Transact with Machines. Do Business with People.

How To Evolve Your Channel Coverage Model

I was with a client the other week and as we concluded our meeting, they said something to me that touched a nerve. “This is where we do business” they said, pointing at the table we had been sitting at. It stuck with me and I spent the train journey home mulling over the significance of the comment.

Here’s the thing. We talk a lot about the buyer journey. We talk about how that journey is ‘two thirds online’, or similar statistic and how that means we can no longer rely on face to face traditional ‘sales’ approaches in order to win business. We conduct our everyday lives online without the compulsion for human interaction. So what value does a human interaction have?

Old School

Then it struck me. I do everyday things online because they are simply a transaction. There’s no emotion attached to my grocery shop. But for more complex decisions, I’m still ‘old school’, preferring to chat to someone to help me understand if I’m making the best decision. That might happen online, on the phone or face to face. The purchase can then happen through whatever format is the most convenient at the time. I’ve separated the transaction from ‘doing business’.

Human Value

Our business life in IT channels is no different. The transaction is simply the completion of the sales cycle. If online makes it less painful then why not? Efficiency has a value.

But if I’m an IT vendor, am I building a business with my partners by only making the transaction easier? We hear every time we conduct partner insights interviews that ‘ease of doing business’ is important. Yet often that gets interpreted as ‘more automation’ or ‘less human interaction’. To cut out the dialogue completely is to leave your partners to their own devices, devoid of any experience.

Partner Experience

With hundreds or thousands of partners to manage, then of course it’s not possible to offer everyone a dedicated person on tap. Nor it is it expected. Ask the average SME partner and they will tell you they don’t get attention because they don’t expect attention. Yet some will grow and become significant, with or without a vendor’s help. Most likely they will align to those vendors who show them just a little bit of love as they develop.

So how do you get that human interaction into your partner engagement? There are five steps I think are worthwhile taking.

Step One: Use Non-Emotive Segmentation

Channel segmentation is a pretty emotive issue. It can become tangled in compensation structures. What’s good for one line of business may not be good for another. It can create conflict between sales teams. Traditional approaches are often referred to as ‘following the revenue’. The dollars go where they have always gone. Growth is organic and ROI diminishes.

A smarter way is to use data to determine potential to grow – both in financial terms and in the desire of the partner. Focus on partner’s growth of your business. Better still, focus on how your business growth drives incremental growth in the partner’s business beyond your product set.

Step Two: Organise Your Channel Resources on Need not Performance

Once you understand how your partners want to grow their business you can decide how to invest in them based on their business need. Partners who need attention may come from one of several segments such as

• Those whose customer influence is so large that they drive strategy – no doubt they will already be getting attention.

• Partners whose businesses are built on technical edge that are driving new, disruptive technologies.

• Smaller partners who are aiming for high growth that hunt for incremental customers.

Re-organising resources to where need is greatest will yield greater incremental benefit in the long run.

Step Three: Separate Online ‘Do Business’ from Online ‘Transaction’

Being online needn’t mean being a machine. Leverage social selling techniques. Channel resources must be encouraged to invest time in developing their network and committing to driving content and discussion. They do not, and should not feel the need to push product and services.

To take this a step further, consider moving a whole segment to ‘online touch’ through mobile and social. There is still a named relationship, even if the dialogue is online.

Step Four: Review and Re-align Regularly

Needs will change over time. It’s really important to conduct a regular review of partner need and to align that over time with trends in performance. By using data, the process of moving partners between levels of resourcing gets easier. Remember most partners will not move that often. This is about identifying the margin cases and ensuring that the model is tweaked to remain effective.

Step Five: Make the Transaction Genuinely Simple

Once partners and resources are aligned, that last step needs to be made as simple as possible. You want resources focused on ‘doing business’ not supporting transactions. From our own research with large vendors, when it comes to tools and enablement the message is “You don’t need more tools. You need to make the ones you have accessible and easy to use”. Vendors would do well to heed this message. Systems that don’t work result in partners finding workarounds that take time and disrupt business flows.

For me, keeping focus on ‘doing business’ is all important. If I get that right, the transaction is an inevitable consequence. Unlike my groceries or an impulse gift purchase, our clients, like vendors’ partners, are too valuable and scarce to leave to the machines.

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