Sales Channel Development
- Do you have literature written and designed just to recruit reps and distributors?
- Do you have a sales presentation crafted just for reps?
- What have you done to train your people to work with third-party reps?
- Have you built incentive and commission plans to encourage cooperation between reps and your direct sales people?
No matter what your product, you have to get it to customers, whether it's a walk-in retail store or a complex eCommerce website. That process is the sales channel, and creating it, developing it, and nurturing it is a full-time job. We tell our high-tech clients that developing an effective sales channel can take as long, and cost as much as developing the product that channel will handle.
If the company is in the business-to-business space, the sales channel typically consists of a some salespeople on the company payroll, and then an assortment of third-party reps and distributors. The company salespeople both manage the third-party portion of the channel, and make sales calls themselves. This mix of direct to indirect parts of the channel, how it is setup, how it is managed, and how it is compensated, is a delicate balance that has to be just right to be competitive and to create incentives to sell the products. Ten years ago, recruiting sales rep firms, for instance, was relatively straightforward, and it was the choice virtually every business-to-business startup followed. Today, that landscape has changed and it is very difficult to recruit good reps -- many will only sign-up if there is an up-front fee that can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Multiiply that fee by six to eight for the number of rep firms it takes to cover the USA, and you're starting to hit serious money, especially for a startup. The situation in Europe and Asia is similar, but even more complicated.
This is all very daunting, because for many products, perhaps most in the business-to-business space, the alternative -- the web -- is just not suitable. The answer? You have to mount a serious marketing and sales effort to recruit your reps and distributors, and the better the job you do, the less you'll end up paying. That means treating prospective rep firms as CUSTOMERS and marketing to them. It means having literature written for just that purpose -- recruiting reps and distributors. There are few things you can do that will pay their costs as quickly or produce such results.
Mindpik can help you build that channel by finding good channel partners that fit your products and market space. And we have done the literature it takes to get those partners on your team!
