I am a self-confessed tech nerd and as such, am the proud owner of an 8k TV. My biggest frustration with regards to this white elephant hanging proudly on my wall is the lack of content that is available in that format. The manufacturers all launched their flagship technology to much acclaim but unfortunately, there is nothing to watch. “If I invest in it, the channels will come” I thought. How mistaken I was.
There’s a similar story today across the IT industry. Many Channel-led Vendors are looking to change their GTMs – to sell more solutions, go from on-prem to Cloud, develop their services & financial solutions offerings, for example. “If we create it, our partners will follow” they say. However, with just a few exceptions, their channels aren’t always ready either. There are several issues that come up repeatedly:
- Their partners have no interest in changing what they do now
- Their partners see this change in GTM as a threat – they have been doing it themselves for years and see these offerings as diminishing their own value to their customers
- Their partners do not have the necessary systems in place to manage an “as-a-service” type model (invoicing, sales remuneration, customer management etc.)
- Their partners don’t have the necessary skills to sell in that model
Solving these issues are a key challenge for any Channel Enablement function. The instruction from the business is clear and your partners may make the right noises but, in the end, not much happens. But what can you do about it? You only have so many eggs and you need to find the right baskets to put them in. If we assume you can cover the basics (understanding your partners’ customer base, their financial health etc.) and from that, produce a more refined list of options – the rest of the challenge is still painfully difficult to resolve.
Firstly, you need to understand which of those partners are ready and able to change. This may not be the partners you know best. That’s no bad thing – your best partners now are great at what they do, any concerns they have might well be valid from their perspective and, creating incremental opportunities is what you are really looking to achieve. This sort of change is a golden opportunity to delve into the murky depths of your partner list and find the hidden gems who can go out and add something different. They might have little interaction with your business today, but your potential stars of the future could be hiding in plain sight.
Once you have that, you then need to get those partners selling it. First, you need to make it pass the “what’s in it for me?” test from a commercial perspective. This is not straight forward – particularly when it comes to Cloud. Yes, the SaaS deal might be worth more over 3 years but as the old saying involving birds and bushes tells us – £1m of on-prem now is worth more to most people than £1.5m of Cloud over 3 years, especially when the person might not be planning to hang around for that long.
The final stage is to make sure these organizations have a team that’s capable. Don’t worry about whether they are experts in your technology – you can teach them that anyway. What you do need to understand is how they behave when they interact with their customers. What are the things they actually do, not the things that they say they do. Fundamentally, those questions are:
- Do they create insights that provide a reason for an end customer to change?
- Do they help the customer to understand what it is that they should change to?
- Can they collaborate with you and the customer to ensure that change is to you?
- Once all that’s done, can they ensure the end user commits to change?
So, how do you find these unicorn partners when you don’t have a CAM sitting in their office every week?
You could send out a survey or start a telemarketing campaign – however your responses are likely to tell you what they want you to think, rather than what they do. It also won’t tell you where their sellers are up to from a behavior or skills perspective or, when you do find an organization with potential, what you need to do to get them moving in the shortest possible timeframe.
You could deploy your Channel Team to interview them, looking for the needles in the haystacks. Although, they are already stretched, don’t really understand what they are looking for and won’t be able to dedicate enough time to get a proper understanding of each partner. No, that won’t work either.
So – for a moment, imagine if you could create a template based on a mix of your own best sellers’ behaviors, combine it with the behaviors you’ve identified as being necessary to succeed with your new GTM and, understand which of those partners’ teams best reflects those abilities?
What if you could have a template in place to understand whether the commercials stack up for you and for them, and whether that business could collaborate with you to create the insights that enable the buyer to progress through their journey?
What if you could use that data to understand how to quickly close any skill gaps? To give their sales organization the confidence to get out there and start selling, quickly and without alienating them – either by forcing them to sit through training on a load of stuff they already know or worse still, them ignoring it is as they don’t understand the value.
We can help you do all of that both quickly and effectively. Our expertise in having helped multiple organizations change how they go to market, combined with our Kompetently® platform can help you to achieve all of this across any size of partner network.
If you want to know more about how we’ve helped people achieve these sorts of goals, please check out our case studies or even better, reach out to us for a conversat
