MarketStar Blog

It’s a highly competitive sales market, and new companies of every shape and size are nipping at your heels to steal your prospects and customers. That’s why it’s important to have a concise direct sales strategy in place in order to hit revenue targets, boost growth rates, and increase profits.

It all sounds very elementary, but nearly 20 percent of tech decision-makers evaluate their use of direct sales best practices as poor or below average. Additionally, about one-third of organizations claim they are average in their deployment of best practices across contact and activity management, sales opportunity management, sales performance management, and sales analysis.

Developing a sustainable, successful partner program can be a useful tool for modern sales teams. Not only do these programs provide scalable opportunities, but they can maximize revenue and lower the costs associated with in-house sales solutions.

However, developing a successful partner sales program is easier said than done. While roughly one-third of businesses support indirect sales channels, not all companies excel at providing their partners with the right technology, guidance, and information to sell effectively.

Before the internet, there were two sales channels: indirect and direct. If you were a brick-and-mortar business, you sold your products directly in your store. If you were a wholesaler, you sold through resellers or distributors.

In today’s world, things are a bit more complex. And choosing sales channels to reach your targeted customers takes more effort. While the internet has certainly simplified many aspects of selling, it’s also created new demands for teams to learn and utilize disparate marketing channels.

Channel sales programs enable tech-driven enterprises to gain market share, increase brand awareness, and remain competitive. However, finding value-added resellers (VARs) to sell your technology services and products can be difficult.

As manager of channel sales, you most likely focus a majority of your time on top-tier enterprise customers but need help reaching second-tier markets and smaller companies; recruiting reliable reps and making sure they’re enabled and ready to sell is the core of your problem.

It’s no surprise that an effective, efficient sales process is a huge driver behind hitting revenue targets. In fact, 79 percent of the top sales and marketing executives said that improving productivity of existing reps is a primary concern, according to recent research.

Sure, every manager strives to operate a well-oiled sales machine. However, implementing a high-performing sales culture depends on your ability to create a productive work environment. 

When attempting to cultivate a broad partner community, vendors often make the mistake of inundating the target partners with content, en mass, and then simply wait for them to raise their hand and ask for help.

Partner onboarding support varies widely from program to program, and vendors have different expectations for how long they’ll need to hand-hold a partner until they are self-sufficient from a sales and technical perspective – in some cases the technical aspects are an ongoing support function that is provided to the partner in perpetuity. Too often the partners get thrown into the main channel program at the lowest level to fend for themselves. They then become frustrated when they are not being able to find the information they need, or being held to performance standards they don’t yet have the competency to meet. 

“Big Data” is gathered from every corner of our digital life, including demographics, geography, spending habits and even lifestyle.  There are thousands of data points collected and used to market and sell goods to us as consumers and this data has spawned entire industries and software companies. 

You already know that inside sales drives more revenue at a lower cost. However, in order to manage teams and ensure a steady flow of leads, this requires appropriate tools and technology.

As big data becomes a reality for businesses looking to manage large volumes of information, data analytics tools have emerged as a reliable way to identify trends and patterns and monitor buyer activity. These tools create a better understanding of your prospects. And while this may be a no-brainer, information-based decisions are better than arbitrary or judgmental ones. 

Channel partners have become more diverse than ever, making it hard to rely on one or two profiles to build an effective support and coverage model. This diversity only grows as you move further down the list of channel partners until you reach the bottom tier, where most vendors see the mix of high diversity and low revenue potential as a reason to write off any support beyond a portal or website. If you want to capture significant long tail revenue, you need to avoid generic messaging and give partners effective communication that fits their specific needs.

Lead nurturing is arguably more important with partners, with whom you’re trying to establish a long-term business relationship, than it is with individual end-users. And much like end-users, partners without a deep, existing relationship already established with your company will likely fall in and out of favor with your product and service offerings as their customers’ demands change.