Channel Not Selling Your Products? How Do You Fit Into the Way They Sell? (Part 2 of Series)

Part 2 of a Series: Channel Not Selling Your Products?

• Part 1: 3 Questions You Can Ask to Diagnose the Problem
• Part 2: How Do You Fit Into the Way They Sell?
• Part 3: 2 Steps to Connect Your Products to How Your Channel Sells
• Part 4: Should You Recruit, Enable Or Both? How Do You Decide?
• Part 5: Help Your Channel “Productize” Your Offering within Their Business

 

In last week’s post, I talked about the 3 Questions you can ask to diagnose problems in your channel

1. What is the Value Proposition for partners to invest their time in selling your product?
2. Is your product and go-to-market program “Channel-Ready”
3. What is the Sales Process for your product and how does it fit into how your channel partners sell?

In this week’s post, I will explore Question #3 regarding the Sales Process in more detail. This question has some important nuances and in my experience is not well understood by most tech vendors. This topic can be thought of as”Two Layers of Sales Process Fit”.  It is important to understand both layers, but the most important thing is that technology vendors factor in both layers of the Sales Process dilemma, in their GTM programs.

The First Layer of Fit

The first layer of fit is exactly the challenge outlined in the “Solution Branding Box”, shown below in Figure 1.  If you did not see earlier posts, the Solution Branding Box is one of The Four “Boxes” of “boxed” strategy and execution that prevent companies from driving revenue from their alliances and channels.

 

Figure 1: The Solution Branding Box

 

The key element to understand for the “Solution-Branding Box” is that resellers make a living by combining products and services into solutions that are valuable to customers.  They take your products and messaging and combine it with the products and messaging from other vendors, along with their professional services to design and implement the solution, and sell the whole solution to the customer. If you provide your sales training and tools to support dedicated “product” sales calls (like the ones made by field sales team), you are missing revenue opportunities (and wasting a lot of time and money…)

Another element of this dilemma is the concept of vendor “tiering” within a reseller. As I mentioned in a recent post ,(What 3 Questions Indicate Whether You Need to Sell “Solutions”? , you can think about your product as a component in the “whole product” using the car analogy below when thinking about the sales process for your product within a reseller.

Where does your product fit?

• The Car – your product is a stand-alone solution (and may incorporate other products as part of that solution) – also called a “Primary Product”
• The Engine – your product is a key part in driving the decision for the overall solution – also called a “Secondary Product”
• The Steering Wheel – your product is part of the car and not thought about as a separate buying decision at all – also called a “Tertiary Product”

A key point to understand is that resellers generally will not make stand-alone sales calls on secondary or tertiary products, but they will sell them opportunistically as part of a larger solution.  That sounds like bad news but it can actually be a huge benefit to you – if you handle it correctly.  If resellers can sell your product as part of the sales process they are already using, it is much easier for get them to to take on and sell your product than if you required a a new sales motion or talking to a new decision maker (and easy is good…)  If you find that the “Solution-Branding Box” is part of the reason resellers are not selling your product, you can 1) define the solutions your product often fits into and 2) provide better training, tools and incentives to support this sales motion.  You may not be the lead product, but you could be part of a lot of projects, and sell a lot of your product!

The Second Layer of Fit

For the second layer fit, the question is, “How does your offering fit into a Reseller’s Business “Practices”.  A “Practice” typically has defined leadership and staff that own a strategy and are accountable for results for a specific set of solutions..  Figure 2 shows this dynamic in a typical reseller/integrator.

 

Figure 2: Reseller Business “Practices” Aggregate Similar Solutions

 

What the more sophisticated resellers do (acting as a smaller system integrators) is to create Practices to align their organization around selling a particular set of solutions.  These Practices allow the partner to provide more value to customers, since they get a complete solution rather than hodgepodge of products, and solutions drive reseller profitability by including more products, an opportunity to sell services and help differentiate the integrator from other resellers who also work with a particular customer.

Try this exercise – Visit the websites of several of your key resellers and look to see if they talk about their Business “Practices” and their consulting expertise. If they do, there is an opportunity for you to help them sell your products within these practices. In recent years, Practices like Virtualization, Storage Optimization, Desktop Virtualization, Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services have become the business focus for leading data center integrators, like Presidio/INX, Forsythe, AHEAD IT and Worldwide Technologies.

The key question for you to answer is, “Where do your products fit into these practices?”  If you see most of your opportunities coming within a particular business practice for your top resellers, you should provide strong training, tools and professional services enablement for these solutions, to make it easy for partners to sell your products within this practice.

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