Are your distributors receiving sales leads that are clearly ranked in terms of their sales potential?

Treating all leads as equals is not only inefficient, but also inhibits revenue potential (spending time and resources on an unlikely buyer, while a higher-potential opportunity sits idle). This is why prioritizing sales activity — known as lead scoring — is so critical to business performance. It allows sales professional to focus more time on active selling to the right leads and less time on administration, qualifications and research.

If you’ve been following our blog, you’re familiar with the advantages of lead scoring in the channel. If not, you can catch up by reading the 4 Important Benefits of Lead Scoring in the Channel, where we explain what lead scoring is and spell out why it’s so valuable in an indirect sales environment.

In this blog, we’ll take lead scoring a step further and examine best practices for creating channel-specific lead scoring criteria. You’ll learn in greater detail how to define and apply an actionable set of lead scoring criteria for ranking the perceived value of each lead. Armed with this information, sales can then better prioritize and act on those leads deemed more qualified and ready for engagement over those that aren’t.

We’ve found that lead scoring models in the B2B sales space, where points are assigned to pageviews, email clicks, and other engagement statistics, can result in complexity to the point where the core purpose of prioritization is lost. Applying lead scoring to the channel requires a different and more direct approach than traditional direct selling models.

As manufacturers generate leads for their distributors, they should focus on these five criteria:

1. Does the lead match my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?

An Ideal Customer Profile is a known and agreed to set of criteria on what makes a great customer. This could be company size, location, industry, or other metrics that inform you who is most likely to buy the product or solutions you sell.

2. Does the lead match my target persona?

Does the title and/or responsibility of the prospect match who you are trying to reach in the organization that has decision-making authority, budget authority, or any other key consideration in the buying journey?

3. What is the source of the lead?

Did it come from a trade show as a result of a passing conversation or a direct quote/pricing inquiry on the website? Was it a marketing-generated lead from a campaign or a highly qualified sales lead based on pre-screening criteria? The source is often a strong indicator of qualification level.

4. What is the level of interest?

Related to the source above but any contextual information related to where a prospect is in the buying cycle – information gathering, committed to a path, comparing products, ready to buy — will help determine a lead’s ranking.

5. What is the opportunity/deal size?

This often requires further sales qualification, but inquiries around certain products or solutions can signal the potential revenue related to a lead. Deal size is an important criteria in prioritization but can also become a distraction if sales professionals chase the largest potential deal sizes at the expense of others. Be sure this metric is viewed in conjunction with the others.

Using this set of criteria, your marketing team doesn’t need to generate more leads in order to see revenue gains. You need only to prioritize the ones you already have — distinguishing the hot leads from the cool ones based on the above set of criteria — before sharing them with your channel partners. With leads that are prioritized based on their sales potential and that contain key contextual information, channel partners will be better prepared to convert more opportunities into sales.

If you depend on channel partners to take your products to market, you know how important it is to identify, recruit, and retain the best distributors.

When it’s time to acquire new partners, or replace under-performing ones, approach the process as you would hiring a new employee.

When hiring, you consider the experience, background, skills and value a candidate will bring to your organization. Once that ideal candidate joins your team, you provide them with the right tools, resources and feedback so that your new hire can be productive and profitable, and by extension, so can your business. In the same way, the right channel partner selection requires knowing what you want in a partner and communicating your expectations.

You can do this be creating an ideal partner profile — specific criteria used to identify and qualify partners to ensure they possess the attributes required to fulfill the company’s priorities and its target customers’ requirements. Think of it as a job description for hiring new partners that are engaged, productive and profitable.

Some companies even use it to evaluate the growth potential of their existing partners and to help plan and execute channel partner training.

To determine the ideal profile of a partner, here are a few key elements to consider:

1. What skills and experience do they need?
2. Does this potential partner possess the right industry focus and technical skills, as well as the right selling capabilities and capacity?
3. Is this potential partner positioned with the right customer base, geographic coverage and value proposition in relation to other solutions or products they sell?

It bears mentioning that potential partners are vetting you, too. What resources do you make available to them so that they can be successful? Do you provide a streamlined and efficient way to share leads, collect feedback, and distribute critical sales materials including timely updates?

Here, you can put on your sales hat and explain the ways in which your company and your partnership offering are more attractive than your competitors.

Your partner prospects, at least the ones you want, may already be selling other products for other suppliers. You need to introduce your company’s unique value proposition and explain why it will lead to a higher-performing relationship.

Much like employees who perform at their best with the right tools, channel partners excel when given the best tools to drive revenue for their suppliers.  Providing high-quality sales leads, collecting on-going feedback, and proactively engaging to help them improve their sales process all go a long way to retain the best channel partners and recruit the next best one.

This is the second in a two-part series on how to build a successful ChannelTech Stack. In our first installment, we discussed the four key elements required to develop a results-driven channel partner technology stack. If you missed it, catch up here.

Leveraging today’s technology to enable channel sales requires an approach that goes beyond traditional partner portals and customer relationship management (CRMs) systems.

As we explored in last week’s post, the aim of technology stacking is to make difficult business process more fluid, efficient and transparent — the end goal being a higher-functioning and higher-performing relationship with your channel partner. Neither partner portals nor CRMs, by themselves, move the needle for businesses that recognize the value of optimizing channel revenue through improved distributor engagement and better pipeline visibility.

Here’s why:

Partner Portals: The passive approach to channel engagement

A partner portal is a web-based application that allows a manufacturer’s channel partner or distributor to obtain direct access to marketing resources, pricing and sales information, as well as technical details or support. For example, the partner portal may list new promotions or discounts for the partner, allow the partner to examine service memoranda, or connect the partner with an assigned sales support representative for configuration assistance. The partner portal is typically accessed through the manufacturer’s web site, and requires the use of secure logon credentials assigned to the partner.

As a sales enablement tool, partner portals are ineffective. They suffer from low utilization rates and infrequent updates and maintenance by the companies that host them.

In pursuit of a competitive edge, manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to draw channel partners’ attention to their latest products, discount deals or incentive programs. But adding more bells and whistles to a partner portal is like putting lipstick on a pig. Because at the end of the day you’re faced with the same shortcoming: placing the burden on your channel partner or distributor to engage.

CRM: A square peg in a round hole

If your company markets products or services directly to an end buyer, a customer relationship management (CRM) system is a fine solution for automating your sales process and tracking opportunities in the pipeline. But for those companies whose products reach their final destinations through a network of distributors or channel partners, a CRM — on its own — is not the right tool for the job. That’s because CRM systems are designed to automate and optimize the relationship between a vendor and its customers. Channel partners, however, are not your customers — at least not in the traditional sense.

In the indirect sales channel space, you rely on your partners to generate revenue by selling your products effectively in the locations you designate. With so much revenue riding on these critical business relationships, it’s necessary that you have a tool in place that’s been specifically designed to actively engage with them. Channel engagement with CRM software alone will cause you and your partners to miss out on opportunities.

A CRM system is designed to “speak the language” of a single company. While effective for tracking sales activities in a B2B or B2C landscape, they are inadequate when used among companies who rely on each other for up-to-date information about leads and sales opportunities.

In a channel sales environment your platform must be able to share information and update channel partners in a way that is centralized and unified. That way, channel partner sales activity is clearly visible, which leads to better forecasting and sales support.

If your goal is channel revenue optimization by way of improved distributor engagement and better pipeline visibility, traditional siloed approaches won’t get you there. To increase productivity and sales, look for ChannelTech Stack solutions that emphasize technology-driven processes that make the most of your channel relationships.

Strategies for better engagement, participation, and results

Effective communication between colleagues and co-workers who all work under the same roof is tough enough. For companies that operate using an indirect sales model, the hurdles that stand in the way of effective communication can seem overwhelming.  

For all the obvious reasons, communication has long been a challenge for companies that sell through distributors or channel partners. And it’s hardly surprising why. Numerous systems and processes across multiple regions and multiple distributors is a recipe for inefficiency. Stuff falls through the cracks. Important stuff, like leads and opportunities. Cumbersome processes, outdated or irrelevant information and poor pipeline visibility all result from poorly executed channel communications.

That said, for those that get it right, communication can also be a major source of competitive differentiation From increased channel partner performance and better conversion rates to stronger, more mutually beneficial distributor relationships — the potential benefits are game-changers. Because at the end of the day, better communication makes it easier for your network partners to do their job of selling and servicing your products every day. So, what does effective channel communication look like?

1. Focus on simplicity

We call it the manufacturers’ “black hole” — when a sales lead or opportunity is sent to a channel partner and no one is quite sure what becomes of it. At least not easily. Was the lead contacted? Where is it in the pipeline? Is this information easily accessible in real-time or do you have to dig for it? Effective communication can and should give you crystal clear, up-to-the-minute pipeline visibility. To do this, focus on simplicity. Your channel partners or distributors are already overwhelmed with plenty of “noise.” Don’t add to the clutter by asking them to log-in to your special portal, or sift through generic emails combing for information relevant to them. Provide a solution that allows them to quickly and easily communicate the quality and status of each lead they receive.

2. Be helpful at the right time

Timely and contextual communication is critical to effective partner engagement. Sending information too early adds to the overload your partners are already experiencing. Not to mention, the longer the information sits before it’s relevant, the greater the chance that it will be forgotten or misplaced. Of course, information that is sent too late is useless. Be helpful by providing product line updates, sales materials and other updates by stage and location at precisely the right time. Your distributors will feel supported and be better positioned to convert opportunities into sales.

3. Create a closed communication loop

Channels communication and collaboration work best when both manufacturer and distributor are working from the same information at the same time. If feedback on the quality and needs of sales leads is limited, or acquired through call centers or blanket surveys, the result will be data that is dated, incomplete and unhelpful. The key is to create “a closed communication loop” in which both manufacturer and channel partner are communicating via the same platform in real-time. All parties can easily view the status, quality and needs associated with every opportunity — the kind of feedback and visibility that leads to huge gains in sales performance.

Want more expert tips on effective channel communication? We can help.

For companies that sell their products through a network of channel partners and distributors, engagement is king. That’s because the more actively you engage, the more you sell.

According to SiriusDecisions, a whopping 79 percent of sales leads generated by the manufacturer are not contacted by the channel partner.

And traditional forms of engagement, such as follow-up phone calls or emails, are both ineffective and hugely inefficient.

The good news is, you don’t have to increase your marketing budget or generate additional new sales leads. The right engagement strategy should maximize every opportunity to sell to the leads you already have.

Here’s what you need to know to create an effective channel engagement strategy:

1. Connectivity. Manufacturers whose products are sold through dozens or even hundreds of network partners and distributors are least effective — read: convert fewer sales — when they rely on email and spreadsheets for sales execution. To overcome disparate systems and processes requires a connected network of channel partners communicating via the same platform. This kind of 360-view solution allows you see the status of every deal, and turn more leads into opportunities.

2. Visibility. You can’t fix what you can’t see. Once your pieces are connected, it’s critically important to base decisions on a real-time view of your pipeline status by distributor.

Rather than cross your fingers and hope that you’ll reach your sales goals, with a single data source on a unified platform you can gain up-to-the-minute insights into the the status and size of various deals. The data also offers important insight related to the performance of your channel partners.

3. Contextual Enablement. Keeping channel partners updated with the latest sales pitch, product positioning or new features is a challenge, particularly if they have to navigate your website or search through electronic catalogs to acquire the information they need. Or maybe you’ve got some material in your partner web portal, but they have to log-in to get it, let alone remember how to find it.

Either way, they’re likely seeing a sliver of what you have to offer and they may be missing the most powerful materials.

The solution is to provide sales and product information to your distributors at their fingertips, right when they need it. We call it contextual enablement, when you can deliver helpful, contextual information on-demand throughout the deal flow — all without relying on your channels to track down portals, catalogs or website information.

4. Optimization. Once you’ve established connectivity, visibility and contextual sales enablement, the next step is to create a continuous real-time feedback loop of communication to improve lead quality, deal conversion rates, and sales execution. When a distributor receives a lead, is it simple for him or her to score it? Are you wasting resources on a call center or sending out an email or paper survey to see if the lead is worthwhile?

Conversion rates go up when all your players share a common communications platform. Here’s the secret to performing this well: Keep it simple. If the task is complicated or requires extra steps, it will be ignored. Your solution should make it easy for your channel partners to score leads and communicate their status.

5. Insight. A  data-driven approach to understanding distributor performance prevents you from making decision based on assumptions. Without a single, unified view of channel performance, conversion rates, lead response times, not to mention your ability to spot trends or make revenue forecasts, is limited.

Data allows you to gain a 360-view of your channel network, including high and low performers, patterns over time and opportunities for improvement.  

Get these channel-engagement strategies right, and you will help your distributors sell more. A lot more.

See a winning channel engagement strategy in action. Request a demo