EDUCATION
It’s not enough to be easy to work with if the sales person can not articulately differentiate your product from competitors’ and other products they sell; and, it’s further complicated if the VAR’s technical staff is uncomfortable answering prospects’ questions or implementing and supporting your product(s).

There’s nothing ‘easy’ about recommending a product if you’re not prepared to confidently and enthusiastically (more on this later) defend that recommendation.

In my upcoming SoftwareCEO Webinar, Navigating the Channel – How to on-board new partners for maximum performance, and faster cash results, we’ll be discussing, in more detail, the critical need and value of early partner training; and, business practices that you can deploy within your organization tied to your channel teams' earnings to assure each new partner completes the required training and certification courses within the required time.

Whether the training will be delivered online, onsite or a combination of the two – it must be initiated no later than two weeks after the agreement is signed! Every week following a roughly two week period the momentum created during the recruitment dance begins draining away and is virtually lost after several weeks if there is no immediate team based activity.

Following the sales training they should be able to compare your product to the others they offer and be able to succinctly differentiate between contrasting feature sets and price advantages.
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[COLOR=#333333]Imagine for just one moment the credibility that your partner will have when they can sit before a prospect and say with clear conscience and unshakeable confidence – “Mr. future customer, I can sell you “A”, “B” or “C”. I know that you’re considering “A” and I could deliver it tomorrow, it’s a fine choice. But, let me take a second to show you why I believe that “D” is a better choice considering your budget, user requirements and incumbent technology.”
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[COLOR=#333333]How would you like to be Vendor “D” in this case? Even your best Direct Sales person couldn’t say what this VAR could.

Summary – Successful technology sales people sell products they know and can differentiate to their customers from a technically literate and knowledgeable trusted advisor position. Their credibility is bolstered by selling the ‘best’ solution of many available options.

That should be enough to chew on for this week. If you want to see how this ends come back next week or wait for the movie to come out.

In the meantime please feel free to post comments to my blog or contact me directly with your burning hot questions at kbeam@thevarcity.com.

Lastly, here’s a great little video clip that I enjoy watching when I start to forget why I ever got into the Channel game - [COLOR=#0000ff]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P89E1F7tryU[/COLOR]

[COLOR=#333333]See ya’ll next week…[/COLOR]

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