2 Track Sales Performance & Market Share

This may seem like the opposite of “starting small,” but in reality, start where you are and begin collecting more pieces of transactional information as you go. Ideally, you’ll track different types of sales data.

For product-based companies, you’ll want partner sales data like:

> Units sold (when, how many, what price)

> Sales cycle (how long it took to close the sale)

> Who was the buyer (depending on partners, this could be general information like size or industry, or the client-specific details like name and location)

> What else the client bought

For services or value-added companies, you’ll want partner sales data like:

> Services sold (when, how long, what price)

> Implementation fees or add-ons

> Sales cycle

> Buyer information

> What else the end-client purchased

Ideally, you’ll track purchases through your partners to the end-client. This can become difficult because many partners want to protect their buyer relationship. There are ways to incent sharing (rebates, claims, etc.) and build trust (through deal registration and protection) that can help collect this information.

Being able to collect, track and analyze this data—either yourself or through a partner collecting this information—will yield answers to questions like:

> “Where do I have the greatest cross-sell opportunity?”

> “Which types of end-clients are purchasing specific products/services?”

> “Which partners are selling the most?”

> “Which partners are selling the products with the most profit?”

> “Where are we seeing buying cycles?”

The key to making this type of data analysis possible (and less painful!) is automation.

Automation helps create custom analytics, increase marketing and sales efficiencies, and prevent information and tasks from slipping through the cracks. Automation should make a channel marketer’s job easier and improve the quality of data by eliminating the potential of manual mistakes.

Figure out where you can make integrations, create incentives to collect where you can’t, and develop process and trust for the rest. These steps will go a long way to help collect the data you need to answer the million-dollar questions. (Literally.)

Already collecting all this sales data? Consider opening up your insights to partners. You probably have a bigger picture than they do into how clients are buying. Share with them new strategies and watch you both succeed.

Provide Relevant Partner Enablement

Every channel manager I’ve ever met has a partner portal: the place they house all the information a partner could ever need to know about their products and tell their clients about their brand. And that is the problem. It houses everything.

Imagine you’re a reseller and are prepping for a client meeting to pitch them a combination of products that best fits their needs. You’re looking for the exact sell sheet with specs you remember seeing, but all you keep finding are the implementation guides and pricing sheets. Gah! What now? You need to be able to share this with your client…

This story plays out one of two ways. They either:

1. Eventually find the document or end up emailing their partner point of contact.

2. Decide to swap out the product for one they know will work and they have information on. Either way, the partner isn’t moving forward with a great perception of your brand and may choose to select a different vendor in the future. This is where the usefulness of data can solve our problems. You can use the partner segmentation and personas to provide only relevant content, add in a level of data on the end-user in your partner ecosystem, and you’ve got hyper-relevance and a great partner experience.

This level of data will help you do things like:

> Provide relevant content for sales reps (sell-sheets, presentations, prospecting tools, etc.)

> Support sales engineer and services teams (implementation guides, FAQs, process docs, etc.)

> Align marketing teams (co-branded materials, stock videos, re-usable content, etc.)

> Tailor training to partner types and participants (certification, prospecting, implementation, etc.)

> Enhance sales success by providing industry content to partners working in verticals

> Simplify incentive views (only eligible participants see corresponding promotions)

> Send announcements to relevant groups of people

This list could go on. What it comes down to is providing each person in your partner ecosystem the most relevant pieces of content, training and information. The beauty of data in this scenario is you can finally reach the person. Not the "partner."

The data you need to do this (if you don’t yet have partner segmentation and personas) is:

> Partner demographic information (location, size, type, etc.)

> Partner customer types (who do they sell to?)

> Partner selling style (how do they sell?)

> Partner personality (how do they like information, what support do they need, etc.)

> Partner staff and roles (if they won’t provide it, still split the information and use rolegeneric logins)

Already doing this? That’s fantastic! We recommend seeing what else you can consolidate and update. Are your incentive/promotion details and progress viewable? Can they see how much they have sold or helped implement in the last quarter? Do you have a view for the executives? When was the last time you updated your materials?

4Evaluate Which Incentives & Promotions Are Performing

Let’s circle back to the business driver of having a partner program in the first place—to reach more people and sell more products/services. At the core of its existence, your partner program should be making you money. If you don’t have the data to know if it’s working or not—we need to fix this*!

*If you don’t have partner sales data (clean, usable and accurate), go back to #2.

To know what’s working, see which activities are generating the most sales. Look at the buckets of general motivation tactics given to partners for desired behaviors, including:

> Sales incentives and SPIFs (travel, cash, gift cards, merchandise, etc.)

> Market development funds (MDF: funds dedicated to driving marketing/sales activities)

> Co-op funds (funds given after sales activity has occurred)

> Discounts/rebates (discounts given on bulk purchases or money back for selling products)

The vital piece to using this data appropriately is attribution—tying back the opportunities and won/lost sales to these activities.

This can become difficult when investments made at the organization level, like MDF and Co-op are used to create leads that are then counted against sales incentives, SPIFs, and discounts and rebates.

I recommend measuring MDF and Co-op on higher level sales metrics like lead generation, pipeline expansion, cross-sell opportunities, deal sizes and new market entrances.

Use the hard sales metrics to measure the success of sales incentives, SPIFs, discounts and rebates because these are the things the sales, service and sales support employees are being motivated by (and are ultimately the people making the sale).

Being able to use data to measure the performance of your incentives and promotions will help you answer questions like:

> “Are my incentives increasing sales?”

> “Are my incentives increasing sales with everyone or just some people?”

> “Are my partners motivated by different things?”

> “Are my MDF and Co-op investments working?”

These questions can be sliced and diced a hundred different ways to measure effectiveness— but it all requires data.

We can’t leave this section without talking about incentives and promotions for non-sales related activity. This can still play a critical role in your partner strategy.

Let’s do a bonus round and cover some data opportunities for this …

Evaluate Which [Non-Sales] Incentives & Promotions Are Performing 4.5

Most channel managers are already encouraging and incenting their partners to participate in non-sales activities by offering something of value.

This could be offering:

> Fast-start bonuses to recruit new partners

> Badges, points or directory listings to reward certifications

> Awards to support staff and sales teams for improving customer satisfaction ratings

> Prizes to spur the adoption of new processes

The list could go on, but the point is it’s just as important as the sales incentives to achieving the goals set forth for your partner program. The only difference is the type of data you need to collect to measure success.

Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, the KPIs to measure could include things like:

> Customer survey scores

> Number of new partners recruited

> Performance of new partners after 1 year

> Engagement with certification programs

> Sales increases from certified partners

> Adoption/use rates of new processes or technologies

The big takeaway here is to think about formalizing some of your non-sales incentives and promotions to capture a bigger return on investment and see a faster implementation. Already doing both of these data optimizations? Consider consolidation. Do these all live separately? Try and get them in one place so people participating in more than one initiative have a better experience. Also think about pooling the awards earned for participation.

5 Make Decisions in the Present Based On Past Performance (Dashboards!)

Every single one of these data optimization ideas will benefit from creating a centralized place to capture the trends, metrics and insights that are made available to you through these initiatives.

Having a dashboard will help you identify trends to:

> React to market pressures

> Address slipping sales by rolling out a SPIFF

> Evaluate the performance of incentives and promotions

> Measure portfolio changes

> Evaluate engagement and certification

> Answer your questions!

This list could go on for days, but what really counts in a dashboard is what you and your organization find valuable. Make sure there is data to answer the questions you have, your boss has, the executives have and your partners have. Definitely don’t forget about your partners, when they can see their progress and dashboard, they can also make even better investments (which could be pushing their teams to sell more of your products/services!).

Getting the dashboard right gives you a pulse on data, period. This can quickly become the most valuable resource when it comes to making a future investment or changing course on an investment you’ve made.

The most important thing to remember with this data is that the insights you pull from it are what matters.