If you’ve been reading this blog throughout 2014 you’ve seen a continued focus on the GTM Bridge that technology vendors need to build to connect their products and their alliances to their customers. The GTM Bridge is shown below in Figure 1 and the last couple of weeks, my posts have focused the second element of the bridge – how to build a “GTM Program Wheel”.
Figure 2 below shows the components of the base layer of the GTM “Onion”, the “GTM Wheel”. In today’s post I’ll be talking about the hub and spokes of the wheel and how you leverage those elements to drive revenue.
Figure 1: Building the GTM Bridge – GTM Program
Figure 2: The GTM Wheel
The Hub of the GTM Wheel – Core Solutions
- Core Solution – what are you selling that provides value to customers (not just your product features).
Last week I talked about “the Hub” in more detail and talked about 2 Common Mistakes in defining the “GTM Wheel” that limit revenue for products and channels.
Today’s focus is around the rest of the wheel and the critical success factors that determine success for the GTM of a Solution. I refer to these success factors and programs as the “Spokes of the GTM Wheel”, and as I discussed last week, it is critical that all of these elements be in place, at least at a basic level.
The Spokes of the GTM Wheel
- Right Partners – Who are the right partners to sell this solution?
To understand the right partners for a solution, you need to understand at a detail level 1) what solution you are selling (the Hub of the wheel) and 2) the process needed to successfully sell and implement the target solution.
My observation is that many technology vendors tend to think of their channel as “black box” of good (=sold something) or bad (=have not sold something) partners that should want to sell any of their products. What they sometimes miss is that channel partners sell their product because they think it is a fit for their business model. When vendors really get in trouble is when they develop a new product or go after a new market, and they assume that their current channel will help them sell in the new environment. If that new customer or market does not match their partners’ business model – revenue will be disappointing…
Some questions to ask yourself and your team to determine the “right partners”
- What are the Focus Products you want the channel to sell?
- Who are the Target Customers for these products?
- What are the Core Solutions that leverage these products?
- What is the expected sales process, avg. deal size, sales cycle, etc… for these Solutions
- What roles do you expect your channel partners to play in that process?
- What profile of partner is the best fit to accomplish these roles for this sales process and product?
- Partner Value prop – Why should these partners care about selling this solution (and your products)?
Just because you think they are your ideal partner, does not necessarily mean that they will care about selling you. I covered this topic in detail in my post Channel Not Selling Your Products? 3 Questions You Can Ask to Diagnose the Problem – The #1 issue is that vendors forget when they talk to the channel is that that they are asking partners to stop doing something they do now (and making $), so they spend more time selling their products. Why should they do that – what is the value proposition for them?
One way to think about this is what I call the “Sending Kids to College” question. Successful partner sales reps are earning a living today and supporting their family. In the future, they want to send their kids to college. What is it about selling your product that helps them do that?
- Field Engagement Model – How will your sales and marketing teams engage with these partners to create opportunities, sales pipeline and closed deals?
Sometimes you hear technology vendors refer to how they involve other vendors or their resellers in customer conversations in terms of “Rules of Engagement” . The question is really how are the sales channels you have set up for your product are going to collaborate (or compete) with each other as you engage with customers?
Let’s take an example – if you set up rules that you will sell direct to any company over 10,000 employees, you will get some complaints from your channel, but what many reseller executives would do is make sure they do not spend time selling your product at these large accounts, since they know the deal will go direct. What happens if a sales rep in Atlanta decides that the 5,000 employee local school district should be a direct account too and tries to sell around incumbent partners (and that becomes a common practice)?
The answer is simple, if his boss and his boss’ boss let it slide – all hell breaks loose because you have become “unpredictable” – which to a reseller means that you are not a reliable source of revenue for them. If they spend time selling your product they may or may not get paid. And that does not put their kids through college…
This is a complex topic that vendors try to address through a mixture of programs (like deal registration), systems, forms and approvals processes. These things are all important to operationalize a Field Engagement Model – but many vendors fall down by not even having a Field Engagement model that is defined – regardless of how well it is operationalized…
Some questions to ask yourself and your team to determine if you have a strong ”Field Engagement Model”:
- Are your channel programs set up so that each segment of channel partners can win deals and earn a profit based on the value that they add to the customer and the sales process?
- Do you get consistent complaints from partners that the rules that are in place around sales engagement are inconsistent or not enforced?
- Have you identified the role partners should play in the process and do they get compensated and rewarded for this work
- Right Skills – What sales and technical skills do partners need to sell this solution, and how will you help them gain these skills?
In the channel business, this is often called “Partner Enablement”, but many of the leading vendors and practitioners prefer to call this area “Partner Readiness, to make it clear that partners are getting ready to do “something”. That “something” can then be a focus for training, tools and other approaches to get partners the skills they need to be successful. When this function is thought of as “enablement”, there is a tendency to dump ever-increasing training requirements on partners (because you can never be “too-enabled”) and different BUs, functional teams and other stakeholders all bombard partners with their wish list of requirements to gain partner levels, competencies and other “badges”. These requirements soon become an unnecessary burden on partners – and may not even contribute to partner “readiness” (and revenue…)
This is another complex topic and I’ve spent much of the last 20 years developing readiness programs, and working with partners and technology vendors on how to approach these challenges with “out of the box” programs and tools like whiteboarding, solution blueprints, etc…
- Demand Engagement – How will you and your channel jointly generate “top of the funnel” sales opportunities and engage with customers to close deals (and what role are partners expected to play?)
The reason I use “Demand Engagement” is to communicate the importance of seamless collaboration between marketing and sales in creating and closing pipeline. Ironically, this link tends to be strongest in smaller organizations where “everyone is in sales” and marketing and sales collaborate closely, and where there are fewer silos or legacy systems to overcome. For larger vendors, it is far too common that marketing gets budget, does some demand generation and it is not clear who follow up leads, or if there was pipeline generated. That may be a bit too harsh, but what I’ve seen is that systems and organization siloes create organizations resigned to throwing programs over the wall – resulting in poor follow up and missed revenue opportunities..
- Scorecard – How will you measure progress and success?
Another complex topic that varies widely by vendor is the scorecard. Part of a good scorecared is revenue and some is other performance metrics (like partners who have met program requirements, adoption of demand generation program X, etc…. For more information on measuring revenue impact, see my recent posts:
- 3 steps to measuring revenue impact for product and alliance
- Measuring Revenue Impact: Are You Operating in the “Stone Age” of Deal Registration?
The Underlying Foundation for your GTM Program:
- Operations and Infrastructure
One of the challenges of a channel business is that there are significant investments in personnel and systems that hat you have to put in place as a foundation, before you get much revenue from your channel. Next week I will talk about in more detail about Operations and your underlying Infrastructure, and how they evolve during a companies’ lifecycle.
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