A User View

We're pleased to welcome Maureen O'Hare to California and to this blog. She's here for Dreamforce next week. Here's Maureen's article.

How did this Australian woman come to be here in Santa Cruz, California? Why would I fly through the sunny Australian skies to get to those of California?

I am the Sales and Channel Director of the Australian company, Access Governance. We started up earlier this year. We are a Master Distributor for the Asia Pacific region, for some fantastic software from Europe and the USA.

We have multiple suppliers, currently 6 but the list is growing. We have multiple resellers as well as our own sales people. With each of the suppliers, we have different agreements, different territories and several currencies to manage for our price lists. Ditto for our resellers. And we have to make sure that we and then each of our resellers are trained in the different products, but not all resellers sell all of the products.

So, we also have the track the ‘recruitment’ of suppliers and resellers.

Then, we have to assign leads from suppliers and our own sources, to the relevant sales person or reseller making sure that we have the materials and training, and subsequently have enabled our reseller with these too. It follows naturally that we then need to manage those leads and deals through to the close, and report the result back to the relevant supplier.

Sound familiar?

We could do some of it in Excel, some of it in Word, but the real action would usually be in email. And we’d spend hours every week keeping each other up to date on who was doing what and who needed to what next.

We could have bought some different systems; a CRM, a document management system, a lead tracking system, and a sales process workflow system. Oh! and a task manager. But that would have just divided up the information differently and still we would not have an overview of our suppliers and channels, and it would leave us scrabbling about in the different systems for the current status of a supplier or a reseller or a sale.

Then we came across IndirectSales! And it does it all!

I can track the progress of adding a supplier or reseller and, with the customisable workflow, I can ensure that all of the steps in the process have been completed. I can store the agreements online in the system, so I can easily check the terms for a supplier or reseller. I can assign a lead to a reseller or even to a particular person for that reseller.

I can customise the workflow for a particular product and track the salesperson’s progress though that workflow. We can also store the price lists so that everyone can be sure they have the current list. With notes I can keep a specific log of the interactions. We can even provide a specific ‘battlecard’ for each product, accessible on the mobile app.

So I came to California to boast about how IndirectSales makes my role possible instead of impossible to other Channel Managers battling to cope with the myriad of forms, spreadsheets, and emails, all the while wondering what is really happening out there in the channel.

If you would like to know more about my experience with IndirectSales, come and visit me at the Dreamforce Conference on October 13th-16th in San Francisco Cloud Expo North Booth N2338.