Why The Future Pathway To CEO Is Via Channel Sales

Channel sales management is the elite parallel career path to become Direct Sales Director. Why elite? It's much tougher and requires a broader and deeper range of skills.

You need to be a strategist, a planner, a manager, a coach, a trainer, a diplomat, a referee, an executive, an operator, an organiser, a leader with cat herding, communication and negotiation skills par excellence. You have to lead without power. You have to drive results without direct control. You have to inspire without direct authority.

In German there is a term, "Eierlegende-Wollmilchsau" which translates to egg laying, wool making, milk producing pig. That sums up the role of channel manager pretty succinctly.

Great channel managers are the special forces of sales.

They are dropped behind enemy lines to do the toughest jobs working with the local resistance fighters. They eat the same food, sleep in the same trenches, suffer the same fate or worse and have to deal with the fall out of their own political leadership not understanding how fragile these relationships can be. They have to battle for resources, protect their fighters from their own side who see them as competition and resent it when their partners win business from under the direct sales force's nose.

The Career Path To Channel Glory

How do you reach the dizzy heights of becoming a channel sales superstar? You can cut your teeth in an entry level sales role like inside sales (outbound prospecting), door to door selling, as a researcher or junior recruiter, learning how to craft a message, ask questions, listen, organise yourself and handle rejection.

With a year or two under your belt, work your way into a junior outbound or field sales role. Invest heavily in your learning putting in at least one hour per day in self-development and study. Make sure you capture at least 3 lessons and live by the 1/2% rule. Your goal is to improve incrementally by at least 0.5% per day. Over 270 working days (1 working year in the UK), you will have improved by 273% as your lessons compound.

Do not be one of those salespeople who claims 10 years experience only to have 1 year's experience 10 times over because you didn't really learn anything new since your first year. Be an aggressive learner. A day without a lesson is a day wasted.

Seek out a mentor whose history is your future. Establish a coaching relationship with someone who is successful AND knows how and why they are successful, AND can coach you. Get a coach as early as you can in your career. Ask for help. People will help if you ask. Not everyone, but most. And challenge their thinking if you don't understand or disagree. Be your own person.

Pay for your own training if you have to. Offer to pay 30% or 50% and ask your employer to make up the balance. Many employers will like the fact you are willing to put skin in the game to improve yourself.

Ask your customers for feedback. Ask them to be candid, open and not gloss their feedback to spare your feelings. What did you do well? What could you have done better? What should you stop doing? Start doing?

Write down your lessons daily. Keep a behavioural journal that tracks what you did and the results it generated. Did I mention, keep a journal! Your journal is your most powerful self-development tool. Those I know who keep a journal get a 300-1200% increase in their sales. Why would you not for the inconvenience of 10 minutes per day?

The military do this well. Plan your mission. Plan your sales calls. Rehearse before you go on sales calls so you aren't winging it or practicing in front of your prospects. Debrief after each sales call to capture the lessons, identify problems you need to address and populate your pre-meeting plan for your next stage in the sale. If you learn a lesson, teach it within 24 hours to someone on your team so you embed it and own it.

Failing to do all this is an act of GROSS INCOMPETENCE and should, in my opinion, be a disciplinary issue. Consider the amount of money, time and resource the business has invested to get you in front of a prospect. Who the hell are you to piss away the opportunity because you are too damned lazy or disorganised to prepare adequately?

You are going to fail even if you do the preparation, planning and rehearsal. Remember that failure always gifts you a lesson if you choose to learn it. Fail fast, fail early and fail often. Failure is not a personality defect. It is unavoidable and can be minimised if you approach it like a scientist. Not learning from your failures, now that is plain stupid and shows flaws in your personality! Not preparing is unforgivable.

Be diligent, be organised and earn your way into a senior sales position over the next 2-3 years. Volunteer to mentor junior salespeople as soon as you achieve senior sale status because coaching is central to any effective manager's job. Managing (supervisory functions) should only take a tiny percentage of their time if they are managing well. I suggest getting at least 1-2 years of regular coaching of other salespeople under your belt before you even consider a move into a sales management position.

By now you are a competent salesperson with 3-5 years of daily lessons under your belt, a selling system that is repeatable, scalable and effective. You understand why what you do works and you've made so many mistakes which you've turned into lessons, so when you start building your own team, your history is their future. Keep these lessons written down so they can become a playbook and form the basis for making a good onboarding manual whever you take on a new hire be they green behind the gills or veterans.

I suggest you spend at least one of your experience gaining jobs working in a reseller or channel partner so you can experience what it's like being on the receiving end of several vendors' love interest. See what good and bad look like so when you eventually move into a channel sales management role you bring the best practices and know what bad looks like from the partner perspective in order not to inflict it on them. In reality, most of what you experience from vendors will be worse that awful. Document why, then work out how not to inflict that on your partners in the future.

Only now might you be ready to take on a management role in direct sales. Remember you have 5 functions in a sales management role.

• Hire the best people.
• Get the best out of them. That means pre-onboarding, onboarding, training, mentoring, coaching, career pathing and accountability. Make sure you confront non-performance early or you will diminish your respect among your other team members.
• Make sure they have the tools and resources they need to do their best work every day
• Clear the path pf roadblocks & protect them from acts of idiocy from your own senior management (this one will come in really handy when you take on a channel management role because your direct salesforce, your exec leaders and your CFO will do everything they can to screw up all your good work)!
• Manage inclusively. Make sure everyone has a voice, is treated with respect and feels a valuable part of the team

That's it. Everything else is putting lipstick on a pig. Do these things well and it grants you license to push back on the petty bureaucracies and rules that constrain unsuccessful managers who are afraid their utter ineptitude will be discovered.

97% of your job is recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, training, COACHING, strategising, deal midwifing, career counselling, clearing the path and protecting your people from the idiocy of your own organisation so they can do their best work. 3% is supervisory and reporting.

Hint: If you hire the best people and get the best out of them, the reports write themselves. If you are in regular contact and your relationship is one of trust and transparency, the data will flow to you so you simply have to tie up a few loose ends on the last day of the month.

Once you have developed your people so you have made yourself redundant and built a team that is self-sustaining, autonomous and effective, you will have learned the power of constructive conflict, never being the smartest person in the room, subsuming your ego and taking delight in other people's success. If you help enough people get their needs met, you get your needs met too.

Coach your people to start with the customer and realise that whatever you sell is a means to solve their problems. Talk to the customer about the customer. Train your people to care about the customer. What makes them tick? Why are they in business? Why are they in this job? What are their challenges, pains, aspirations, KPIs and goals?

The Customer Experience begins in your planning and strategising. It must be your goal to become your customers' trusted partner. Unless you start with the customer, your self-interest will be high. Selfish selling results in transactional relationships. Your job is to help your salespeople find, win, keep and grow the customer. Make this philosophy part of your recruitment process, onboarding process, accountability process. Measure your salespeople against how well the customer rates them for their competence and knowledge, keeping their word, their attention and focus on the customer and how well and how closely they develop relationships. Measure them on how little the customer experiences them focusing on their selfish self-interest.

If you can, restructure your comp plan so it's not weighted towards the front, for new logo, new business. That gets paid a little. What get's paid a lot is the customer achieving their intended outcome. That is a big payout to everyone who contributed to their success, not just sales - marketing, presales, customer success, customer service, professional services, operations, product development, finance, management. This drives massive discretionary effort and puts the customer at the heart of everything you do and aligns all your revenue operations around the customer. Pay well for hitting consumption and adoption targets, for renewals and extension sales of other aspects of your portfolio, into other parts of their business, their supply chain, into their customers and their partnerships. This kind of smart thinking gets everyone working together and makes sure your comp plan doesn't drive fireside sales at the end of the quarter, destroying relationships and what if left of your credibility with the customer.

Help your salespeople develop clear expectations and boundaries. Teach them how to develop strong, sustainable agreements with prospects and customers that weather the tests of time, change and adversity. Teach them to challenge their customers so they are seen as adding value instead of order-taking. Have them become part of the customer's innovation cycle. Provide them with the right tools to help them plan years ahead in the account, take their place with the C-suite, operations, finance and deliver genuine business value to keep them out of the clutches of procurement and other deal prevention departments.

Once you've built a team that lives and breathes great customer experience and whose sole focus is the customer's success, and you've helped them develop to the point where one of more of them can replace you, you might be ready for your first channel management role.

RANT!

In today's market, channel managers are usually the nice guy who didn't cut it in sales but is good socially. We don't want to fire him because he's good to have around and heck, "what harm can he do if you lump him in with our channel partners?"

SERIOUSLY??????

The channel is the future. Did you know that 75% of ALL global trade is sold through partners today. Based on the WTO figures for 2016 that equates to $11.6 trillion. In 2020 that was even higher since the channel was functioning whilst many vendors were stuck at home.

Check out this podcast with CEO of @Westcoast, @Alex Tatham https://marcuscauchi.podbean.com/e/putting-your-partners-at-the-heart-of-your-distribution-business/

Sorry folks! That is a market that is too big to ignore and not one you want to leave to Tim, Nice But Dim. Can you see why your success in the future will be defined by your abiity to collaborate.

Channel sales has until now been seen as a dumping ground for failed direct salespeople. It's the ginger haired, bastard ugly sister of direct sales. Did you know that Coca Cola in 2016 laid off 20,000 salespeople and put sales in the hands of their bottling partners? We are seeing this trend happen everywhere.

If you are in direct sales and you are an order taker, retrain as a plumber because there's a shortage of them. Your days are numbered. You will be replaced by AI like Google, Siri or Alexa. Your job will be outsourced. No one needs a brochure in a suit any more. You are the morons that the statistic you see bandied around that "the buyer organisation is 60% of the way through their decision before they invite in a salesperson".

Why?

Because you haven't been doing your bloody job!

If you had been doing your job you'd be the one helping them work out that they need help, why and what to do to fix it, so by the time they go through the motions of a bid, your competition are pitching against a foregone conclusion they have to buy from you. Why? Because you have all the customer's fingerprints and ideas baked into your solution. You have been specified and your competition is playing the role of column fodder.

As the manager you must make sure your salespeople are inviting the customer to define how they will measure your organisation's performance from the start and that they are having regular touches (attention and intimacy) to ensure that you are never more than a few days or weeks from identifying and fixing a problem. You are always seeking to improve the customer's experience. That builds your credibility and reduces your perceived selfish self-interest.

Why is all this essential before you become a fantastic channel manager?

If you can't handle this in a direct sales situation, how on earth do you hope to be able to handle it when you have a dozen, a hundred, a thousand partners? How are you going to manage the expectations of your partners and their management and salespeople? How are you going to handle the political minefield that is channel sales when you have your own direct sales force competing with you and trying to undermine your deals? Or when your idiot of a CFO decides not to pay your partners their commissions so he can make the numbers look good for investors?

If you are going to consider join the special forces of the sales profession, you need to earn you right to eat at the top table. Many are called but few are chosen.

The future of sales is Channel Sales Management.

#MakingChannelSalesWork

----------

Make sure you follow @Jay McBain, lead analyst for channels, alliances and partnerships at Forrester. His research is pure gold - https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/jaymcbain/

Check out @Zach Selch's book on Global Sales - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Global-Sales-Practical-Profitable-International-ebook/dp/B08M4BLGGW/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=zach+selch&qid=1619281733&sr=8-1

@Hans Peter Bech's book Going Global on a Show String is packed with insights too - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Going-Global-Shoestring-Expansion-Software/dp/8793116284/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=hans+peter+bech&qid=1619281823&sr=8-2

He also wrote Building Successful Partner Channels which is excellent - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Successful-Partner-Channels-Software-ebook/dp/B00VELDSP8/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hans+peter+bech&qid=1619281823&sr=8-1

And the book I co-authored with David Davies Making Channel Sales Work is proving invaluable to both newbies and veterans alike.