A "lingua franca" for Indirect Sales Channels

Whenever you get groups of people working together and needing to communicate 

together, there is obviously a need for a common language. That is easy if you are 

all from the same country, group – or company, but if you are, a diverse group, who 

each have their own “language”, then you have the need for a lingua franca. The best 

examples, are probably the use of English in the airline industry and in technology, 

where people from all over the world work together. Without a consensus way of 

communicating, we would be in a mess, and would not have made the huge progress 

that has been made in both sectors. The alternative is to try and live and work in a sort 

of “Tower of Babel” . It would be chaos.


Wherever we have diverse groups working together or even technologies working 

together it is a really good idea to have a common hub to work together or a lingua 

franca. Very often we have a “de facto” language to work with – like the English 

language example in airlines and technology, but there are places where “the 

languages” that are available, are, first of all, too diverse, and secondly, do not fit the 

purposes of the diverse community. 


Indirect Channel Sales is very interesting “community”. It is a huge community that 

transacts billions of dollars, but does so without a consensus way of working together. 

It consists of vendors, consultants, resellers, distributors, etc, who all work together, 

but they all have their own way of doing things, and because there is no “consensus” 

or specialty system, the systems are normally VERY basic, or systems built for direct 

sales – and they are specifically NOT to be used for collaborative working with “non-

employees” or even employees who are not approved. The truth is that the problem is 

even worse in the channel sales because the community is not only large and diverse, 

it is also dynamic - the people who are working together are doing so on a deal by deal 

basis, and every deal can have a different mix of people, companies – and 

systems! Can you imagine how much more we could do if there was a specialist 

system that was built for the needs of the indirect channel sales community AND built 

for collaboration AND to act as that hub, where everyone can share the system and 

data they generate?


Taking the metaphor to an extra level, many people regard pidgin languages as lingua 

francas because they take elements from other languages. In the case of Sales 

Tracking and Management systems there are many elements that are part of all 

systems, and IndirectSales.com is intended to have those elements – be familiar - 

have “stages”, pipelines, etc. 


Indeed, the final dimension that we think is important is to have shared best practices, 

even when you allow customization. You can fully customize the Questions you ask in 

your sales tracking forms, but we aim to promote the use of the SCOTSMAN 

methodology through our system – that could be the “English language of airlines and 

technology” – but that is subject of another article from a guest who is a specialist 

on the subject.