MarketStar Blog

One of the fastest ways to expand enterprise sales is by enlisting help from channel partners, but to be effective, you also need a partner relationship management strategy. To make your channel partners effective, you have to provide the tools and support they need for success.

When you have a channel partner program, you need to rely on your channel partners to manage not only customer sales but also the overall customer experience. In the age of software as a service and recurring revenue models, everyone in the value chain has to assume responsibility for customer success. However, your channel partners are on the front line, since they closed the sale and are the first line of defense for customer fulfillment. Therefore, the vendor’s job is to enable channel partner success in order to optimize the customer’s experience.

Change is inevitable; in fact, it is essential for businesses to grow. However, not everyone is willing to embrace change, and even if they are willing to accept change, they may not see things your way. That’s why stakeholder relations have to be a key component of any business or change management strategy. It’s important to have everyone involved on board with the new strategy, policies, and procedures so the entire team is working toward a common goal. When making plans for 2019, you want to be sure that everyone involved shares the same vision and objectives.

The one thing that all sales professionals have in common is having to make a sales pitch. However, to get to the pitch, you have to start a conversation—and that’s where many sales reps struggle. To help you engage before you can pitch, here are some of our best examples of conversation starters and sales pitches.

You know that you have a great product; your customers tell you so. You are enthusiastic about your product or service and you know that your energy comes across in sales calls. You have a list of all the benefits your product brings to the table. You have even researched the competition and are ready to respond to any objections. So why aren’t you closing more deals?

Strategies for B2B sales have changed with the coming of the digital age. The days of cold calling are over, and we have entered a new era of B2B sales driven by customer experience (CX) and customer service. Today, selling is more about making a connection and solving customers’ problems than it is about making a hard sales pitch to close a deal. Welcome to the age of digital selling.

Selling any technical product is a team effort. Sales representatives need support from customer service, accounting, operations, and, perhaps most important of all, sales engineers. When you close a complex engagement involving multiple components, integrations, and customizations, you need the support of the sales engineering team to help with presales and to handle fulfillment. However, even the most seasoned sales professionals still get confused about the role of sales engineers and how best to include them in the sales process. That’s why it’s essential that sales managers understand how to manage both sales reps and sales engineers.

Today’s customers live online. If you want to fill your lead funnel, you must use digital media sales.

Attracting partners to your channel is art blended with science. While channel teams can leverage tools and technology to facilitate the process, it ultimately depends on their ability to identify ideal partner segments, discover the best candidates, and create relationships that stand the test of time. Despite the fact that recruiting partners for your channel may take some finessing, there are some tricks to the process.

Anticipation of the latest gadgets, newest technology, and highest innovation kicks off the new year at CES, held January 7 – January 10 in Las Vegas. While it may seem as though the 150K attendees, (from 150 countries!), are similar, the truth is, they can be bucketed into five fictional snapshot personas: