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What does a modern channel sales campaign look like?

Jim Stockwell
Jim Stockwell

In any economic downturn, companies are forced to take every opportunity to cut costs and withstand the storm as best as possible. As sales revenues and profits decline, businesses have no choice but to take measures such as hire freezes, travel freezes (although this one is a given right now anyway) and cut expenditures like marketing/advertising.

As marketing budgets shrink, businesses need to find ways to protect existing revenue and expand customer lifetime value. If you are a channel firm, this means mining your existing installed base data to find growth opportunities. This is extremely important for everyone within the channel ecosystem, from vendors through to VARs, due to the sheer volume of products/services available on the market that need to be supported, maintained, upgraded or enhanced with complimentary offerings. You could be leaving potential revenue on the table if you are not doing this effectively.

That’s why sales campaigns play such an important role for sales and customer success teams within channel organizations. Not to be confused with marketing campaigns, which mostly help with acquiring new business/lead generation, brand awareness and staying in touch with customers, these sales campaigns take a different approach.

Below is a quick overview of how it works. Note that this can be applied within any channel business – vendors, distributors, VARs and service providers.

Monetize your Data

To start, you will need to capture, maintain and leverage the right data. Installed base data can be so vast and complex, such as point of sale information, price books, consumption data, part numbers/descriptions, cubic measurements, options, service and maintenance contract dates, the list goes on. It’s important to keep all of this consolidated and up-to-date using the right technology, with minimal human intervention. Typical enterprise applications such as CRMs, ERPs or Marketing Automation (MA) tools cannot capture this level of detail for every single customer. Trying to adapt these tools to do it for you will result in wasted effort due to additional manual work and/or extensive customization.

Give your Sales and CX Team the Power

Leverage artificial intelligence to analyze your customer data and identify real opportunities which can be actioned by your sales or CX team immediately. In other words, automatically create proactive, customized proposals which will ultimately help your customers extract more value from their existing IT investments. This is a consultative approach, that helps put your customer in a better economic position and in turn, allows you to become a key part of their IT strategy, rather than just another IT supplier.

Automatically Generated Quotes – Life Changing Stuff

We all know that the channel ecosystem is a complicated beast and selling within a channel model has its own unique complexities and challenges. For example, how tedious and slow can channel quoting be? No – seriously, it’s a pain.

That’s why it’s no longer feasible to follow these legacy processes, because you need to bring in additional revenue quickly and achieve faster results. Which is why automating the quoting element is critical.

Imagine being able to provide your sales team with automatically generated quotes, already prepopulated and pre-validated using current price lists etc, ready for them to immediately take to their customers for approval.

And that is why I feel these modern channel sales campaigns trump generic marketing campaigns and offer a much greater return on investment, every single time.

Sales Campaigns Module

iasset.com’s Sales Campaigns Module does each and everything that I have mentioned above. As you can see, it’s very different to marketing automation tools or CRMs that are used within just about any industry. It’s designed specifically to help channel firms accelerate their unique sales processes, whilst protecting and growing their revenue and delivering more value to the end customer.

 

Please reach out to schedule a time for a demo on how our Sales Campaigns Module can work for your business.

 

 

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