Are you working in a channel model? Think outside the box to discover new ways the Salesloft platform can make your life easier. Our cadence software can be used to build out multiple touch patterns, update resellers on the latest changes to your product line, and more effectively cover your entire territory.
In this video, we’re sharing 3 real-world ways Colin James, one of our Enterprise Salespeople, used our platform to be more successful in his previous channel sales role.
Hey guys, this is Colin James. I am a member of our Enterprise Sales team at Salesloft and today I’d like to talk to you about a use case for our platform that I’ve had a lot of experience in, in my last job, which was channel sales. So, there are a lot of unique ways you can use this platform outside of our standard use case. Today I’d like to go over three of them that were helpful for me and set me up for success in my last role.
First and foremost, the most important thing when you are working in a channel model, especially dealing with re-sellers who are engaging with customers and regarding your product, is staying top of mind. So, typically in a channel model, you’re going to have a lot of competitors. You are not going to be the only person working with your partners. And you’re trying to make sure that your name is the name that they think of when a customer asks them how to solve a particular problem. So, being able to maintain top of mind coverage with your re-sellers or distributors or your channel partners – however you define them – is incredibly important for you as a seller in this particular type of sales model. When I was at my previous job selling to re-sellers, I would use our cadence software to enable me to build out multiple touch patterns over the course of… anywhere from a matter of weeks to a matter of months to make sure that the re-sellers that I was engaging with always thought they were the number one thing on my mind.
Area number two that is very important for you as a channel seller is making sure that your sales channel is up to date on all of your latest products and offerings. A lot of times as a channel seller, you find that your re-sellers aren’t always aware of the latest updates and latest changes to your product line. Most of the time they find these things out as when you are in their store, in their facility, visiting them, trying to run a presentation to educate them at that moment. Most people don’t have the bandwidth to sit there and try to message several hundred people every single time a new product comes out. It typically just spreads organically by word of mouth, or maybe your marketing team is running it through Marketo. But that doesn’t have the one-to-one touch that Salesloft gives you. So, what I would do, when we would get a new product, a new modification to a popular line that we were using, I would build out a cadence, and then I would populate my sales channel/sales network into that cadence so that I could easily send them what looks like one-to-one messaging. And keep them aloft to what we’re doing on our side to make sure that they’re being successful in their own fields.
The last thing I want to talk to you about is arguably the hardest thing to solve for when you’re working out of a channel model, which is effectively covering your entire territory. Or effectively covering your key accounts list. A general rule of thumb is that sellers are going to spend about 80% of their time on their top 20% of accounts. They don’t do this just because they’re lazy and they don’t want to go meet all the other people in their pipeline or in their territory, but it’s because of a lack of time and it’s from a lack of resources. In my role, I spent most of my time in San Francisco. That’s where all of my largest clients were. That’s where I could most confidently generate the most business to be able to hit my number. The challenge was that I didn’t spend any time in Seattle, Portland, or San Diego. So, using cadence software to help me maintain selling campaigns and touch point campaigns and build top-of-mind, like I referenced in the previous point, is going to enable building that awareness in areas that you’re not spending as much time… which will allow you to drive more pipeline, which will allow you to further excel. And that’s especially helpful for a sales manager, who might be dealing with sales reps who are putting all of their eggs in one basket. If that basket dries up, well, then all of the sudden you have a much larger problem on your hands.
Alright, thank you guys so much for listening in. I hope you had a chance to learn a little bit about channel sales and specifically how Salesloft can help in that model. If you have any questions or you’d like to talk more, go ahead reply via comments. Thanks again for your time.