Exceeding Your Number In 2022! Part IV. "The Execution Plan!"

John McKay was a famed football coach who coached USC's football team (The Trojans) and also held the position of the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for over eight years in the late 1970's. During Tampa Bay's 26 game losing streak Jim was asked "What do you think of your teams execution?" In classic fashion, John responded "I'm all for it!"

All kidding aside, successful strategy execution is the difference between success or failure for every organization. Channel Sales is no different! How well our partners execute our solutions sales strategy will be the difference between missing or making the number in 2022. In my previous posts in this series, I outlined:

1. "The Plan"?to transition your top 10 passive underperforming partners to active sellers.
2. "The Blueprint"?defining our sales enablement framework, providing the process to transition underperforming partner to active sellers.
3. "Assembly Required"defining how to create and use Sales Plays to reinforce your selling strategy to generate new opportunities with your target market.

Today's post?"The?Execution Plan", organizes the prospecting activity of our partners to pipeline new opportunities. Specifically, we want partners to target accounts for prospecting by Sales Play and Customer type. In addition, we want to make it quick and easy for partners to prospect, providing a simple recipe for sellers to follow to generate leads. But, before we walk through the process, be sure you have read the previous posts in the series, as they all build off one another. In particular, read the last post "Assembly Required". Our Execution Plan is based on utilizing Sales Plays to focus our Partners on generating new demand. Let's start our "Execution Plan" by defining our targeting process.

Note:?Before starting your Target Account Planning process be sure to define the goal and desired outcome for the exercise with your partner, as well as, the incentive being offered to create priority for prospecting for your solution.

Target Account Planning:?If you have been in channels for longer than a week, you have probably been associated with a Target Account Planning (TAP) process. Many Channel Organizations have experienced mixed results aligning partners with a Target Account Planning process. Why? Because there are a number of factors that determine the success of a Partners prospecting efforts to include:

• The willingness of the Partners sales teams to prioritize prospecting
• The Partners relationship strength with their accounts
• The relevance of your solution with both the partner and the market
• Your solutions ROI (Effort versus reward)

Any one of these elements can derail your Target Account Planning process. However, in my experience the biggest challenge to Partner lead prospecting is the absence of Sales Plays and the lack of an effective Sales Play enablement process organizing and equipping Partners to generate new demand. Traditional channel enablement approaches fail to provide the recipe for the partner to follow to create new sales. Targeting is essential to create proactive partner sellers, however, targeting is only half the equation for a successful sales creation formula. A successful Target Account Planning Process must include equipping partners with:

1. An Identified Market Opportunity
2. A Target Profile
3. A Unique Value Proposition
4. Incentives
5. A Defined Outcome for the Sales Play
6. Measurement and Accountability

Target Account Planning without structure usually leads to poor results. Essentially Targeting works when accounts are targeted based on your recipe to create sales. So let's start our targeting process using a Sales Play Matrix to define the best Sales Play to execute with a partner based on their customer base. The illustration below provides a framework to use with your partners to organize their prospecting. We start by organizing customers into three categories based on the customers installed solution. All customers have either:

1. Your Solution
2. A Competitors Solution
3. An Alliance Partners Solution installed

The matrix identifies a Sales Play based on a selling strategy and customer type (See previous post "Assembly Required'). Channel Accounts Managers use the Sales Play Matrix in their partner planning process to define Target Accounts and align plays based on the partners prevalent customer base. In addition, accounts are prioritized based on the Partners access and relationship with Decision Makers.

Note:?Be sure all appropriate sales teams are in agreement with the partners target account list to avoid channel conflicts. In addition, be sure that your Account Executive is in alignment to provide Deal Registration for the Partner for any accounts mutually agreed on for targeting.

Prospecting:?Once you have an agreed upon TAP List and Sales Play (Upsell, Upgrade, Cross-Sell or Shift) identified, its time to equip your Partners with a prospecting process as part of the recipe for creating new sales. The goal for our partner prospecting process is to build awareness for your solutions value and to generate an initial meeting. Our recipe is coined 4-3-2-1 (See Illustration below). Let's take a closer look.

4-3-2-1 Prospecting Process:?There are many ways to successfully reach targeted individuals and if your partner has a relationship with your targeted decision maker the process is much easier and doesn't require execution of each step in the 4-3-2-1 process. However, for accounts that require more effort to get to the right Decision Maker(s), this is a great process to organize the Partner's prospecting. So let's define the process. Effective prospecting requires both meaningful messaging and an organized approach to connecting with your intended audience. The 4-3-2-1 Method is a Prospecting Process designed to organize your partner’s reach activities into a simple step-by-step process. Partners Sellers are busy, so time management is critical for success when asking them to prospect. For channel sales, introducing a simple process is critical for your success to encourage Sellers to hunt. The 4-3-2-1 Method essentially asks Partner Sellers to commit to the following:

• Target (4) Accounts?based on your Sales Plays Target Profile.
• Send (3) Emails?(Per Targeted Individual) based on your Sales Play's Email Campaign.
• Make (2) Follow-Up Calls?(Per Targeted Individual) based on your Sales Play's Call Script.
• Use (1) Alternative?connection approach per person if the email and call doesn't produce results.

Repetition and consistency improve the probability for successful outcomes. Simplicity creates time management, taking less than ten minutes a day to execute the process assuming partners are equipped and enabled properly with a comprehensive sales campaign. Sellers that adopt the process and choose the right accounts to target will absolutely see positive results from the effort.

What Does This Mean To Me:?This article is a high level overview of our Target Account Planning Process. The process is designed to help you transition your passive (underperforming) partners to active sellers. Our framework provides a blueprint to use to guide your partners prospecting activity for mining their customer accounts for new opportunities. The Sales Play Matrix is a great tool to organize and focus your partners to identify accounts that map to your selling strategy.

Here's what I would like you to do. Pick a willing Partner and introduce your Sales Plays with the goal of defining the best play to run based on their customers and relationships. Hold an enablement session with your Partner to introduce the Sales Play, establish the goal, process (4-3-2-1) and incentives for executing the play. Work with each Partner Seller to identify four accounts to target. Equip the Seller with your email campaign, call script and promotion. Agree upon an execution schedule and measure the Sellers activity and results.

In closing, there's significant revenue potential when you transition your channel partners from passive fulfillment partners to active value-aligned demand creators. Enabling your Partners to execute your structured channel demand creation process will unlock the sales energy of your partner community to create new demand.?If you adopt, resource, enable and execute 4-3-2-1 properly, you will absolutely grow your channel sales in 2022!

Finally, I hope you found the post useful. The next post in the series is titled "40 Yards" and discusses the need for skills development as part of your plan to exceed the number next year. Stay tuned! Also, hit me up on Linkedin email if I can answer any questions about the post.

Craig

Sponsorship:?This post was written based on content from Channel Force Inc On-Demand Channel Sales Training. To learn more about our Channel Sale Acceleration Training, please visit our training page at channelforce.podia.com

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