Making A Difference Podcast

Changing Channel Dynamics, Driving Channel Success With Today's Buyers!

Channels have always been a critical part of most organizations' Go To Customer strategies.  They are critical to extending our coverage of the market, accessing markets with specialized expertise, and in helping provide our customers more complete solutions.

Managing channels for optimum performance in the face of rapidly changing buying processes and cloud based solutions creates challenges neither suppliers nor channel players have faced in the past.

For example, many of the IT centric products and services are seeing radically changing buying--shifting out of IT into end users.  This drives a change in the channel, helping them shift their approaches to the buyers or finding partners that have access to those buyers.

Shifting from business models where products/services were sold outright, to today's models where products and services are frequently packaged as "As A Service" offering requires new business models, new skills, new capabilities both in the supplier and channels.

Rapid digitization of our customers businesses provide yet another challenge and opportunity to both suppliers and channel participants.

Managing these transitions, helping partners manage these transitions is a very complex process.  It requires new thinking, new relationships, new partner enablement programs, and in some cases new partners.

Simon Minett, Head of Global Sales Operations for Unify, has been leading their transition from a primarily direct field sales orientation to a channel deployed orientation.

The discussion Simon and I had, is one of the most fascinating and wide ranging conversations on this topic that I have had.  We cover everything from managing the transition to channel first, developing capability in the channel, shifting priorities and business model, rising complexity and managing that complexity, to critical elements in channel performance management and enablement.

It's a longer discussion than normal, but this topic is so critical, it was important that we cover this topic in some greater depth.

I hope you enjoy this podcast as much as I enjoyed the conversation with Simon Minett!

How Do We Recruit And Onboard "A" Players? A Discussion With Al Drucker

The cost of a bad hire in sales can be millions of dollars.   We can't forget the hiring and salary costs are the smallest part of our investment in sales people.  The biggest part is the opportunity costs----lost business and opportunities--- if we make the wrong choice.

Too many managers are pretty cavalier about the process, the interview someone, see if there is "chemistry," then make a hire.  Too often, they settle for what they get, not invest the time in finding the right high performers.

Al Drucker has a completely different approach.  He has a rigorous screening process---first he's very clear about what he's looking for, he builds a "competency model," against which he evaluates candidates.  He leveraged behavioral tests and assessments.  Finally, he has a rigorous interview process, invoving everyone from his assistant, presales support, other managers and sales people.  He expects people to prepare for and go through role play and presentation scenarios.  Through this rigorous process, he does everything possible to make sure he is recrutigint "A" players.

But the job doesn't stop there.  Al recognizes that even the best people will fail unless they are onboarded correctly.

Join Al Drucker and me in a fascinating discussion about what it takes to recruit and onboard "A" players.

Thanks Al for a great discussion!

Transforming The Sales Organization

Any kind of organizational transformation is hard.  But imagine tranforming your entire approach to the market.  Think of the challenges of moving fromp primarily a direct field sales structure to a hybrid structure, with heavy reliance on channel partners.

Why would you do this?

What are the challenges in making this happen?

How do you learn in the process and continually improve?

I cover this and more in my discussion with Colin McLean, Senior Vice President of North American Sales and Service Providers for Unify.

It' a fascinating discussion of transformation at a very large scale.

Dave Brock Discusses Sales Metrics On Sales Manager Playbook Podcast

Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss good and bad sales metrics with the folks at Leadfuze's Sales Manager Podcast.  Most of this conversation was based on chapters on performance management and metrics in the Sales Manager Survival Guide.

The podcast originally was published here:   https://www.leadfuze.com/podcast/006-dave-brock-sales-manager-survival-guide/

This copy is provided with their permission.

Can Sales People Create Value, A Conversation With Leanne Hoagland Smith

Can sales people create value?  Leading up to this conversation, Leanne and I had been somewhat in disagreement about this topic.  As we discussed it, I think we found ourselves more in agreement than not.

Join us to hear us discuss the following:

• What is value?
• Can sales people create value?
• How do we discover what the customer values?
• How do we communicate and articulate value to the customer?
• How do we deliver value?
• How do we assess the value that customers realize?

I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did.