Part 3 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 the last two weeks, I’ve talked about diagnosing problems in your channel – and how you can address these challenges to grow revenue. You may have read these two posts excited to see your challenges in print, but also with a sense of doom.  You may have thought to yourself, “Darn, that is exactly the situation for my organization. But how can I change this situation?”

This week, I will talk about how technology vendors can make some basic changes to how they market and sell their products that will enable them to connect to how their channel sells.   I will focus on “Two Steps to Connect Your Products to How Your Channel Sells” – and discuss how technology vendors can follow these steps to unleash the revenue potential of their Products and Partnerships:

Step 1

Make sure you are connecting to the way that your channel sells, and not not falling victim to the “The Solution-Branding Box” that I talked about in Part 2 of this series.  The higher end resellers (the ones that you probably want to have selling your product) don’t position vendor products as stand-alone offerings, but instead position THEIR SOLUTION and THEIR BRAND to the customer, and talk about the vendor products as supporting proof points. Figure 1 below shows how a reseller positions their solutions to customers.  Look carefully at the center of the circle – the value proposition, training, sales tools and marketing campaigns all revolve around the overall Solution the reseller is bringing to market– not any of the component vendor products.

Figure 1: How Solution Providers Talk to Customers

Make sure you are connecting to the way that your channel sells, and not not falling victim to the “The Solution-Branding Box” that I talked about in Part 2 of this series.  The higher end resellers (the ones that you probably want to have selling your product) don’t position vendor products as stand-alone offerings, but instead position THEIR SOLUTION and THEIR BRAND to the customer, and talk about the vendor products as supporting proof points. Figure 1 below shows how a reseller positions their solutions to customers.  Look carefully at the center of the circle – the value proposition, training, sales tools and marketing campaigns all revolve around the overall Solution the reseller is bringing to market– not any of the component vendor products.

If you are operating “inside the box” like many technology companies, you only provide materials centered around YOUR PRODUCT (which is not what your best resellers are selling to customers…) As discussed in more detail in my earlier post about “The Solution Branding Box”, you are doing 2 things that cause big problems for your companies health:

• #1 – You are not connecting with the way that your channel sells or the way customers buy – and you are missing out on revenue opportunities
• #2 – You are wasting a lot of time and money creating materials that don’t fit what your channel needs.  You do need product assets, but you should not be creating a lot of assets that start the sales conversation with your product (or worse, one of the sub-products to your platform product.  You are creating materials without an audience – because the audience for your channel training is YOUR CHANNEL. Who is not the audience?  YOUR SALES TEAM! There can be a big different between what is needed to enable your field team and what is needed for your channel, and I will talk about this more in future posts…

Perhaps more subtly, if you bombard your channel with a ton of “product-push” resources (as discussed in my post, “Does Your Org Structure Lead to “Push” Marketing (and Missed Revenue)?”, you distract them and increase the likelihood they will give up on selling your product and become passive non-sellers.  You may recognize these companies – they are the channel partners who look like they COULD sell a lot of your products, but don’t…    

Step 2

You can produce GTM programs for your channel that connect with how they do business and help them create a standard process for marketing, selling and delivering your products, as part of the Solutions that they sell.  Figure 2 below shows two key phases of this process.   Let’s start by looking at Phase 2: Execution. This looks pretty similar to what many vendors do to support their products and this is a good start at connecting with your channel.  If you are not organizing your training and tools in a way that is conceptually similar to the Promote, Sell and Deliver, this is an easy win to get started.  Ever heard feedback from your channel that your partner portal is a bunch of stuff and they are not sure how it is all supposed to be used? Changes are good that you have not mapped your materials to a basic process to show how they are supposed to be used.  Is it any wonder that a partner sales rep (who also sells 10+ other lines) doesn’t know how to find the information they need?

Figure 2: Connecting Your GTM Program to How Your Sales Channels Sell

Phase 1: “Planning to Succeed” is really the “Out of the Box” ingredient in this process and there are two different and very powerful elements in this Phase.

• The first element is the Planning Process, which should occur in the partner BEFORE marketing and selling.  Partners are like the rest of us in high tech – they see the world as full of opportunities (from many vendors) and they want to pursue many of the shiny objects that they see. So they market Solution A, train their sales team on Solution B, spend their time in front of customers reacting to what the customers ask about (and often not proactively driving any long term goal at the account).  Most partners do planning, but not for all of their product lines, or as well as they would like. To facilitate this planning, vendors should build their GTM programs with an explicit planning step and resources to support business planning.  Your CAMs need to have the tools and training to help drive a plan with resources inside your top partners – and by making your CAM a business consultant, you will stand out to your channel as a vendor that is focused on their success.

• The second element is “Productization”, which is similar to what some call “packaging”.  When you “Productize”, partners create a set of predefined high-level GTM Solutions that include products from multiple vendors, and their professional services, to make it easy to market, sell and deliver the Solution as if it were one product.  We’ve all got the same problem – we have a few stars who can whiteboard and design a a custom solution on the fly and the rest of our sales team who are more “product-centric”.  How do you enable a product-focused salesperson to sell a complex solution?  By defining the solution like a product…

This post leaves me with two follow questions that I will cover in the upcoming weeks:

• Question 1: How should tech vendors build their programs, tools and trainings to enable partners to “productize” Solutions (that drive revenue for your products)?
• Question 2: How do vendors need to support these Solutions with an overall GTM program that includes training, sales tools, and marketing programs and a systematic way to measure success?

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