively into those accounts, and working cooperatively with other channels.

These five simple steps will allow you to redesign a successful leveraged sales force with high level of productivity and efficiency. In any sales force redesign initiative, it is critical to keep in mind two central facts:

1. Customers have their own needs and expectations.
   In many industries, a field rep is still the de facto standard. Customers expect to work with a face. It is worth confirming what customers want and expect before narrowing sales force participation to a smaller segment of the marketplace.

2. A sales force consists of people.
   A strong and committed sales force is a company’s most important asset and should always be treated as such, especially when big changes are taking place. Many well-intentioned corporate initiatives fail because people in the field don’t support them. As a result, it is important to execute a sales force redesign in an orderly manner and to get a buy-in of the sales force before, during, and after a process or system redesign. Without this crucial step, you may fail. 

Related:

• Table of Content
• Red Queen Effect – An Introduction
  
• The Billionaire Code
• Cracking the Code
• Implementation Plan
• Sales Force
  • Leveraged Sales Force
    

• Narrow participation in the marketplace
• Greater emphasis on acquiring and building key account relationships
• Integration with other channels to increase productivity

The idea of a leveraged sales force is simple i.e., focus your sales force on a small number of key accounts that require a personal touch and leave the smaller opportunities for other channels as shown in the figure below. By focusing your sales force on large, complex accounts you gain an instant boost in productivity.

It is not always an easy task to redesign your sales force to focus on key accounts. Most sales forces have longstanding systems and processes in place that reflect a bias toward broad, undifferentiated coverage of the marketplace. This bias can get in the way of an effort to increase leverage and productivity. For example:

• Traditional sales processes tend to involve field reps in every step of the sales process, from lead generation all the way to post-sales support. As new channels are added, the sales force often continues to perform this "do-everything" role, fighting for a share in every account and dominating every step in the sales process. As a result, companies find their newer channels bumping up against, and competing with, the field sales force throughout the selling process, leading to margin-reducing and brand-damaging channel conflicts.
• Traditional compensation systems tend to reward sales reps for short-term revenue production. This encourages the sales force to sell into any and all accounts, which contradicts the primary goal of the leveraged sales force i.e., building long-term profitable relations with a few key accounts.
• Traditional sales training programs teach sales reps to close accounts aggressively and fast, often in a manipulative manner. This approach makes sense when the sales force's goal is to sell as many products as possible in as many markets as possible. Key account selling, on the other hand, is different. It requires a consultative and cooperative approach.

The list of outdated systems goes on and on. The point, though, is a simple one. To build a more effective and well-leveraged sales force, sale force processes, systems and skill development programs must be re-evaluated and in many cases redesigned. Let me give you a battle-tested approach to migrating a sales force from its old role as "owner" of all sales activities to a new role as a specialized and high-impact participant in the sales process.

Related:

• Table of Content
• Red Queen Effect – An Introduction
  
• The Billionaire Code
• Cracking the Code
• Implementation Plan
• Sales Force
  

Although sales forces are just as important as they’ve always been, there is no doubt that their role is shifting—that they are undergoing fundamental change. In a multichannel selling environment, sales reps are generally the most expensive type of selling resources, while other channels can almost always make sales at lower costs. This is why many companies are starting to limit the participation of their sales forces to the kind of transactions that really do require high-end consultative selling expertise of the sales reps, while sending other transactions to low-cost channels. This approach gives a sales force leverage: It frees up the time and energy of the sales reps to focus on the largest and most important market opportunities, which in turn lowers the costs and increases the productivity of the sales force.

It is important to not that a new breed or sales force is also emerging i.e. technical sales force. They don't interact face-to-face with a customer, rather they facilitate internet sales, engage customers by starting conversations on company's website, blogs, and social networking sites, and create brand awareness. This re-incarnation of traditional sales force is much more potent which blurs the boundaries of sales, marketing, branding, and PR. In this chapter, however, I'll concentrate on how to re-organize traditional sale force into leveraged sales force for maximum productivity. So let's see how to build one.

Related:

• Table of Content
• Red Queen Effect – An Introduction
  
• The Billionaire Code
• Cracking the Code
• Implementation Plan