Channel Not Ready to Sell: Do You Make “Enablement” Real with “On-the Job” Training? (Part 5 of the Series)

A number of my recent posts have focused on challenges and best practices to “enable” your channel and drive revenue. Below is the list of the posts so far:

Channel Not Ready to Sell?

• Part 1 – Perhaps You are Violating One of the “5 Natural Laws of Channel Enablement”? – Outlines these 5 laws and focuses on Law #1: Enabling partners to do something
• Part 2 – 2 Simple Steps to Enable Channel Revenue – Focuses on Law #2 and the need to combine training and tools
• Part 3 – Maybe You Are Training Partners Too Much Like Your Own Sales Reps… – Focuses on Law #3 and the differences between channel training and vendor rep training
• Part 4 – Enablement must be “Packaged” within a Channel Program, To Drive Adoption and Revenue… – Defines packaging and gives examples of how to package enablement to drive revenue

 

In the final post of the series, we will be talking about Natural Law #5

• Sales Engagement: How Channel Enablement Becomes Revenue $

 

 

Let’s start with a baseline question – How much training does it take for someone to be able to do something effectively? That seems like a reasonable question, but it actually misses a critical point of enablement.

• In order to be “enabled” to do something, people need to learn how to do it, and then they need to practice the skills they’ve learned

But think about the “enablement” programs that you’ve seen in your career. How many of them provided opportunities to practice what was learned? I’ve seen it happen it happen occasionally, but not often. Sometimes the vendor coordinates “Role Plays” in a workshop setting, and I’ve done whiteboard training where the participants broke into small groups and practiced whiteboarding to each other. But for many vendors Training = Enablement, because creating “practice” can be complex, hard to measure, expensive and difficult to scale.

That statement defines the dilemma that tech vendors face:

• Partners need practice to be effective selling
• But providing a programmatic way to get practice can be complex and difficult to scale

What can vendors do the provide opportunities to practice and get partners “enabled to sell”. The answer is something that the sales reps do every day – talk to customers (and to do it with partners, as the final step in “enablement”). What I am suggesting is connecting your “Enablement” plan to your Sales Engagement approach.

Those of you working in large vendors may be reading that suggestion with skepticism – how can a field Rep at a complex vendor and a lot of partners (like Cisco or HP) participate in “channel enablement”. After all, that is the Enablement Team’s job and is done by “corporate” folks, leaving the field to do their job, to engage with customers….I see your point, but hold that thought for a second.

 

When have you seen “enablement” work well, so that the teams in the field are confident that they can rely on the local channel partners to initiate and close sales opportunities?

 

In my experience, “enablement” works when there is a strong connection between the local sales team and the partners. That connection often occurs in smaller companies where the local sales team has responsibility to recruit and enable partners in their region, to help them in selling deals in their territory (but no so often in larger companies with fragmented responsibilities). Part of the value in this model is that the local sales team feels that they are accountable for helping to “enable” the partners in their region, to help them in selling. But a large part of the value is the local sales team, not only trains the partners, they go with them on sales calls and provide feedback on their progress. In other words, “THEY PROVIDE ON THE JOB TRAINING”.

That sounds wonderful, but it does not scale well to a larger company. You can’t expect the local sales team to own recruitment, on-boarding and the enablement process for all their partners. But the local sales team could be accountable for the “last mile” of enablement, which helping partners practice what they have learned by going after real sales opportunities together.

How would this work? The critical element is creating a channel program requirement that the “last mile” of enablement occur in the field with the local team. In this model, it would be part of their role to work with the partner to jointly engage with customers (and get on-the-job-trainijng). In effect, the process would work the same way it works for the channel-savvy and channel-friendly reps that you already have:

• New partner or newly certified partner calls the local team looking to work together on some opportunities
• Often the onus is on the partner to provide the first couple of contacts for targeting – after all, they have many local customers, just not with the vendor’s product (and what vendor does not want that???)
• As the vendor sales team and partner get used to working together and have some success, the vendor reps bring the partner into opportunities
• As the relationship matures, the vendor sales rep and the partner start to do joint account targeting and selling, with defined roles like “Partner SE runs the POC” follow up from the intial meeting…”

That process is really just basic sales engagement. But for many vendors, this process only occurs where you have sales reps that understand how to work with partners and drive revenue. With channel program design, there are always important details to define and operationalize, but this approach is a winning solution for vendors and for partners.

The opportunity is to build this approach into your channel enablement plan and “Package” the Enablement (see my recent post on this) this into your channel program to scale. This approach has the following benefits:

1. Create a set of “enabled” partners who have both the training and experience necessary to help vendors drive revenue
2. Help the vendor field standardize on a best-practices sales engagement approach that creates new sales opportunities and a community of enabled partners in their territory

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