Sales Laundry

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of.  If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q:  Channel Sales & Direct Sales Teams:  What are your thoughts on best practices for structuring a sales team that maximizes sales for both groups and minimizes/avoids conflicts.

A:   I don’t know your specific industry,  but my experience comes from technology, so that is how I have framed my comments.  Here are my general thoughts:

The Direct Sales Team

 Dividing the loyalties of your direct sales team between their own numbers and helping out the channel sales organizations can be a recipe for disaster.  If times get tight, I have seen direct guys pull all sorts of tricks to take a juicy channel deal direct.  The hedge to that is a partner deal registry and clear rules of engagement, neither of which is ever a bad thing.  On the other side I have seen channel partners act like blood sucking leaches, draining a manufacturer of resources and continually begging for leads.  It can get ugly either way.

 I would seriously consider putting a dedicated sales resource in your office supporting your channel partners exclusively. 

 You need your channel organization to spend the time and money needed to get trained up on your products and dedicate enough mindshare to them to get them heard above the noise of their other offerings.

 Use your internal dedicated sales resource to go on sales calls with them and help them put sales proposals together and nudge them along the sales funnel.  Force the dedicated channel sales representative to drive all revenue through the partners.  That way you have someone other than your Channel Manager working in the channels best interests on a daily basis.  Put a smart sales person in that role that can leverage the legitimate leads and deals that he uncovers in his patch into incentive for the partners to get up to speed and stay current.  You can use the leads to reward those partners that are moving the needle for you, for priming the pump for new partners or as needed to help steer your channel sales force.

 This dedicated sale representative can also be a good entry level sales position for your company in more established territories that you can develop into a direct role if the compensation model works like that for you.  That way they have your channel supporting them a bit as they come up to speed so you don’t have the huge dips in productivity when a new guy takes over a territory.

 Your dedicated sales representative should support your best partners and their best reps to keep the pipeline full, then spend time working your best partners second tier reps, other partners and finding new partners that are not going to stomp all over one another in a given geography.  Cut the bottom 20% of your partners and all those 1-off deal guys that pop up.

The Channel Sales Team

 Channel organizations are often times the whipping boys of the direct sales team and feel they drive product sales but have no real line of communication with the manufacturer to discuss strategy or to communicate feedback they get from the field.  Listen to your channel.  Typically the top 20% of the reps at the top 20% of your channel partners are driving the majority of your business.  You need to talk to them and understand their challenges with your organization if you want the real scoop.  The execs are usually not as helpful in the day to day stuff and Sales Managers are sometimes in the weeds because they were great reps that got promoted without any training.

 Give the channel a mechanism to register their deals and be protected from your direct reps.  Give them ready access to sales and support until they have their own resources trained and representing your brand well in the field.

That is about 1% of the topic.  You can check out The VAR Guy for dedicated blogging on technology channel sales.