Bottom line: Imagine if all the sales teams in your company decided to make the most important relationships cataloged in their Rolodex come alive again. That infusion of intensity and customer focus can change a company – and no sales team ever accomplished that going card after card in a Rolodex dialing for dollars.
When other people are selling your products for you, how do you help them sell smarter? How do you help them prefer to sell your products over others?
Selling to-order vehicles would be easier if the engineers who designed them also sold them. But that’s simply not scalable if you want to achieve any type of global selling and service success.
So you are tasked with this challenge as a Director or VP of Channel Sales, Marketing Operations or Channel Management: How to get the most accurate product information to your indirect dealer channel faster than your competitors and turn that speed into profits?
In 2008, Cincom undertook a study to measure the factors that A&D companies rely on to be competitive in their markets. The results show that A&D is in the middle of a major transition from being long dependent on manual processes to more automated approaches to integrating financial analysis into project management decisions.
It’s no secret each of us has less time to accomplish more as this year accelerates. Think of your customers too. Stop and consider what they must be going through. And your resellers, they are attempting to keep selling and service relationships in place that have in many cases taken years to create while doing more with less.
Often created through years of effort, refined by a continual pursuit of looking for ways to make shared tasks, processes and systems more effective while dealing with occasional conflict, channel strategies have much in common with marriages.
A “high-touch” sales model continues to resonate, even in highly complex manufacturing environments.
And well, why not? “High Revenue” customers with unique requirements need and deserve the face time that companies give them.
But, what needs to change are levels of automation and integration, as unique customer requirements increase in a complex selling environment.
Companies need to respond with automated guided selling strategies for more speed–and a greater market share.
Because the customer fulfillment process is usually a manually driven, asynchronous process, there is almost always a queue in front of each process task. These queues can stretch the customer fulfillment process timeline as much as 600%. There are several process tasks where time delays from waiting are typical
