Know your Customer, Know your Sales Channels



We know that customers are not a monolith, but instead a rich diversity that we must incorporate and address in our marketing if we are to achieve the revenue success that we desire. Leading firms are realizing that the sales channels that reach our customers are not monoliths either. Within every sales channel there are differences of sales skill, customer knowledge, product/services knowledge, successful sales experiences, and leadership roles within their sales group. To achieve our market success objectives we must also incorporate and address this diversity in our marketing programs.

We all have learned the importance of knowing our customer. The ability to know our sales channels provides several powerful new capabilities to a firms marketing efforts.

For many products and services, our primary communications with the customer goes through a sales channel, shaping not only what is said but also frequently determining whether or not there is any communication at all with the customer [outside of the direct marketing and advertising].


Designing marketing programs for usability by the sales channel personnel:

Sales personnel with significant diversity include the attributes of sales skill and level of knowledge of either customers or products/services. Design marketing programs must have a targeted level of skill and knowledge as the “design center” for the program. Certainly a marketing program that assumes a high level of customer knowledge and sales experience is very different than the marketing program for an entry level sales person. The marketing program design for a product specialist with a strong industry focus is also very different than a marketing program designed for a sales rep in a distributor with multiple product lines.

By knowing the these Salesperson attributes that reflect diversity, and measuring the success of the marketing programs, sales personnel with different levels of these capabilities can improve the effectiveness of both the marketing and sales efforts with marketing programs designed for salability.



Over fifteen years ago the functions of Engineering and Manufacturing came to the realization that when Engineering designed for Manufacturability, the time and cost of achieving production levels were significantly reduced. This capability is referred to as Concurrent Engineering, and so appropriately achieving Marketing for Salability has been called Concurrent Marketing.



Case Study:

One of the largest [top 5] software companies was introducing a new software architecture, but the sophistication of the software limited the deployment to the top 100 senior account directors. This occurred because the second tier of sales personnel was only known at the “monolith” level, which was assessed to be due to the lack the breadth of skills for the broad architecture sale with customers. However each of these sales people had depth in specific areas that directly relate to the new architecture. If these specific skills and successes were known, then specific programs could have been designed by Marketing so that each of the sales people could have implemented as sales initiative based on their knowledge and skill. Segmenting the sales personnel based on their skill and knowledge, and deploying the appropriate marketing program could have doubled the selling capacity for the new software capability announcement.



Designing Marketing Programs for Maximum impact:

Knowing the sales channel extends beyond the attributes of skill and knowledge and even into specific sales team dynamics.

For example, the frequent challenge for new product launches is in gaining momentum in the sales channels. Knowing the salesperson that sells a capability in a location would allow the firm to incent that sales person to encourage/assist others in making their first sale by offering duplicate compensation for any additional product sale made in the next 60 days.

Being able to identify the leaders, early adopters, etc in each of the sales groups makes it possible to focus additional resources on the leaders to utilize them to initiate the adoption of the selling effort by the sales channels. The timing of communications to the sales personnel can be timed to coincide with the expected adoption rate within the sales channels.


Summary:

“Build it and they will come” may work in the movies but does not work with customers. Firms are now learning that “build it and they will sell it” doesn’t work either. Compensation alone is rarely the answer. Success with sales channels depends on marketing to the sales channels with the same level of focus and sophistication that is currently being used to achieve customer success. Today we may “market” to the sales channels with sales events, announcements, sales compensation, etc. Usually these marketing efforts still treat the sales channels as a monolith, even though we learned from our experience with customers that we can improve our results by knowing our customers and segmenting our efforts accordingly.


Bud Hyler