S21 E378: The Mistakes Most Channel Sales Teams Overlook

Ian, welcome to the Same Side Selling podcast. I am

your host. Ian Altman, so this is the time of year where we

spend a lot of time with channel sales organizations, and I'm

often honored to come and speak to organizations where they

bring together everyone in the organization. They bring in

their manufacturers, reps or independent third parties. They

bring in their business development people, their

regional managers, their product people, all together to get

excited, and they're gonna talk about their new product

offerings to get people really excited and pumped up about this

new stuff they're coming out with that's going to potentially

change their industry. Well, maybe not, but that's the story

that we tell everybody is, wow. This is going to be pivotal.

It's going to change everything as you know it, each team member

that you have, of course, wants you to dedicate an hour. The

product managers want to come in. They want to spend an hour

talking about the new features, the new capabilities, on why

everyone's world is going to change because of this

capability. It's usually something that's a very small

feature change, but we believe that it has changed the world.

Are you asking the right question, though, are your top

performing reps, whether they be independent manufacturers reps,

or whether they be your sales reps? Are they the ones who have

the most extensive product knowledge, or the top

performers, the ones who know best how to solve client

problems, how to uncover opportunities, how to ask the

right questions to get your clients to say, Wow, I need this

better than the alternative product that's out in the

marketplace. And what we find is that the top performers tend to

have the greatest sell sales skills. They tend to ask the

best questions. They tend to have the greatest curiosity to

uncover opportunities, rather than necessarily just having a

ton of new product knowledge. So if you want to introduce new

products, and you have new products to introduce, here's

what I would suggest you do instead, instead of spending

time talking about the features and benefits and capabilities of

this new product. Instead, have your product managers talk

about, why did you introduce this product to begin with? What

was the demand in the marketplace? What problem is it

designed to solve, and what questions should you be asking

as a rep to uncover the need for that product out in the

marketplace. So if you have a feature that, let's say, has to

do with HVAC equipment and how you hang metal, or whatever it

is, how you hang wires, then you better talk about, here's what

it does for installers that actually makes their life better

and reduces risk. You can't just say, well, here's something that

improves sheet metal or here's a new thing we want you to buy.

You have to explain to the customer what they would be

looking for. Say if you've been frustrated with XYZ, ABC in the

past, here's a way to solve that we found in our tests and our

studies. It reduces labor by 15% and reduces rework. Well, that's

a reason to buy it, not just the capability in itself. You also

want to solicit info in advance from your attendees that says,

Where are deals getting stuck? Where are we having problems out

there in the marketplace? What can the company do to reduce

friction and make it easier to do business with us compared to

other brands? Because now we're getting insight from them that

says, Wow, these guys actually care about what it's like to do

business with them. That's great. Now I understand where

the real value is. You also want to think through what can some

of those responses be? Someone might say, well, your stuff is

more expensive. If we get that in advance, we can say some

people have said it's more expensive. Here are three case

studies of why, even though it's a little bit more expensive,

people get a better result from this. How are your results

different? And now people go, Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. I

guess it does make sense that it is more expensive because we get

a better outcome. If you want to get top results for your team,

take a look at these Same Side, Selling Academy. Just visit same

side, selling.com to learn more. Create different role play

scenarios with the attendees, so you can model great

conversations and outreach techniques that drive results

for everybody. So you can say, look, here are ways to start the

conversation about this new offering. Here are ways to get

people to consider switching from what they've used in the

past to our solution. And then finally, ensure that the

attendees leave the event with actionable plans to reinforce

the concepts, and then set up a mechanism to reward ongoing

engagement, so you can create video based ongoing education.

Hey, we're gonna pull everyone together in a zoom session. And

we're going to discuss this, whether it's zoom teams, Google,

meet, I don't care, just some way for people to maintain

connectivity with each other and practice these skills. So

instead of showing up and saying, Here are new products,

here are new capabilities, here are the features and benefits,

instead remember, start with, here's this new product. Here's

the demand in the marketplace that prompted us to create this.

Here are the questions to ask to determine if your customers

might need this. Here's a way to start that conversation. Then we

want to understand where they're getting stuck today so we can

accommodate that and where we have friction in our process

that makes it harder or easier to do business with us, so

they're more inclined to do business with us than others.

Then we want to role play these different scenarios. Give them

tools to maintain connectivity with us going forward and

continue their education. See we can share all the information

about product features and capabilities via video we just

send out, but these types of interactions, practicing real

life sales, sales scenarios, those are things that work best

when everyone's in a room together, working on it, and

that's where we'll invest our time. And the people who do this

are driving dramatically better results than the people who

aren't. These are all concepts that we have the benefit of

experiencing every month in the Same Side Selling Academy, in

our Coaches Corner, where people are raising different topics,

role playing them, and getting real live feedback that improve

their outcomes. So if there are topics you'd like me to cover,

just drop me a note to Ian at Ian altman.com We'll see you on

the next episode of the Same Side Selling podcast. So long

you