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On-boarding is a time when the partner can discover
the culture of the vendor. The culture can have an im-
pact on employee turnover, support, stability, quality
and commitment to channel. Just look at the culture of
Rackspace, Netflix and Zappos.
The value proposition is an integral factor to suc-
cess. Know your value to your partner – and to his
customers. How can you help him fill out his portfolio
or his bundle to his customers?
As in any selling, you have to understand how you
differentiate your offerings from the competition. In the
hosted PBX space that means why your service instead
of a premises PBX, Microsoft Lync, Cisco UCS or other
hosted provider (Asterisk, Metaswitch, Broadsoft and
proprietary). If you can’t explain the difference – and
where your service fits in the ecosystem or marketplace
– how will your partner ever be able to position your
service in a sale?
What is unique about what you are bringing to the
partner? It could be that you have a channel-only sales
strategy or you pay outrageous points on evergreen.
Whatever it is needs to be told clearly and concisely.
Another helpful factor is a “channel champion.” In
telecom that role usually falls to the channel head, but
in smaller organizations (or less formal environments), it
needs to be someone who will fight for the partners. There
will be commission battles, channel conflict, sales segmen-
tation, deal registration and other internal conflicts that
will cause partner fury or unease, especially if a deal is
taken away. (There isn’t a partner in the telecom channel
with five years’ experience who has not experienced this
at least once.) It results in sales reluctance from your part-
ner. If word spreads (which it does), it can mean slow sales
from the channel. Someone has to represent the channel
internally for confidence from the channel.
During on-boarding, partners should become familiar
with not just the products and positioning, but also the
process (the 3 P’s). By that I mean, deal registration,
quoting procedure, portal demo, and all the other pieces
of the sales process from prospecting to first bill review.
Do you have implementation specialists or project
managers? How many steps in the install process? How
are the partner and/or the customer kept informed?
What does this process look like for the customer? What
can the customer expect? What can the partner expect?
What is the partner’s role in this process?
Finally, how can you work together with the part-
ner to get two deals done in the next 90 days? How
can you work together to be successful? Put a plan in
place for the partner to take all of the on-boarding to
market as quickly as possible. Without a 90-day plan,
it is likely that no sale will be made for 90 days, and
when an opportunity arises, the partner will have for-
gotten most (if not all) of what he was taught during
on-boarding. This means the channel manager will do
all of the heavy lifting.
Two questions that rarely get asked: How do you want to
be managed? How do you imagine us working together?
Much of the demand that drives quotes from the chan-
nel originates from the customers. And in a Pavlovian
response, partners jump to get a quote. All too often, how-
ever, this is done without doing much discovery at all. “The
customer is hot! Let’s get the quote quick and win this
one!” This often turns into hurry up and wait.
If the customer says, “I want broadband,” how often is the
question that follows, “Why? What are you using the Internet
for?” Or “How vital is the Internet to your business?”
One reason that this question: “How much would a
thirty minute outage cost?” isn’t asked often enough is
because the answer may be, “We’ve never had an out-
age.” And then the dialog is stifled. Or is it?
“My job is to sell you productivity and efficiency.
The whole purpose of moving to the cloud for a busi-
ness is to make that business more flexible, efficient,
productive and competitive. We do this by getting you
back time in seconds or minutes. On a congested pipe,
all that waiting for pages causes delay and frustra-
tion.” (The same can be said for malware, viruses and
older computers.)
“Let’s take a look at what you are using the Internet
for, so that we can get you the right pipe. Fair enough?”
One responsibility of channel managers is to educate
your partners. The education is often about products; it
is rarely about how to sell it, what questions are working.
When was the last time a channel manager provided a
script to a new partner?
When the partner gets better at selling, he will sell
more stuff – some of it will be yours, some of it won’t.
Another component of education is on the Solution
Sale. The customer asked for an Internet quote, did you
ask what he was doing with it? We have options be-
yond managed router for the customer. We have hosted
email, backup, collaboration, conferencing, etc. Telling
your partner these options may help him keep them in
mind for when the customer doesn’t want a quote (for
he is stuck in a contract). He can ask what they do for
hosted email or backup – or even what conferencing
bridge they use.
If anyone likes fishing, you use different lures for different
fish on different days. The service portfolio is a tackle box
Chapter 3:
“They Aren’t Selling My Stuff”
9
THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S
PLAYBOOK