Can technology help you sell? No really - “Sell”?

By Dave Wilson

Selling is an art, and those artists come in every shape and size, age, sex, color and religion. Some are good talkers and others are good listeners, and everything in between. Some have great product knowledge and some haven’t got a clue. Yet they do their numbers.

Selling, though, is also a science. Companies go to a great deal of time and expense to have their sales people trained on how to “sell”, and how to sell their products. They also invest in sales tools, and the emphasis over the past 30 years has been traditional sales accounting systems (CRMs), where the emphasis is on Sales accounting, reporting and forecasting for management. In more recent times we have seen huge growth in analytics and marketing automation (leads). If Dreamforce 2014 was anything to go by, comfortably 90% of exhibitors focused on those two technologies.  Getting good leads is obviously important and management can now get better insights from the data produced from our CRMs – and the marketing Automation processes – but what about actual “Selling”?

The burning question is whether or not technology can make the science of selling more effective for the sales people; put the emphasis on the “selling” as well as the “accounting”; enhance the art of selling? In recent times Gartner has been making much of the concept of digital business, and the effect of the mobile form factor is an obvious one for sales people. For the first time ever you can carry a mobile battle card, or playbook with you into an appointment or call, and no customer would object to a simple request: “ I have a checklist of questions about your requirements, (relative to our product) do you mind if we go through those together now or later?”

As a rep you are expected to know everything there is to know about every product and every specialist use of those products. The company has just done a marketing campaign aimed at Finance (or Healthcare, etc, etc), for one of your 20 products. In the course of a day you might do 5 calls for 5 different products in 5 different sectors. This might seem an exaggeration, but in my last company, the account managers had to contend with 125 products and every vertical marketing sector.

Do you think technology can help? Of course, it can. While those are “product” or “needs analysis” questions, you have the device in your hands, it is perfectly natural to just check about Business questions – the budget, the timescales, decision makers, any specific drivers for this deal? Compliance, for example, or ROI targets? What is the best process for this product? Arrange a trial, or a demo? Right through the sales cycle we follow a workflow and every product in every market has its own playbook. As a rep you cannot possibly know all of that but those product managers and marketing people can. They need to get that encapsulated into a simple process you can check through across all 5 of those calls you have today. Every deal has its playbook. Every deal for every sector has its own playbook – but for you they are all the same – a series of checklists, and maybe the opportunity to fire up a Powerpoint or video demo at an appropriate time?

This is tool to get your win rate average up, but even better it also detects that you have made changes that should be reflected into your sales accounting system and into your companies brand new Business Intelligence and Predictive analytics system. More to the point, you are a few steps closer to another good quarter and that Club trip to Hawaii, and your Fridays can be spent on the golf course (with your customers), rather than trying to remember what to put into your CRM!

IndirectSales Released.

This week sees the official launch of IndirectSales.com.

While this is our official launch, we already have a number of users world-wide who have been helping us ensure that we have a stable and feature rich product that is business ready to solve channel sales collaboration needs.

We have also completed the mobile app to enable in the field sales users to interact, anywhere, anytime using their mobile phones or tablets.

It is not a coincidence that our launch is happening at the same time as Dreamforce, the Salesforce.com annual conference here in San Francisco which we are attending.
You'll find us in the Cloud Expo North, booth N2338, and with us are 2 of our pre-release users, Access Governance from Australia and Porter Consulting from here in the USA.

Access Governance are a master distributor in Melbourne working throughout Australia and Asia. The represent a number of companies in that area. They use IndirectSales in 3 ways To track sales though  their own and their reseller sales organizations, to track recruitment of new resellers and to also track the recruitment of new suppliers. They make extensive use of the notes facility to hold copies of all agreements from a simple NDA to a full reseller agreement.
Maureen O'Hare will be with us all week at Dreamforce.

Porter Consulting use IndirectSales on behalf of a major Silicon Valley technology supplier. They work with them to deliver targeted marketing campaigns for specific products through a set of master distributor and reseller networks.  They chose to use IndirectSales because we implement a customizable qualification and sales tracking process easily deployed and administered in the field for all distributors and sales partners.
Al Morgan from Porter Consulting will be with us on Wednesday.

But why Dreamforce For many customers, IndirectSales starts where Salesforce leaves off - in handling and collaborating with the channel on major sales. We are the ideal compliment to any company that deploys Salesforce, has an indirect channel and wishes to integrate channel sales data securely into the corporate CRM.

If you are here in San Francisco for Dreamforce, come see us and discuss how we can help you collaborate better with your channel sales network.

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.

It's Time to Stop and Smell the Channel

If you're like me, and you've spent the majority of your career selling directly to customers, you have an innate mistrust of the Channel. Sure, they're just like you and me, they sell stuff too, but they do it in strange and unknown ways, in a dark and mysterious realm beyond the reach of human vision, entirely out of your control.

It's really not as bad as all that, but if you're serious about your craft and have embraced Sales Process as the key to greater success, it can definitely feel that way. As you deign to entrust your precious leads and life's blood revenue goals to organizations and individuals that you no idea whatsoever which sales process they embrace, if any at all.  The instinct is to keep all the "important" deals firmly in house where you can have full control and total visibility of their progress through your sales process and not have to risk "throwing your pearls before swine" into the black hole of the Channel.

Well, sorry to say it, but this approach in a competitive market will virtually guarantee slower growth, lower margins and continually being outflanked by your enemies.  To stay at the front it is absolutely essential to embrace meaningful partners, and to do so around a commonly shared sales process and true collaborative selling. To be honest, we all need to get that place of trust where we eagerly hand off the best leads with the biggest upside to the right partners.  It's often the partners who have the better relationships within the customers and hence a much better chance to actually close the business.  You just have to know that your partner knows how to best sell your product.  It's easier said than done, but with today's convergence of major technologies like mobility, digital business process, the API economy and the Cloud, the previously unimaginable has become not just possible, but essential.  The key is SaaS-based Chanel Sales Automation with a mobile app at the front end which will accommodate a customized sales processes, real deal progress scoring, and a digital Sales Battle-card, with API integration to all of the major CRM and Sales Automation tools currently in use.  Every member of your Channel organization may be using their own CRM or Sales Automation tool, but as the vendor at the top of the food chain you can mandate your own common sales process to  be used to sell your products, and at the same time provide your own "Digital Sales Battle-card" within the mobile app that greatly aids in onboarding new partners with minimal training and ensures they are following your own best sales practices to close more deals.  All of this can easily integrate into their own CRM using available API's to reduce double entry.

The Channel has been around for a long time, but today's greater level of competition and demand for efficiency requires that we all take another look at how we can optimize our Channel investment for far better results, and the good news is that once again, technology has provides the means to do just that.

Sales Best Practices in Channel Sales

One of the best salesmen I have ever worked with called me last week. He works for a large company that does a lot of its business through partners. He had just lost a deal, and it looks like the partner was not talking to a key decision maker. It sounds like they were outflanked. Everything looked good on this deal, yet it was lost over one of THE most basic of sales best practices – make sure you are talking to the MAN (Money, Authority Need). His reaction was that he needs get out his sales training materials to remind himself of the fundamental rules of selling – he was beating himself up.

Of course, if my friend were selling direct, without that partner, then he would have figured this out for himself before it was too late. It is the fact that he took for granted that his partner would be following best practices for Sales, that was bugging him. This can be a mistake, as in this case. This is a great partner, who is technically strong, and very loyal. Besides he needs the partner. It is just the way the business works now.

How many times have you heard such stories, or experienced them personally? It happens all the time. It could be that a deal is forecast, but it turns out the budget is for next year (or none at all). It could even be that the customer is in pure “Research” mode; there is not even a defined need/project.

There are not one, but two big lessons here. The problem is not just that basic sales principles have not been followed, and that is problem. The more difficult issue is that the partner is a different company and you are not working through a formal collaboration system. If you WERE using a common system, like IndirectSales.com, then it would have been obvious. There is a simple checkbox for Authority that you would both be using, on a simple app on your smartphone, and you rate your exposure to the decision maker between 1 and 5; if it’s a 1, then you need to find Mr, Miss or Mrs 5. It’s a simple as that.

As new technology makes collaboration and keeping sales best practices easier and easier, and the changes in the product landscape (especially in the technology sector – cloud, SaaS, commodity hardware, apps, etc) make collaborative selling more and more essential, then the more we will need to use such tools. We must work better together.

Blog 2: Channel Loyalty and the Software Defined Datacenter

I often tell my adult kids that I owe my career to Moore’s law, and they roll their eyes.  But it’s true, with every advance in silicon, the number of solutions that became economically viable increase, and my value as a marketeer continues.  However, it is a two-edged sword: every advance has made high margin, proprietary hardware, so cherished by resellers, easier to replace with commodity systems. 

And so we arrive at the software defined datacenter.  All of the infrastructure elements are now based on low-margin commodity hardware.  Where do the margins come from that bind a channel partner to a hardware vendor?

Many of my clients sell such hardware, whether it is to resellers or service providers.  My clients want to engage their partners to sell these products, or commit to deploying very large volumes.  We often must remind them that from the channel point of view, the hardware is simply a low-margin pivot point on which to sell high margin services.   So driving channel services must be a key element of the hardware vendor value proposition.  Services drag becomes a core part of the channel partner “What’s in it for me?” conversation.   It is very different conversation than with direct sales.

This is where a channel-collaborative sales model, along with a tool such as Indirectsales.com, can really make a difference.  Through working closely with channel partners in a shared selling model, vendors can guage and track how services factor into deals.  If, as part of this process, vendors can help partners suggest additional services, based on product capabilities, it enriches the sale and the teaming relationship.  

By documenting incremental partner services, tools such as Indirectsales.com show that specific products drive channel margins.  It adds a level of differentiation in a commodity marketplace.  Things like sales collaboration, deal process analytics, and “whole deal” revenue tracking make the value more obvious.   And that grows vendor mind and wallet share, which is the whole point.

These ideas are part of every coaching or content development project we take on.   I think it is why folks come back to us, and channel partners are happy to see us.

Al Morgan

Director, Solution Marketing

Porter Consulting

+1 408 394 7122

almorgan@porterconsulting.net

www.porterconsulting.net

I don’t like you ……..But I love you

This song, originally written in 1962 by the legendary Smoky Robinson, could be an anthem for today’s channel sales model. 

For most companies, channel sales has become “the” major way of doing business. Over 70% of all high-tech sales go through the channel, sales cost can be 20% lower than with a direct sales force and using the channel companies of all sizes can effectively and efficiently extend their reach, not just nationally but globally. You really have to love the channel sales model.

But talk to most corporate sales professionals and they’ll tell you they really don’t like selling through the channel. They spend millions of dollars on marketing campaigns and never really know what happens to the leads. Market development funds get spent but there’s no accountability. Forecasting is a nightmare because no-one really knows what is going on, where and with whom and no-one ever admits to losing a sale so there is no feedback on product or sales performance.  Corporate sales professionals really don’t like the channel sales model.

The song’s real title is “You’ve really got a hold on me” and that’s how those corporate sales folks feel.  And they feel like they are held in a very painful place.

So how do you change the game and make this a partnership where everyone likes and loves the channel sales model? The answer is information. Help the channel provide visibility of each and every deal – and do it in a way that is straightforward, with common goals and reporting that’s available in real time for everyone to see.  Show the marketing team what revenue each campaign generates and how those MDF dollars spent are turned into sales. And while we’re doing this, let’s help the channel sales people by giving then sales and product training, on the fly on their phones. Let’s make it so simple that it’s easier to use the new tools that work with the old.  And of course, because everyone has one and they are all different, let’s make the information available into your – and their – CRM systems.

Sound too good to be true?  Well in the past it was. But recently a group of seasoned channel sales professionals, who have been battling with these issues for decades, got together with a team of young an enthusiastic web and software designers to make it happen. The result is Indirect Sales.com. The first and only cloud application to address this formidable challenge.

The application is already live and helping our first customers. They really like what it does to solve their channel sales issues. Like?  I should say love.

Want to know more, see a demo or have trial? Contact us on info@indirectsales.com  And see us at Dreamforce Expo North Booth 2338