Software Marketing for Complex Sales

But you can’t pan for gold with a tractor, so the bigger companies have no choice but to concentrate on increasing market coverage for SMB via the channel. The trouble is that in the rush for the prize, all of the usual mistakes are being made. The tools being jointly used by Vendor sponsors and their channel partners are not sharp enough. The methods being used are not efficient enough. Ultimately, there’s an awful lot of gold spilling from those pans and it’s coming straight out of your wallet!

The joint sales and marketing activities being run by Vendors and their Partners are brittle, leaky and frankly, need a good makeover. The good news is, there is enormous room for improved sales productivity in this area, which will delight sales managers, directors and CEO’s alike.

So what’s the problem? I’m only allowed 1,500 words, so here are some top line issues that we see every day while working with both large technology vendors, as well as on the other side of the coin, working for their Partners:

At the Channel level….

You have signed up to the "Platinum" partner program that gets you referrals, sales leads and all the other wonderful benefits that will make your business take off. Pretty soon, however, you begin to realise that these "co-marketing" leads are pretty weak. After a while your sales team just start to ignore them as a waste of time. One of the key benefits you signed up for has just proven worthless.

Then again, maybe you use "co-marketing dollars" or rebates from the vendor to 100% fund your lead generation or sales development. The trouble is, the Vendor wants you to report back on the closed deals and how much of their "kit" you sold as a result of this, and you haven’t the faintest idea. How many co-marketing dollars (let alone Vendor mindshare) are you losing because of this?

At the Vendor level….

ROI is the phrase of the moment, and Vendors need to prove this in their partner co-marketing as much as anywhere else. More importantly at the street level, the "Client Manager" / "Channel Manager" or whatever the Vendors are calling their people these days are ultimately sales people. These people have sales targets to hit and commissions to earn. If their channel partners cannot accurately report on closed deals resulting from co-marketing, their pay and possibly their jobs are at risk.

Channel Marketing teams need to prove ROI in order to secure budgets from within their organisation. Unrecorded revenue means budgets get cut next time around, which ultimately means less co-marketing dollars for Partners. Leakage.

Plugging the Holes:

In our work for both parties, TSL regularly comes across the same challenges. Ultimately, we see it as our role to plug all the holes that happen when you have Vendor-Partner and Sales-Marketing groups all tugging together, and sometimes apart. While these challenges are not easy to fix, with the right systems, procedures and most importantly, discipline, you can very quickly make an enormous impact on your co-sales productivity. Here are some golden rules that will help:

For Partners:

Leads alone are not the answer!
Simply throwing more leads at your sales team is more likely to reduce sales productivity than enhance it. You don’t just need better-qualified leads or meetings either. What you really need are "Engaged Opportunities". These are highly qualified opportunities, where the people generating those opportunities are also introducing your sales people to the buyers and helping to embed them in that opportunity. After an initial discussion with the buyers your sales staff should be free to push the opportunity back to the lead generation team if it does not "qualify in".

If you can’t do this in-house, then outsource it to someone who can. You’ll ultimately save money by enabling your sales team to concentrate on closing real opportunities instead of wasting time with the wrong people.

Qualify out, then nurture
While IT spend is on the increase again, projects are still being delayed and suspended. If your sales team can’t see near-term revenue opportunity, they will probably ignore this opportunity until it is too late to get back in.

If you have to "qualify out" an opportunity, make sure someone stays in touch with the primary contacts on a regular basis. If you don’t have the resources or discipline to reliably do this in-house, then find a company who will. What will the ROI be if you close just one of those opportunities that would have been ignored?

Analyse sales / engaged opportunities by market segment, then adapt
There are only so many companies and market segments you can effectively cover with a limited budget. By continuously analyzing which micro-segments your "engaged opportunities" or sales are coming from, you can zone in on the most profitable areas and substantially increase your sales productivity.

For example, you may focus on the market segment "Retail companies in the UK with more than 100 employees". However, if you break this down to companies with employee numbers between 100 and 300, 300-600, 600-1,000 and 1,000+ you could find that 70% of your opportunities are coming from the 600-1,000 bracket, so you can afford to do much more resource-intensive selling to this group.

For Vendors:

Benchmark Partners against each other
Any goodwill that I have built up with Partners reading this article is about to be killed off!

Vendors: You must analyze which partners are "playing ball" – reporting on status of leads, wins, losses, ROI - and which ones are throwing your co-marketing funds down the drain.

Most importantly, if you track wins and losses, you’ll begin to find out if there is a stronger potential partner out there that is consistently beating your existing partners in a particular area. In this way, channel co-marketing becomes part of the channel recruitment cycle, except that it is far more efficient than any other method you probably use now.

Sales must take responsibility
One of my colleagues recently spoke with a sales director for a business unit of a major technology company. Although he admitted having a problem generating new "real" opportunities for his sales people and that this was affecting sales results, his attitude was that lead generation is marketing’s problem, not his.

The fact is that marketing teams are usually incentivized on generating "quantity of leads". Sales teams are incentivized to spend time closing well-qualified opportunities. Sales Directors can moan about the leads from marketing, or they can accept the responsibility and force a new solution. Maybe this sales director will realize this when he finds TSL helping the competition kick his butt in the market!

Software Marketing Company
Ridge Consulting is a software marketing company that specialises in enterprise business application software