Sales Management – Entrepreneurial vs. Static Approach

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Apr 292012
 

What do I mean by this title? Isn’t Sales always entrepreneurial? How can it be static if I keep on winning customers? Well, what I mean is allocating territorial responsibilities to your sales people in a way that they have their own region, no matter what size, under their responsibility rather than allocating them specific accounts or splitting up regions in strange ways. In doing this right, three key elements need to be considered: Potential (size of the responsible area) Synergies Goals 1. The main function of Sales is to exploit a certain potential. So, the potential should be large enough in order to be attractive for the individual sales persons. And “attractive” means, it … Read more

How To Treat Your Customers

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Nov 192011
 

In the times of traditional software sales, the roles of supplier and customer were pretty clear. The vendor provided a solution; the customer obtained a solution. Nowadays with Cloud solutions, a new partner model between vendor and customer needs to be established as (B2B) customers and vendors have become equal partners (see also previous posts to “Effective Channel Management”). Also, in the past the main focus was on winning the customer and therefore on presales activities, since closing the deal already provided the main chunk of the revenue. Postsales activities were often managed by so-called farmers, sales people specialized in keeping the customer and focusing on support renewals and add-on sales (usually providing not more … Read more

The Benefits Of Customer Satisfaction

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Jun 192011
 

Customer satisfaction is valued highly in almost every commercial organization. Especially large firms spend an enormous amount of money on customer satisfaction programs. Therefore, an important question is: What are the benefits of customer satisfaction for the supplying company? A common assumption is that satisfied customers are more loyal in the sense that they stay in a longer relationship with the supplier. However, marketing research has proven that this linkage is not always so strong and that it largely varies by customer segment and industry. Therefore, vendors and service providers should not rely on such effect, also because the stand-alone value of customer loyalty is not very clear as I will outline in one of … Read more

Effective Channel Management (Part II)

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May 232011
 

As mentioned in Part I of this article, the two elements of an effective sales partner program beside the revenue commitment are: A plausible categorization of the partners into the various partner levels Attractive program-specific benefits for the partners Probably 90% of all partner programs offer the three partner levels Silver, Gold, and Platinum. So, if you design a new program, you can be a bit more creative in naming the partner levels. Sometimes it can make sense to have more than three levels, but that really depends on how fragmented your partner base is. I think it should never be more than five, because then it will begin to be confusing for the partner. … Read more

Effective Channel Management (Part I)

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Apr 172011
 

High-tech Sales is often direct but almost always also through partners. Especially for smaller accounts or customers, to which you don’t have easy access (e.g. because of the geographic distance, your positioning or company size), it can be very effective to address such target customers through partners. However, that requires an effective channel management. One success factor in channel management is a partner program. A formalized partner program mainly serves two purposes: You signal to the market that you have many interested partners, in fact so many that you need to manage them through a generic program. That message makes your company appear very attractive for partners and gets them interested in learning more about … Read more

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