The last 2 weeks, we’ve been talking about channel partner enablement and the gaps in industry practices that limit technology vendors’ success in creating revenue through their channels.
Channel Not Ready to Sell?
- Perhaps You are Violating One of the “5 Natural Laws of Channel Enablement”? (Part 1) discusses these laws and the Law #1 regarding enabling partners to do something
- 2 Simple Steps to Enable Channel Revenue (Part 2) focuses on Law #2 and the formula for success in Channel Enablement that goes beyond just training, to tools
This week we will focus on Natural Law #3 – Channel Sales Training ≠ Vendor Rep Sales Training
Stop and think about that statement for a minute. Do you think it is true? I’d wager if you asked 10 colleagues in the tech industry this question over lunch, you would get nearly universal disagreement. However, what I’ve seen working with tech vendors and their channels over the past 20 years is that,
while the sales training needs for your channel partners and vendor reps sales are similar, they are different in some important ways that require tech vendors to train their channels’ sales team differently than how they train their own sales reps…
Let’s dig into these similarities and differences further. In our discussion of Natural Law #1 we focused on enabling the channel to do something (rather than know something). What we are enabling the channel to do is “sell”, so it is critical to enable the channel on the “doing” things related to “selling”.
What is Your Channel Selling?
You might want to answer, “your products”, but over the last 10-15 years the industry has evolved so that a reseller has to have strong differentiation to survive. Unless they have very high volume and a large telesales presence (like a CDW or Insight in the US, or a PCWare in Europe), their only chance to differentiate is to assemble multiple vendor products to solve a customer problem (with a Solution). If a reseller just sells “products”, there is always someone willing and able to undercut them on price…
You can see how this dynamic plays out in in Figure 1 below. A reseller marketing and sales effort focuses on “Solutions”, not the component products.
Figure 1: The Center of the Channel Sales Process = Multi-Vendor Solutions
These solutions often include multiple vendors – and branded as their (e.g. The Forsyth Data Center Refresh Solution), that includes multiple vendors (like VMware, Cisco, NetApp/EMC), and their Professional Services.
For more information on this topic, check out two related posts:
- Channel Not Selling Your Products? How do you fit into the way they sell?“
- Is the Solution-Branding Box” Causing You to Waste 50% of Your Channel Enablement Resources?”
What are Vendor Reps Selling?
Vendor Reps are certainty selling “Product”, but they can also sell “Solutions”. In fact, I’ve talked in many posts about how selling solutions can help vendors sell more of their product.
- What 3 Questions Indicate Whether You Need to Sell “Solutions”? (and when does selling “Product” work better?…)
- Channel Not Selling your Products? 2 Steps to Connect Your Products to How Your Channel Sells
Even if Vendor Reps position solutions, they will gravitate back to selling “products”, because they only get paid to sell one vendors’ product, and they if they don’t keep their conversations focused on things directly relevant to that product, they won’t be in their job very long… I recently saw a vendor initiative focused on selling “Automation”. The problem was that while the vendor’s products made a significant contribution toward automating certain data center activities, they were part of a bigger picture that included a lot of processes and products from other vendors that were alien to the vendor’s sales team (and to many of their SEs as well). If their products were 40% of the solution a customer needed to buy, that means 60% of what the customer needed was outside the vendor rep’s control (and knowledge). It should not be a surprise that the vendor’s reps were not excited (or successful) learning a lot of new information, complicating their sale and losing control of the steps needed to close. This need to bring all solution conversations quickly back to “product” is exactly why most Vendor training is product training. This dynamic is illustrated in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: Center of Vendor Rep Sales Process = Product
Channel and Vendor Rep Training Support a Sales Process
As we discussed earlier, “selling” is not a single task but a process that your channel and your Reps need to go through to successfully close an opportunity. If you want to drive channel revenue, you need to enable your channel to “Do Something”, which is complete the steps of the sales process (all the way to close). I often talk about a Basic Sales Process in terms the steps shown Figure 1 below. Early in the sales cycle, both the Channel and Vendor Sales Reps need to Qualify and Position based on “Why” customers should care – and that it requires a “Solution” focus.
Figure 3: The Basic Sales Process
Once a deal is qualified, it needs to be “validated” – which includes lots of questions about the “Product” capabilities, capacity, compatibility, ROI, etc… Both Vendors and channel partners need this information, but it is not the channel sales reps that need this training, it is specialists and SEs that need Product information to “validate”. You can read more about this dynamic in my recent post, “Are You Jumping to the “Product Sale” too early?
Does your organization ever get frustrated that your channel partners do not initiate as many deals as you would like, or that too few channel partners’ sales reps know enough about your product to sell effectively?
Perhaps you would get drive more revenue if you trained your channel how to Qualify and Position Solutions around your product. (Which is different than the way you train your own sales reps….)
Implications on Enablement Needs
At the beginning of this post, I said that while sales training for vendor reps and the channel are similar, they are also different in important that impact how channel enablement needs to be done.
- Vendor Sales Reps must get Product Sales Training
- to understand Product capabilities and the use cases
- Vendor Sales Reps should get Solution Sales Training
- to connect to customer problems
- Your Channels’ Sales Reps must get Solution Sales Training
- to qualify and position vendor Products as part of their Solutions
- Your Channel Partners’ SEs and Specialists must get both Solution Training and Product Training
- so they can both “Position” Solutions and “Validate” that Products meet customer needs
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