If you’re a distributor that partners with manufacturers, odds are that a few of them generate and share sales leads with you.

This indirect sales distribution model has numerous benefits for both you and the manufacturer.

You obtain sales leads at little or no marketing expense, and the manufacturer enjoys expanded market share without the time and expense of hiring and training sales force.

Win-win, right?

What should be a symbiotic relationship with a manufacturer, however, can rapidly devolves into something much more chaotic, and much less lucrative.

Distributor-manufacturer relationships frequently struggle to operate within a defined process. Lead qualification criteria, two-way flow of information, and proactive engagement are often woefully lacking, which leads to end-of-quarter sales numbers that are less attractive than they could be.

Common communication-based hurdles like these create serious inefficiencies that can have a serious financial impact. When information for everything from lead status to lead quality isn’t easily seen as it happens by everyone involved — potential sales inevitably fall through the cracks and revenue gets left on the table.

Here are 3 ways to achieve better sales alignment with your manufacturers.

1. Define the process, and then standardize it. Think in terms of both how leads are shared from a single manufacturer as well as how you aggregate and organize them across multiple manufacturers. The key to prioritizing follow-up and tracking progress is a single view of all potential sales leads, regardless of the source.

2.  Determine your shared lead qualification process. Getting this right can be as straightforward as identifying certain industries, roles, or even contact information. Lead qualification can be further improved by enhancing generated leads with additional contextual information like zip code, SIC code, company size and other information that helps you better prioritize and engage the best leads.

3.  Maintain a two-way flow of information. Critical to manufacturer/distributor sales alignment is regular and routine feedback on the quality, status, and other action items on every shared lead. Without this closed-loop process in place, leads more easily enter  no man’s land, where pipeline visibility is nearly impossible.

But I work with dozens of manufacturers — all of which have different processes and systems for lead sharing and follow-up?

Exactly.

The way to bring multiple entities into a single process is to adopt a shared platform. This enables distributors and their manufacturing partners to rapidly and easily share leads and to communicate about lead status and quality.

This proactive engagement approach helps distributors sell more — much more, in fact. You might have heard that portals can bridge this gap, but in reality the opposite is true. A portal or similar “static” destination that requires a log-in typically suffers from underutilization and outdated information. It’s just one more burdensome task to add to the daily laundry list.

By contrast, a push-based notification system that leverages email is a rapid and easy way to communicate the acceptance of a lead or the creation of an opportunity. With it, you can build a hassle-free, and optimized, sales process where everyone benefits.

Do you find yourself guessing what the revenue contribution from your channel partners will be at the end of the month or quarter?

Do you look at historical performance and “hope” it continues or even increases over time?

For companies that sell through channel partners, separation between financial forecasting and a channel partners’ actual performance has long been difficult to align.

Why does accurate forecasting and deal tracking matter?

Traditionally in the indirect sales model, the time lapse between what you hope will happen and what actually happens can have significant costs associated with it. You might be saddled with too much inventory and forced to incur the associated carrying costs for an anticipated demand that doesn’t materialize . Or, you might experience lost sales because low inventory prevents you from fulfilling an unexpected sale.

When visibility is limited across your channel partner network, the result is an information gap that strains  financial reporting and forecasting, not to mention the operational impact of running an efficient channel-revenue business.

Stop flying blind

Closing this information gap is a critical step to better understanding and managing the channel sales process.

To take the guesswork out of channel revenue requires clear and timely pipeline visibility. When leads are shares with distributors, do you they fall into a black hole? Or, are they easily tracked during every step of the buyer’s journey?

Enabling revenue-related information to flow back and forth seamlessly between a company and its channel partners requires an integrated approach.  In the past, integration has been complicated  by the fact that distributors and channel partners are working from different systems, making it impossible to actively share and update the status of a deal in both directions (from manufacturer to channel partner and from channel partner back to manufacturer).

But the ability to do this is absolutely key to accurate and timely forecasting and opportunity tracking mentioned above.

How to anticipate your needs

Channel revenue visibility allows you to anticipate your needs — whether that be inventory, revenue planning or revenue estimates for shareholders. To do this requires a shared platform that provides a unified view of distributor performance as it happens. Rather than hope or guess at what is taking place among your partners, a connected network of channel partners communicating easily via the same platform around deal status, action items, and opportunity tracking allows you to accurately track, manage and plan.

Armed with deal tracking data in real-time, you’ll know instantly:

1. whether you need to ramp up inventory or pull back,
2. if you are on course to meet quarterly revenue targets, and
3. whether your future revenue estimates are accurate

The bottom line is that you can’t improve what you can’t see. And the ability to quickly respond to needs, demands or changes generates revenue and saves time.

See how the LeadMethod platform creates connections that increase revenue visibility across the partner network.

This is the first blog in a two-part series that explores the differences between passive and active channel engagement, and provides actionable steps to help manufacturers create a high-functioning, outcome-driven channel sales engine.

5 Characteristics of Passive Channel Engagement

Selling through channel partners and distributors is an established, proven, and scalable go-to-market approach for manufacturers of all types. Channel partners that specialize by industry, region, or account are an important piece of the sales puzzle and provide access to large market opportunities without little to no internal investment.

The channel sales model, however, is not without its challenges — mostly notably disparate systems and processes fraught with inefficiencies, miscommunications and missed opportunities. This leaky system tends to inhibit revenue optimization. Sure, you’ve got a car that runs. But it’s not firing on all cylinders, and it’s bleeding precious fuel.

Activities versus outcomes

To date, “enabling” the channel has been more focused on activities rather than outcomes. Sign up channel partners, make sure they have access to the information they need, send them sales leads, support them when they request it, and reap the benefits of their efforts.

This passive approach is functional, but not high-functioning. It does not give channel partners any reason or motivation to engage. And most importantly the passive approach doesn’t promote ‘sales enablement’ in order to help channel partners sell.

Companies that continue to use passive channel engagement practices are losing money. We characterize passive channel engagement as the use of the following:

• Web-based portals
  Providing a web-based partner portal or secure site that asks channel partners to log in and learn software. These tools offer suffer from low usage and low relevance.
• Internally oriented CRM
  Trying to manage external selling relationships with an internally oriented CRM system that does not accommodate for the disparate parties involved and their often conflicting processes and systems.
• Incomplete
  Absence of valuable feedback and input via a continuous and collaborative approach to information sharing.
• Inconsistent communication
  Ad hoc communication around the quality of sales leads, status on open opportunities and needs related to training and education.
• Old data
  Relying upon emails and spreadsheets to collect, aggregate, and report on channel sales performance creating a lagging view of revenue generation and goal tracking.

In our next blog in the active versus passive channel engagement series, we’ll explore how to create a higher-performing sales engine and share 6 tips for developing an active approach to channel engagement.

Challenging times are an opportunity for organizations to review their current processes and implement new strategies to drive growth for their businesses.

The key to instituting a change you can actually keep is to identify low-hanging fruit where achievable gains can be made quickly and easily.

The most common goal for companies who operate in the channel-sales space is to optimize the channel revenue execution process. But that’s the kind of nebulous resolution, by itself, that is hard to implement in a practical way. The better approach is to break up channel revenue optimization into manageable, easy-to-execute chunks.

Here are LeadMethod’s 5 Channel Sales Solutions for that are easy to keep and deliver rapid benefits:

1. Enhance forecasting and revenue visibility. Selling through partners without timely and accurate visibility to the entire sales pipeline complicates decision making and can lead to negative surprises at the end of the quarter. To improve forecasting and revenue visibility, both manufacturer and distributor must work from the same platform to successfully track and manage opportunities.

2. Improve lead and opportunity tracking. Without proper tracking, leads and sales opportunities invariably fall through the cracks. The result is lost revenue and wasted marketing dollars. Know exactly what happens to every lead at every stage of the sales process by aligning with how your partners sell.

3. Improve channel sales enablement. Channel partners are only as effective as you are at equipping them with the resources they need. To set partners up for success, provide “context aware” sales enablement that maps the right materials to the opportunity by stage, product, and scope.

4. Expand channel revenue contribution. When you depend on the channel for the majority of your revenue, you take actions that you expect to deliver results even though you are not directly involved in that execution. Get involved and drive the execution by aligning processes and systems with your partners.

5. Implement a closed-loop feedback process. Stop doing the things you have always done if you aren’t sure if they are useful or valuable. Give your channel partners a direct voice on the quality of leads you share by implementing a closed-loop feedback system.

These 5 strategies are easy to implement with the help of a technology partner committed to maximizing the revenue execution process for companies who depend on distributors. Talk with us to find out more.

In a channel sales model, manufacturers generate leads for their channel partners and distributors. Done right, these leads are first scored based on their priority and then passed to the appropriate channel partners for follow up.

What’s happens next, might be less clear. Were the leads contacted? How fast? Was a quote offered? Did the lead turn into an opportunity?

That initial sales lead outreach is just the first step of a critical relationship management process known as lead nurturing. Just as B2B or B2C brands nurture prospects along the buyer’s journey for better sales results, so too can manufacturers nurture their channel partners.

Lead nurturing is essentially relationship building. In the channel sales environment, it’s the process of maintaining relationships with distributors or partners throughout every stage of the funnel. It focuses communication efforts on listening to the needs of channel partners, and providing them with the information and answers they need to better sell your product throughout each step of the end-buyer’s journey.

The key to a successful channel partner nurturing program is the ability for both manufacturers and channel partners to easily communicate about the status of a sales lead in real-time.

Here are 3 key elements to a high-functioning channel nurturing program:

1. Frequent and consistent communication around sales opportunities.

You send a high score (priority) lead to a distributor and expect the lead to be contacted within 48 hours. Let’s say the lead was not contacted within that time frame and the customer is still waiting. You can initiate an automated email nurture to that distributor salesperson as a reminder to contact the potential client. In another example, a lead has been labeled an open opportunity for more than 30 days and you would like to know if the distributor has either quoted the customer, sold the product, or lost the deal. Initiate a distributor lead nurture to remind them after 30 days to quickly update you on the lead status.

2. Provide relevant help at the right time.

Once you know the status of the leads in your pipeline, you can then help your distributors by providing contextual sales information that will be useful to them at the right time. Sending information too early increases the chance that it will be forgotten or misplaced. Information sent too late is useless. Good channel nurturing provides product line updates, sales materials and other updates by stage and location at precisely the right time, which will better position your distributors to convert opportunities into sales.

3. Easy and real-time way to provide feedback.

Effective nurturing in the channel is a two-way street. Distributors need to be able to communicate with you as easily and clearly as you communicate with them. A real-time tool that enables ongoing feedback between you and your partners creates a “closed loop” around opportunity status, lead quality and needs — without the hassle or cost of surveys or call centers. Leads are less likely to fall through the cracks, and outdated or irrelevant information isn’t contaminating the process.

Distributor nurturing is a great way to gently remind distributors to communicate lead status during every stage of the buyer journey.

But how do you do this when everyone isn’t working from a shared platform? They answer is, you don’t.

Communicating with channel partners on a single platform makes executing a lead nurturing program easy by enabling a two-way flow of communication and feedback in real-time. You product stays front and center without ever sending an email, making a phone call or logging into a portal.

When researching channel nurturing tools, look for a platform that allows distributors to quickly update you on a lead’s status without the requirement to log-in or learn software. LeadMethod, for example, only asks distributors to click buttons from their phone to update manufacturers on a lead status. It’s about as easy as it gets. A sound nurturing program that emphasizes these fluid communication and collaboration elements will help you create a strong and productive relationship with your business partners.

For more information on distributor nurturing, let us show you how the LeadMethod program works.