Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

3 Tips to increase Channel Sales… try thinking out of the box

 digg it |   delicious |   StumbleUpon |  reddit 

This past week I met with a prospect that had a fairly common sales dilemma. His telesales team sells both directly and through a reseller channel. They are compensated on both types of sales.  Channel sales had been subpar, and in our discussions about our inside sales training courses, he wanted some ideas on improving the way his inside sales team works with the Channel. Being an "out of the box" thinker is always helpful in sales, and you have to be that way with the Channel, too. By doing so, you can get a jump on your competitors, and they may never figure out how you did it.

I probably got the "out of the box" concept from my grandfather. He came out of Russia after the revolution, through Siberia, to Harbin, China, onward to Mexico, and then up to the U.S. Some of the creative ways he survived aren't fit to convey in a business blog. But when he came to San Francisco, he bought a house, and one of my earliest memories if of his kitchen. He painted a beautiful Chinese landscape on the entire eastern wall of the kitchen, because he wanted it decorative, and he wanted it to be his (it may still be there, if you know the person who lives on the corner of  Hugo and Arguello streets in the Golden Gate Park panhandle, and they've been wondering about their kitchen mural, let me know). He did things his way, rarely listened to anyone about anything, but continually found new ways to solve old problems.  In business, I believe that creative thinkers are that way because they want to develop something new, and there's a certain pride of ownership in knowing they got there first. The annals of American entrepreneurship are loaded with tales of the successes of people that made a creative 180 and "accidentally on purpose" made a lot of money and changed an industry.

Many salespeople don't think creatively enough when they work with channel sales partners. They hand them leads, forget about them, and wonder why channel sales numbers are down. Here are some tips for turning this around and getting your channel to increase sales for your product or solution.

1) Call the CEO of your channel company and ask what you can do to help him or her drive more business. Notice I didn't say "ask what you can do to sell more of my product." Your channel company cares more about overall profitability than in just selling your product, because they often have a bunch of other products, too. You need mindshare more than anything else, and in discussing his or her business, you'll probably be the one principal sales rep this year that will show genuine concern for his or her profitability. When I was in sales, one of my channel principals, whose business was partly based on providing engineering consultants as an outsource solution, told me that his outsource business had been crummy. I told him that since I was making tons of calls into his territory, I could ask a question to each of my prospects as to whether they ever used contract programmers. I got my channel partner some business that way, and guess what? My product sales through that channel partner grew exponentially in the ensuing months. Calling high and taking my channel partner's interests to heart were the two keys to getting my channel partner to sell more of my products.

2) Call each of your channel partner sales reps on a regular basis to help him or her make a sale. If you've got a handful, there's no reason you can't call them all once a week. Maybe a call to one of his or her prospects from the manufacturer will make a sale, so why not ask if you can call that prospect and help out. Ensure the rep that you won't let the prospect "go direct" and buy from the manufacturer, and you'll help close the sale for him or her. Sometimes channel partners are unwilling to do this because they're afraid the principal will steal the sale from them. Convince them you won't take away their business, and build trust. I guarantee that you'll be brought into more of their deals, and each of you will have better sales numbers as a result.

3) Create a "virtual channel" by developing your own personal sales channel, right from your desk. Let me give you a "tecchie" example from my own world to explain this concept. I used to sell a software debugger for programmers writing in C language. Before my prospects bought a debugger, they had to have a C complier. There was one C compiler vendor that had bought some of our debuggers for their own use. So I called the sales director of that company, and suggested that I could help them sell compilers to companies that were in Analysis phase, and hadn't bought any software development tools yet. They'd need both compilers and debuggers. The director and I reached a gentleman's agreement that we'd help each other out, and he'd ask his own reps to chat up our debugger. This turned out to be a great relationship. It wasn't formal, wasn't written on paper, but forged a great relationship that was profitable for each of us, and helped my sales territory tremendously. So if you know of a non-competitive vendor that sells to the same people you do, and he or she makes a great product, why not turn that vendor into an ally? This will give you additional "feet on the street," and increase your sales.

So there are three great ways to work with the Channel. Far too many reps view the channel as competition, which is absurd when they're getting comped on both types of sales. It's all about team communication, and in such cases, the Channel is part of your team. I've given you some doable ways to solidify important business contacts within your channel structure. If you sell directly and through a Channel as well, add these ideas to your Best Practices Playbook.