Dear Channel Sales Rep,

Anthonoy Iannarino Coaching

The letter below and many of the concepts included in it are borrowed from Anthony Iannarino’ weekly newsletter. Of course I spun it into a letter that could be directed to your channel sales force and injected it with some Move the Channel vernacular.

Anthony is a sales coach for hire, and one of the best Keynote speakers I have ever seen. I usually start my morning by reading Anthony’s blog, and I never miss his weekly newsletter. If you are a Channel Sales Leader, you and your sales force should make The Sales Blog part of your weekly diet too.

 

Dear Channel Sales Rep,

If you are going to sell successfully with your channel partner, you can’t be “just a salesperson,” or “just a vendor.” You need to be someone with the business acumen and situational knowledge that can help your partner grow their business while also growing your own.

What sort of business acumen do you possess? As someone who’s position is atop the sales channel, your knowledge of your industry should cater to both the micro and the macro elements of business. This means mastering the language of both our business (i.e. the manufacturer) and the language that is unique to your channel partner’s business. Do you understand the unique business of your business partner? Obviously, their goal will not be just to sell more of our products–after all, their loyalties lie first with their shareholders and employees. However, if we can align our goals with those of our partners, then ideally the achievement of their goals will result in the selling of our products. In other words, we want to be a (big) part of their overall solution and offering. Thus, if we can understand our channel partner’s goals, we can better position our products and services to help them achieve those goals.

How much situational knowledge do you own? To sell effectively, you need more than just experience. You need to know which choices are available to your channel partner and the end customer, including which products to buy, which services to use which partner to sign with, etc. Even if you are the industry leader, they have choices. As someone whose position is atop the sales channel, you need to be an expert not just with your products, but with your partner’s overall solution as well, and you need to know which options are available to the end customer. There should never be information parity between you, your channel partner, and the end-customer.  Obviously, you are expected to be the expert when it comes to your products; but in order to help your partner and the end-user, you also need to know all of the choices that are unique to them.   

As our Channel Sales Rep, what are you going to do this week to develop your business acumen?  Can you apply knowledge & empathy to your partners’ and end-customers’ situation?

Let’s go Move the Channel!

Sincerely,

trav signature image

 

 

Travis M. Channel

 

Channel Chief, Any Leading Company, Inc.

Email

781-680-0258

www.movethechannel.com

 

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

%d bloggers like this: