Empowering your channel partners

In October 2005 I read a short article entitled: "20 ways to improve your sales effectiveness". Written by a sales professional, the article summarised twenty different things you could do that would enable your salespeople to be better at selling. Although not specifically aimed at selling through channels, most of the recommendations listed in the article could be applied equally well to direct or indirect sales.

But what struck me most about this particular article was that nowhere in the list of 20 things to do was there any mention of providing better sales support material. And this reinforced a view I have – that unlike all other professions, salespeople are expected to perform well with little or no relevant information or help.

Take, for example, the technical support people who work for your channel partners. If you have an arrangement with a channel partner where the partner will handle first line support for your product, would you be happy simply to say to the partner's technical team: "Well, there's the product, here are our standard user manual and datasheets: now get on with it. I'm sure you'll pick it up as you go along."

Or what about the commercial and legal profession? Have you ever been in a partnership arrangement where one partner says to the other: "Well, I'm sure you know what you're doing. This is the way we usually do things, but you go ahead and let us know when we should invoice you and for how much, and how long you will take to pay us."

These examples sound silly. But how often do I come across situations where a great deal of effort (on both sides) has been expended on setting up a partnership where one organisation will market the products and/or services of another, yet very little time or thought has been devoted to considering how the partner will actually go about selling these offerings.

Usually any activity in this area is concentrated solely on sales training. The salespeople in the channel partner's organisation come along to a training session, where they learn about the features of the product and/or service, and are then encouraged to go away and sell it.

The problem with sales training

For complex products and services, providing sales training for your channel partners' salespeople could be argued to be a necessary activity, but it is certainly not sufficient to ensure you achieve maximum benefit from your sales channels.

Sales training for channel partners suffers from a number of drawbacks:

1. It can only be delivered to those who actually turn up for the course. The "no show" rate can be high for sales training courses, particularly close to year-ends and quarter-ends. Salespeople will not read training materials, so there is no point posting them to absentees.
2. While the course is in progress, attendees may pay attention and learn key messages. But once they are back "on the road" and dealing with day-to-day business issues, these key points are soon forgotten and salespeople will make up their own messages. It is unlikely that they will return to the course material to remind themselves.
3. Salespeople move around a lot. After spending a great deal of time and effort to deliver sales training to a new channel partner, six months to a year later you could find that up to 30% of the people you have trained no longer sell your product, either because they have been reassigned or because they have left the partner's organisation.

Providing sales support material

Recognising these shortcomings, you may decide to equip the salespeople in your channel partners' organisations with a set of documentation, either to complement or replace sales training. This is likely to be the same information you provide to your direct sales teams. Your hope is that the salespeople in the partner's organisation (probably unlike your own salesforce) will actually read this documentation, understand it well enough to extract the key selling messages, translate these messages into customer benefits, and be highly effective at selling your product.

But this is exactly like our example above. What you are saying to the salespeople is: "Well, now that you've learned about the product, here are our standard product descriptions and datasheets: now get on with it. I'm sure you'll pick it up as you go along." The fact is, this will happen very rarely (if at all).

Empowering your partners

Salespeople, especially those in your channel partner's organisation, are busy people. They are likely to be charged not only with selling your product, but a whole host of other products, some from competing organisations. If you are going to achieve a level of effectiveness in sales through channel partners that is above mediocre, you must provide the salespeople in your channels with sales support material that is not "just the normal stuff". You must stand out from the crowd, empower your channel partners and above all, make selling your offerings relatively easy and straightforward.

The information you have been providing to your direct sales teams is unlikely to be good enough for channel salespeople. Your own staff benefit from being part of your organisation. They pick up a great deal of information from talking informally with your technical and commercial people. They learn from each other what works and what doesn't. They get to know the types of customers that are likely to buy. As good salespeople, they absorb all this "informal" knowledge and turn it to good use when they are selling. They are effective at selling independently of all the information you throw at them, not because of it. Simply throwing this same set of documentation at salespeople in your channel partners will not deliver the same results.

So, if there is just "One way to improve your sales effectiveness" in your channel partner's organisations, I would recommend this: think long and hard about what those remote salespeople are going to need to be effective at selling your product or service, and provide it to them in a concise, clear format. Nothing else you can do will have a greater effect.

Partnering Points on empowering your channel partners

• The key to making your partners' (and your own) salespeople more effective is to provide them with the information they need, in a structure that they can understand, and in a concise format.
• You need to tell them what your proposition is, why customers want it and what benefits it provides.
• You need to identify the types of customers who will buy, what drives them to buy and who are the likely decision makers.
• You must be frank about your capabilities and how you fare against the competition. Tell the salespeople where your strengths lie, and forewarn them about areas of weakness.
• Let them know what to expect – what sort of deals will they get into, how long it will take to close a sale – and where they can seek further assistance.
• Finally, consider getting this done by experts who are external to your organisation. It is unlikely that your own staff will have the time, the skills or the level of detachment necessary to do a good job.

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