View from the Front Line

This week a user is going “live” albeit in a small and   controlled way.

We have been working with this company for a number of months, and we are very grateful for their support and patience with our evolving products.

We have now reached the point where our software is robust enough that it can be deployed and will deliver sales channel automation.

Like all good implementations the software is going in a controlled and managed way. The user’s staff have been trained and briefed with the Sales Director as the product champion leading the way.

Our consultants have been working closely with her during the past few weeks to make sure that deployment will be a success and will immediately add value to their business.

Implementing any CRM is a non-trivial process, and with a new product with revolutionary capabilities it’s even more important to get the change management and the cultural shift correct.

To a large extent though because IndirectSales.com talks in the language of the channel manager and other sales and marketing professionals, and because it has an intuitive interface, user acceptance of the system is remarkably swift, you just need to make sure you have underpinned the implementation with good planning.

This first phase of this implementation is relatively straight forward in that IndirectSales.com initially is working only within the users company, however the plan is to extend this deployment very rapidly to their reseller base.

We will let you know how this project matures through future postings

Jonathan Hopkins

Professional Services Group – Indirect Sales

IndirectSales.com Live

It’s been quite a ride but at last our pre-production IndirectSales.com web service is live. We’re working on final testing and a few tweaks but if you have a need to get greater visibility of your Channel Sales Automation process then we shall be happy to show you around, let you kick the tires and see what IndirectSales.com can do for you.

The sales landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. Once, the majority of sales were driven by a direct sales force but now over two thirds of all sales go via the channel including retail, the web and local and regional distributors and resellers. Not long ago, you could track leads from your marketing programs through to end user sales. You knew when and why a customer purchased your product and what had caught their interest to do so. 

Now, with so many leads and opportunities going through your channel and the lack of visibility of them, you’re often flying blind when it comes to making sales, marketing, production, logistics and even product decisions. 

This is the issue that IndirectSales.com addresses.  To bring a collaborative approach to channel sales and marketing; where you get to see what happens to your leads, you can better manage your sales and you can understand how effective your marketing programs are. 

And what does the reseller get for all this?  They know that you are with them every step of the way. They know that you are invested in helping them close the sale and will reward successful collaboration with more and better targeted programs in the future.

But what of the overhead of setting up and using the system? IndirectSales.com follows tried and tested sales processes that should be familiar to every successful sales person. It uses simple tailored Q &A menus to determine how far along the sale has moved and assigns probability of closure so you can achieve better forecasting and alignment of resources. 

And to minimize the overhead for the salesperson on the street we have developed a mobile app which allows them to update the sale status as and when the information becomes available in real time.

Why not get ahead of the game? Take a look around IndirectSales.com to see if it can help you regain control and be able to conduct your business like you want to conduct your business.

Time to Partner - join us!

Over the past few months, we have been investing heavily in the IndirectSles.com product and in our pioneering customers. The experience has been good and highlights just how diverse the world of indirect channel sales can be. However, everyone has the same  fundamental issues in common, especially the need for collaborative selling – and we use the word “partnership” without thinking about what it really means.

Everyone wants data to run the business; processes they can understand and agree on. They want their own businesses protected and maximized but don’t particularly care about the other guys business.

It’s a unique world, but there is a very large and important business community, looking for a common process.

To reflect this, we have decided that this blog, which is about Channel Sales Automation, will be open for outside contributors to share their experiences and views. From an IndirectSales.com perspective, we will be inviting people with views on how technology can provide new features (that did not exist even 5 years ago) to allow such a product to be put together – an engineering view; how Direct and Indirect Sales teams can and should work more effectively – a sales view.  We’d like your thoughts on how the very existence of sales best practices, such as SCOTSMAN, can work really well for companies looking for ways to collaborate properly; a lingua franca. We believe that anyone can and should understand a system like SCOTSMAN that encompasses the underlying principles of most sales methodologies.

Vendors looking to work with Partners; Partners looking to work with Vendors; Channel sales and Marketing looking to work with both, separately and together.  Distributors, equally straddle the two worlds and can bring a unique perspective to the world of channel sales automation and the need for something beyond spreadsheets. If this is your world, we want to hear from you.

We welcome everyone  to join the debate. If you have something to say, just contact us. And please, subscribe to the blog and share with people you know who might be interest. It should be an interesting ride.

Progress Report

Although the primary intention of this blog is to talk about “the Channel” – the Indirect Sales process and community, it is also the blog of IndirectSales.com. Three months ago we received our first external funding and we have been VERY busy, and, as it turns out, too busy to blog! So to plug that gap, we thought it would useful to give some idea of what we have been doing, and some of the things we have encountered along the way. Don’t worry, we do not intend to go into the system step by step but we are going to talk about things we have seen as we have been piloting the system, and running it in parallel to some good projects.

It is important to understand that we are truly pioneering an approach to Indirect Sales that will allow all members of this community to benefit – obviously the Vendors and Distributors sells more, but also the “Channel” now has its own process so they can be part of a better collaborative selling environment.

We have found some interesting things, and in future articles we shall discuss in more depth.

The system is working for 3 classic situations:

 1) Small companies building a channel. The sales tracking is important but having a single version of the truth on joint deals, on partner management is so difficult. Everything is buried in emails and spreadsheets – and there are many spreadsheets.  The ability to put them on Drive or Dropbox seems to do very little to improve the situation for the simple reason that this is not a process. It is just storage of a problem that has existed for years. What is needed IS a common process for all personas. We think we have got that working really well now.

2) Medium size companies, who already have a channel, but managing it is a problem.  Again everything is done in spreadsheets and email because that is a format that everyone is used to, but once again there is the need for a process that is as effective as Salesforce, but for Indirect Channel Sales. Deal control, forecasting, performance indicators are all difficult when everyone involved in this loosely connected community does not have a process they feel part of. It must be integrated with the corporate CRM, but the CFO will not allow Partners to directly use that CRM – it is part of the Finance system.

3) Perhaps the most surprising is the fact that these problems exist at the level of major companies – Vendors AND Distributors. Even they rely on spreadsheets and email, which is a surprise. However, the reasons are the same – the lack of a process that could produce the data needed to improve the business. In fact, the universal push to a lighter footprint sales organization, without loss of momentum is making this an area of future investment. We need to get this right. A major difference with this community, though is that universal adoption of the tool is never even discussed (yet :-) ). Each and every exercise to bring controlled collaborative selling is being done on a funded Campaign basis.

Inevitably, our experiences over the past few months in each of these situations has broadened the feature set, so we can be used by the broad base of vendors a VAR might come across. In future blogs we can talk about some of these. The focus right now is get the API finished and tested against a dedicated mobile app for the Partner – but more on that another day.

Using Direct Sales Management systems for the Channel

Let’s face it, Salesforce.com has done a superb job of making CRM a SAAS product. It has also done an even better job of marketing itself. Many believe that Salesforce (and others like them) “does everything” – and that includes “channel management”. They certainly have processes that cater for Partners – but are they really "Channel Sales Automation Systems"?

There is an evolving classic approach to how you handle Direct and Indirect Sales processes. This is not every company but it certainly applies to the huge majority of companies that use the channel seriously. The diagram below shows the main elements of this approach.

The workflow is basically the same as it has always been; leads go in one end and come out the other end as orders… we hope.  The tools we are using though, are evolving. On the left, you see “Marketing Automation Tools” and Partner Resource (or Relationship) Management systems. They perform some great values in terms of trapping interest from your website and other marketing initiatives and creating leads (as well as brand control, etc). For Direct Sales they feed into a proper tracking system like Salesforce – and control = success. However the Indirect picture is still messy. Leads are fed into spreadsheets or made available through portals. If you are lucky, the “Vendor” will let you register your deals through another portal into the corporate CRM system, but, of course, that’s as close as the reseller is allowed to get. The actual tracking is done on the corporate CRM by an assigned Direct rep or by the Channel sales team (who usually maintains a spreadsheet). The Vendor lives in a world of spreadsheets, email, and constantly dialing for updates.

Hopefully at the end there will be an order placed somewhere that tracks back to that original lead – that usually cost a lot of money to generate. The truth is that deals are often lost through poor sales processes, that effective sales management and tracking could have helped with – this stuff really does work. Even worse, the partner can just as easily switch-sell to another Vendor and you have no real way of controlling that. Perhaps even worse than that, you might have really great partners who are doing everything by the book, and you have no real way of recognizing that. You should be building around those great partners; they are the ones you should be nurturing, giving leads to; they are the ones that make you a professional business.

The truth is that we are still not fully evolved. The thing that is good about Salesforce is that it is “multi-tenant” and for almost all things that is good. It means that your system behaves like it is in your datacenter – locked down and restricted – but instantly available; maintenance free. Unfortunately, it still operates in that way for Partners; by definition they are not allowed access to corporate systems – even though they share a common business process. Your relationship with your Indirect Sales team is more like a network process – a collaboration process that transcends firewalls. Systems for the channel ARE unique, but the good thing is that the workflow is almost identical.  We can fix this.

In the next article in the series we will talk about how these clues have inspired a real Channel Sales Automation system, that helps users of systems such as Salesforce evolve that next critical step by using the Channel’s own Sales Automation system.

What is the Indirect Sales Channel?

There is an assumption that all sales take place through a directly employed sales team, and/or, more recently, through the web. The problem with having a Direct Sales team is that they are notoriously expensive to run. In IT Enterprise Software Sales, for example, many companies use a number of $420K pa, as the standard loaded cost of a rep. Having global coverage with such an overhead is, to say the least, not something you can do instantly. On the other hand, "the web" gives you global coverage at VERY low cost, which is great if you have products that sell themselves. Put them on Amazon and watch the money flow? The trouble is that a lot of the time you need "people" as part of the mix - consultants, integrators and business people who know customers needs - Sales people, Resellers, etc.

Many companies have a diverse mix of "Channels". The diagram above gives a simple view of how a typical Sales Ecosystem might work. The right and balanced approach to your overall sales strategy is vital, not only to saving costs, but to increasing sales - and reach - and supportability. The area to the left has been the focus, because it has been the most tightly controlled. However, the entire ecosystem to the right is clearly of a scale that few companies can ever reach. The goal of Channel Sales Automation is to provide that framework and realize that potential. 
The examples, listed, of companies that have leveraged the channel to create their empires are all classic tech companies, but this model applies to almost any business type, especially when the product needs "people" as part of the process.

As we get close to the launch of the formal beta system, I intend to use this medium to explain some aspects of what we are doing. There all sorts of terms for all sorts of services in around Sales and Channel Sales, and we are something very precise and understandable - I hope! We really are a Channel Sales Automation System. We are not a PRM or a CDM. We are to Indirect Sales what Salesforce.com is to Direct Sales - a system that allows all the personas in a Channel Sales process to use a common Sales system. They can be the Reseller, a Services partner, a distributor, and several personas from the Vendor. They can be doing Leads screening, or leads nurturing, but they are ALL part of the same process.

It's just that in the world of Indirect sales, the players are brought into the Deal on a JIT basis, and paid on a performance basis. This means that the Vendor can extend his virtual sales organization far and wide but keep a common process for everyone. At the same time it really is a system for the Channel - the Vendor effectively sponsors the use of the system by the Resellers, so that they only ever have one system to work with. The Resellers can then invite their other Vendors to use this common system, and this makes life more consistent and professional for the Reseller.

In turn, each Vendor can use their own preferred systems - Netsuite, Salesforce, Zoho, Oracle, etc, etc for CRM, or Mailchimp, Marketo, Constant Contact, Pardot, etc for Marketing automation - and indeed the existing systems for PRM, CDM, etc that make sense of derived data, can now work with our pure data, to give even better value to their customers. Indeed, these customers are likely to be shared customers. The Vendor can treat biznet3.com as their channel sandbox which gets fed by Leads from Silverpop and sends updates to Netsuite - or whatever tools you prefer as a Vendor, Distributor, etc.

In other words, a rich ecosystem is evolving to catalyze specialization in Sales, and the magic of the API will be the way to make it all work for us.

Over the next few days, I will start to expand some aspects of this new and needed approach. I have used some diagrams that explain some of the dynamics pictorially, and I will share them too. I think this helps. If you want to be part of our private beta, you can go to our "embryonic" landing page, find the Contact us at the bottom and send us a note. We WILL follow up. The time is now!