Four-tried-and-tested-ways-to-improve-channel-sales

Four tried and tested ways to improve channel sales

by Sales Incentives

Four tried and tested ways to improve channel sales

Four tried and tested ways to improve channel sales

Channel sales is a game-changing and viable model where organizations involve channel partners to sell, market, and promote their products instead of hiring a sales force directly.   

What makes channel sales a practical option for your business? 

Trusting a third party can be a tough call. That is why it is imperative to seek answers to specific key questions. For example, is my business resourceful enough to go in for the expansion in your sales force, indirect, of course. Next, you might need to find out if your business has an effective sales process in place or not. If the process is refined, you can effectively leverage the potential of channel sales. To add to it, you should be okay letting go of some of the control by trusting people outside the company to sell your products and services.  

Four tried and tested methods to improve channel sales  

1) Pursue increased mindshare of your channel partners  

Mindshare, often used for describing the degree of consumer awareness, is a limited resource. In the case of channel partners, it denotes the time and energy the partner uses in selling your products and services. The channel partner may not necessarily be working with one brand at a time – most of them work with multiple brands. As a result, your brand gets a certain percentage of the total mindshare of the channel partner.   

Your goal should be to derive a bigger chunk of the mindshare. To do so, it is essential to treat each channel partner as an ally, a friend offering them the landscape to work as true partners. Coaching and training them and being ever-present are critical to making their work easy. Your channel managers need to be accessible at all times, and you need to ensure that you design a win-win rewards and incentives program.   

2) Equip the partnership with an appropriate sales channel partnership tool  

Improving channel sales can be effectively done when you have the right tool to streamline channel data. This is especially true if you plan to scale up your channel sales. A platform like My Incentives that helps organize data gives you a holistic insight into revenues generated and the performance of different sales partners, help you run multiple incentive programs, and more. Such a platform has numerous features that help accelerate sales – for example, sales contests, training materials, learning resources, online webinars, etc.   

Simply introducing such new-age platforms is not enough, though. You need to make sure that your channel partners are trained to use the platform and are using it as a routine. One of the ways to ensure this is to focus on two-way communication. Your business should be open to listening to the channel partners so that their issues can be resolved instantaneously. Similarly, you need to keep your channel partners informed about new updates, announcements, etc., so they are always well-equipped to act as your extended arm.  

3) Innovate your Rewards & Incentive program 

Your channel partners are here to earn commissions and incentives. How can you make your R&I programs more appealing and attractive to get better traction from your partners? There are different ways to do it, and it is clever to design a comprehensive program.   

One amazing way is to categorize your channel partners in a tiered format – basic partners fulfill only the basic requirements of the partnership, higher partners who can fulfill higher targets, and superpartners who are your main revenue churners. With the tiered level comes the need to offer support accordingly to your partners. For example, superpartners get advanced marketing support, get premium listing, etc. 

Remember, your channel partners will give their best efforts to push your products and services when they are incentivized effectively. It is crucial to make it a well-structured robust program where sales expectations, KPIs, and related metrics are explicitly defined. Communicate to the sales partner and ensure that your channel partners understand the same clearly. Also, tying the goals of the channel partner with your business goals can make the process more effective.    

4) Quality should get precedence over quantity  

More partners or better partners? Your choice, in this case, can significantly impact your channel sales performance. Going in for the former can look lucrative, but it is always better to go with the latter option. It’s like choosing between retaining old customers and going in for new ones. Retaining the existing ones is always cost-effective. If your business has just entered the channel sales strategy, invest in finding good credible partners and then work towards making them stick by you. 

If yours is an established business with a proper setup of channel partners, go back and research to find the qualitative ones. These are the partners you should take along with you because they will help your business perform better. Leave the slow and low performers behind as they might become obstacles to increasing channel sales. 

Conclusion  

Channel sales have great potential if leveraged effectively. Ensure that you choose the right ones and do everything possible to keep them with you. Keep the communication channels open and be accessible for them. Give them the resources and tools to perform well and incentivize them wholeheartedly and, of course, timely. Ensure their excitement levels towards your products and services are as much as yours! 

Channel sales is a game-changing and viable model where organizations involve channel partners to sell, market, and promote their products instead of hiring a sales force directly.   

What makes channel sales a practical option for your business? 

Trusting a third party can be a tough call. That is why it is imperative to seek answers to specific key questions. For example, is my business resourceful enough to go in for the expansion in your sales force, indirect, of course. Next, you might need to find out if your business has an effective sales process in place or not. If the process is refined, you can effectively leverage the potential of channel sales. To add to it, you should be okay letting go of some of the control by trusting people outside the company to sell your products and services.  

Four tried and tested methods to improve channel sales  

1) Pursue increased mindshare of your channel partners  

Mindshare, often used for describing the degree of consumer awareness, is a limited resource. In the case of channel partners, it denotes the time and energy the partner uses in selling your products and services. The channel partner may not necessarily be working with one brand at a time – most of them work with multiple brands. As a result, your brand gets a certain percentage of the total mindshare of the channel partner.   

Your goal should be to derive a bigger chunk of the mindshare. To do so, it is essential to treat each channel partner as an ally, a friend offering them the landscape to work as true partners. Coaching and training them and being ever-present are critical to making their work easy. Your channel managers need to be accessible at all times, and you need to ensure that you design a win-win rewards and incentives program.   

2) Equip the partnership with an appropriate sales channel partnership tool  

Improving channel sales can be effectively done when you have the right tool to streamline channel data. This is especially true if you plan to scale up your channel sales. A platform like My Incentives that helps organize data gives you a holistic insight into revenues generated and the performance of different sales partners, help you run multiple incentive programs, and more. Such a platform has numerous features that help accelerate sales – for example, sales contests, training materials, learning resources, online webinars, etc.   

Simply introducing such new-age platforms is not enough, though. You need to make sure that your channel partners are trained to use the platform and are using it as a routine. One of the ways to ensure this is to focus on two-way communication. Your business should be open to listening to the channel partners so that their issues can be resolved instantaneously. Similarly, you need to keep your channel partners informed about new updates, announcements, etc., so they are always well-equipped to act as your extended arm.  

3) Innovate your Rewards & Incentive program 

Your channel partners are here to earn commissions and incentives. How can you make your R&I programs more appealing and attractive to get better traction from your partners? There are different ways to do it, and it is clever to design a comprehensive program.   

One amazing way is to categorize your channel partners in a tiered format – basic partners fulfill only the basic requirements of the partnership, higher partners who can fulfill higher targets, and superpartners who are your main revenue churners. With the tiered level comes the need to offer support accordingly to your partners. For example, superpartners get advanced marketing support, get premium listing, etc. 

Remember, your channel partners will give their best efforts to push your products and services when they are incentivized effectively. It is crucial to make it a well-structured robust program where sales expectations, KPIs, and related metrics are explicitly defined. Communicate to the sales partner and ensure that your channel partners understand the same clearly. Also, tying the goals of the channel partner with your business goals can make the process more effective.    

4) Quality should get precedence over quantity  

More partners or better partners? Your choice, in this case, can significantly impact your channel sales performance. Going in for the former can look lucrative, but it is always better to go with the latter option. It’s like choosing between retaining old customers and going in for new ones. Retaining the existing ones is always cost-effective. If your business has just entered the channel sales strategy, invest in finding good credible partners and then work towards making them stick by you. 

If yours is an established business with a proper setup of channel partners, go back and research to find the qualitative ones. These are the partners you should take along with you because they will help your business perform better. Leave the slow and low performers behind as they might become obstacles to increasing channel sales. 

Conclusion  

Channel sales have great potential if leveraged effectively. Ensure that you choose the right ones and do everything possible to keep them with you. Keep the communication channels open and be accessible for them. Give them the resources and tools to perform well and incentivize them wholeheartedly and, of course, timely. Ensure their excitement levels towards your products and services are as much as yours! 

Why-it-is-High-Time-You-Stopped-Using-Excel-Sheets-for-Incentive-Calculations

Why it is High Time You Stopped Using Excel Sheets for Incentive Calculations

by Sales Incentives

Why it is High Time You Stopped Using Excel Sheets for Incentive Calculations

Why it is High Time You Stopped Using Excel Sheets for Incentive Calculations

Microsoft Excel is one of the most remarkable software innovations – agreed!

Sales teams use it to track their leads, sometimes even when they have a CRM. HR teams are using it. And so are Marketing, Finance and almost everyone else. But Excel sheet with its gridded boxes is not the best idea for a lot of things.

For example, when calculating sales incentives.

Excel doesn’t just fall short on various parameters of calculations; it just makes it more complex and cumbersome. That is why a lot of companies serious about their worker incentive programs go in for specialized software systems that automate most of the process. They either end up building a bespoke software or seek a SaaS product that can serve the purpose.

So what exactly is the problem with using Excel sheets?

The downside of using Excel sheets for incentive calculation

Excel is an excellent tool for calculations, and there is no second opinion about this. Not just that, it helps store data with millions of rows available and is an excellent tool for data visualization, data cleaning, analysis, and reporting.

But when it comes to sales incentives, you need more than just that.

Incentive programs are based on specific rules and logic. Excel sheets, unfortunately, have not been coded to handle such complex computations with layers of logical reasoning embedded into the system. One can still argue that they can use nested ifs and indexes to build logic to their calculations but that’s too tedious.

And, what if there is an error in the nested ifs?

The entire compensation program can go for a toss.

Plus, there are issues with scalability, shareability, and real-time visibility.

Understandably, most people are pretty much used to spreadsheets, so it is natural to have a temptation to rely on them for all purposes. However, here are these six reasons that will convince you to look out for a new-age tool that will speed up your workflow and aid you effectively in calculations and compensations.

Let’s jump right in.

Manual updates

Back in 1985, when Microsoft introduced Excel, it was to improvise on calculators and mental computations. The spreadsheet is amazing in formulas. But there are limitations, and you will feel it as you keep depending on the sheet for incentive programs. One of the most significant drawbacks is that Excel must be manually updated. With one or two salespeople, you may be fine with the spreadsheet, but depending on Excel can become frustrating when business and team sizes grow. This means that Excel has scalability issues tasking & overburdening your employees in the process.

Error-prone

With manual-driven processes, the risk of error is always high. Since Excel operations need a person to feed in data, it is vulnerable to costly mistakes. While the contention of many Excel lovers would be that a mistake here and there definitely should not be counted as a con, we would like to remind here that when handling complex ecosystems like incentive programs, one slight mistake can lead to a chain of errors, thereby impacting the program dramatically. On the other hand, automated systems minimize risk phenomenally, also playing a vital role in making the process transparent and fair.

Knowledge transfer is a challenge

Individuals control spreadsheets. They design the workspace as per their convenience and understanding. One fine day, when the individual leaves the office or is absent from work, it can be pretty daunting for a new person to interpret the equations, formulas, etc. This means that in the absence of the person who has created the sheet, Excel sheets can become obstacles leading to delays, inaccurate reporting, etc.

It is not a live system

Excel sheets are not live and cannot be integrated with real-time enterprise-based systems. Until and unless someone updates the sheet on a shared mode in real-time, workflow on Excel mostly happens in solo mode. The data is primarily redundant and, over a period, becomes obsolete. Additionally, sharing Excel sheets mostly means sharing as an attachment on an email, denting the performance of your incentive program.

Compare this with modern software tools like My Incentives. It is on the cloud and accessible to every concerned person anytime, anywhere.

Tracking is an issue

One formula that gets changed by multiple team members, and there is no way of tracking who did what – sounds familiar? It is pretty frustrating trying to locate the source, especially in case of an error. Such issues are easily avoidable in automated tools because there is always a history, a digital footprint left behind by the user. This makes Excel less accountable, and when there are legal compliances and finances associated with the program, like in an incentive process, this can be a huge issue.

Manual release of payments

In incentive programs, one essential process is the payout. With Excel, payments are always manually released. This is because it cannot be integrated with any payment gateway or financial system for automated payments. New-age systems like My Incentives digitalize the entire process; therefore, there is no stress about manual payouts. If your business has remote teams, the system has in-built algorithms to take care of tax implications and legal compliances depending on geographical locations. Different payout options like gift cards, wallets, etc., can be easily woven into the system, offering exciting payment options to your sales force.

In conclusion: If not Excel sheets, then?

In response to the changing times and the exclusive demands of incentive programs, it is crucial to transition from basic spreadsheets to dynamic automated systems like My Incentives.

My Incentives, for example, can automate your complex calculations, run multiple incentive programs, and the disbursement too can be managed from the same platform.

If you wish to know more about My Incentives, we can give you a customized one-on-one demo.

Microsoft Excel is one of the most remarkable software innovations – agreed!

Sales teams use it to track their leads, sometimes even when they have a CRM. HR teams are using it. And so are Marketing, Finance and almost everyone else. But Excel sheet with its gridded boxes is not the best idea for a lot of things.

For example, when calculating sales incentives.

Excel doesn’t just fall short on various parameters of calculations; it just makes it more complex and cumbersome. That is why a lot of companies serious about their worker incentive programs go in for specialized software systems that automate most of the process. They either end up building a bespoke software or seek a SaaS product that can serve the purpose.

So what exactly is the problem with using Excel sheets?

The downside of using Excel sheets for incentive calculation

Excel is an excellent tool for calculations, and there is no second opinion about this. Not just that, it helps store data with millions of rows available and is an excellent tool for data visualization, data cleaning, analysis, and reporting.

But when it comes to sales incentives, you need more than just that.

Incentive programs are based on specific rules and logic. Excel sheets, unfortunately, have not been coded to handle such complex computations with layers of logical reasoning embedded into the system. One can still argue that they can use nested ifs and indexes to build logic to their calculations but that’s too tedious.

And, what if there is an error in the nested ifs?

The entire compensation program can go for a toss.

Plus, there are issues with scalability, shareability, and real-time visibility.

Understandably, most people are pretty much used to spreadsheets, so it is natural to have a temptation to rely on them for all purposes. However, here are these six reasons that will convince you to look out for a new-age tool that will speed up your workflow and aid you effectively in calculations and compensations.

Let’s jump right in.

Manual updates

Back in 1985, when Microsoft introduced Excel, it was to improvise on calculators and mental computations. The spreadsheet is amazing in formulas. But there are limitations, and you will feel it as you keep depending on the sheet for incentive programs. One of the most significant drawbacks is that Excel must be manually updated. With one or two salespeople, you may be fine with the spreadsheet, but depending on Excel can become frustrating when business and team sizes grow. This means that Excel has scalability issues tasking & overburdening your employees in the process.

Error-prone

With manual-driven processes, the risk of error is always high. Since Excel operations need a person to feed in data, it is vulnerable to costly mistakes. While the contention of many Excel lovers would be that a mistake here and there definitely should not be counted as a con, we would like to remind here that when handling complex ecosystems like incentive programs, one slight mistake can lead to a chain of errors, thereby impacting the program dramatically. On the other hand, automated systems minimize risk phenomenally, also playing a vital role in making the process transparent and fair.

Knowledge transfer is a challenge

Individuals control spreadsheets. They design the workspace as per their convenience and understanding. One fine day, when the individual leaves the office or is absent from work, it can be pretty daunting for a new person to interpret the equations, formulas, etc. This means that in the absence of the person who has created the sheet, Excel sheets can become obstacles leading to delays, inaccurate reporting, etc.

It is not a live system

Excel sheets are not live and cannot be integrated with real-time enterprise-based systems. Until and unless someone updates the sheet on a shared mode in real-time, workflow on Excel mostly happens in solo mode. The data is primarily redundant and, over a period, becomes obsolete. Additionally, sharing Excel sheets mostly means sharing as an attachment on an email, denting the performance of your incentive program.

Compare this with modern software tools like My Incentives. It is on the cloud and accessible to every concerned person anytime, anywhere.

Tracking is an issue

One formula that gets changed by multiple team members, and there is no way of tracking who did what – sounds familiar? It is pretty frustrating trying to locate the source, especially in case of an error. Such issues are easily avoidable in automated tools because there is always a history, a digital footprint left behind by the user. This makes Excel less accountable, and when there are legal compliances and finances associated with the program, like in an incentive process, this can be a huge issue.

Manual release of payments

In incentive programs, one essential process is the payout. With Excel, payments are always manually released. This is because it cannot be integrated with any payment gateway or financial system for automated payments. New-age systems like My Incentives digitalize the entire process; therefore, there is no stress about manual payouts. If your business has remote teams, the system has in-built algorithms to take care of tax implications and legal compliances depending on geographical locations. Different payout options like gift cards, wallets, etc., can be easily woven into the system, offering exciting payment options to your sales force.

In conclusion: If not Excel sheets, then?

In response to the changing times and the exclusive demands of incentive programs, it is crucial to transition from basic spreadsheets to dynamic automated systems like My Incentives.

My Incentives, for example, can automate your complex calculations, run multiple incentive programs, and the disbursement too can be managed from the same platform.

If you wish to know more about My Incentives, we can give you a customized one-on-one demo.