Two years ago, the management team at REA Group, Australia’s number one property platform, decided it was time to take a journey of powerful and purposeful digital transformation. The business was fast expanding into new markets, organically and by acquisition. Its legacy systems were not designed to cope with the increasing expectations of a market demanding seamless, real-time individualisation and meaningful, relevant connection.

To grow at pace but still be nimble enough to defend its position at the top, REA Group required the forward vision, insight and trend-spotting capabilities offered by data analytics.

REA Group brought on board a Salesforce suite to make its data-driven vision a reality. Vitally, this united data front allowed for the formation of a single point of truth for every customer, one that was available across the organisation, rather than being held in siloed departments and acquired businesses.

The REA Group journey to its digitally dominant position today as an organisation that changes the way the world experiences property – a company that refers to itself as “a leading global digital business specialising in property” – is a perfect case study for numerous data points that came out of the fourth edition of the State of Sales report.

Sales ops fuels organisational growth

For example, 89% of sales professionals said sales ops plays a critical role in growing the business. Clearly, sales ops played a lead role in REA Group’s development of a single point of truth for each customer.

“There’s a lot of work that the sales ops team has done in collaboration to create that single point of truth,” says Rodney House, REA Group’s Sales Adoption Lead: Customer Excellence. “That data is used to drive the business of the account managers within our business.”

“The biggest thing our Chief Sales Officer wants is for our sales team to see our customers more often but, when they do, for them to have a better-quality conversation. So actually, it’s about quality and quantity at once – he wants more shots on goal and more of those shots to go in.”

That’s not possible without a single point of data truth, Rodney says.

The sales professionals who go out and speak to the market, he explains, are the engine of the organisation. The Salesforce system, and the data and insights it provides, makes that engine run far more efficiently and much faster.

“We can see now in real time whether we are having more conversations quarter-on-quarter, as well as whether those conversations are driving value,” Rodney says. “Those are statistics that would never have been known around the organisation before.”

Sales ops is cross-functional and strategic

Similarly, 85% of sales people say sales ops is becoming increasingly strategic. In fact, within REA Group there is now a Chief Sales Officer, a role that simply didn’t exist two years ago.

“Two years ago, we were structured by market – residential, commercial, etc.,” says Smrithi Kamtikar, Senior Manager Product at REA Group. “Then we took the opportunity to move to a more functional structure, and that was when our Sales teams came together into one function.”

“Since then, from a platform perspective, we’ve been on a journey of dramatic simplification, with the end goal of putting in place the right experiences for our customers and ensuring our platform supports teams like Sales and Customer support who in turn support our customers..”

Another fact to come out of the State of Sales report was that high-performing sales teams were 2.3 times more likely than underperforming teams to increase the cross-functional nature of their work. In fact, 48% of sales ops teams surveyed have increased their involvement in cross-functional workstream management.

Within REA Group, most of our discussions tend to be cross-functional ones, Smrithi says. At quarterly planning sessions, she says, a multi-disciplinary team that includes sales discusses shared goals and common challenges, combining their wisdom, experience and knowledge to develop actions and solutions.

Those discussions, and so many more within the business, are made far easier where we have relevant and insightful data into our market and customer needs.

Data reveals the future

“From a macro point of view, we’re constantly reinvesting in our data to support good business decisions,” Smrithi says.

“We’re also doing it to make sure we can take the next big step forward, which is about becoming more predictive and proactive across all our customer channels – regardless of whether they are digital or face to face channels.”

“We don’t want to look backwards, we want to look forwards and have the ability to predict what our customers might want, and to identify gaps in the market, and to know which product or which approach best solves specific customer pain points.”

From a micro point of view, Rodney discusses the way a performance discussion might go between an account manager and their sales manager, with the insight provided by data.

“We’ve definitely moved to more data-led coaching,” he says. “We describe it as ‘less feels and more facts’. So rather than sitting down and saying, ‘I think I’m doing well’, they can now say, ‘I have made this amount of calls and off the back of that I can see that I have issues with this particular product, because I close the other product more often’.”

“Central to everything we’re doing right now is the driving of a coaching culture. Some people considered coaching as being a bit of a soft art. But actually, when you marry those two things together – the empathy of coaching and the hard facts of data – that’s when the real magic happens.”

Find out the latest sales trends and insights guiding sales professionals to recover and grow in the fourth edition of the State of Sales report.

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Every new reality in a business creates unseen challenges for staff. What’s important for the business is that leaders recognise these challenges and adapt and remodel their management practices to ensure they help provide solutions.

For sales teams, this has never been more important than it is right now.

The fourth edition of the State of Sales report, which evolved from a survey of almost 6,000 sales professionals worldwide in May and June 2020, revealed that just 26% of sales leaders feel completely capable of adapting team culture, and 28% say the same about staff skills.

These stats on their own reveal an enormous chasm between the expectations of senior management and the reality closer to the ground.

As individuals in sales teams have been physically separated by work-from-home orders, and as customers in that environment have begun to expect greater empathy, trust and personalisation, team culture and skills have been far more difficult to manage and mould.

Our research tells us it’s time for a new approach by leaders, one that better suits the new reality of a post-COVID market.

Leadership is no longer about authority

What is that new reality? It’s one in which the typically co-existing and complementary concepts of leadership and authority have been decoupled. It’s one in which the structure the office once gave to relationships and channels of communication have been shattered. And it’s one in which trust and capability walk hand in hand – the leader’s job is to ensure their people have the necessary capabilities to do the required work, and then to trust them to get it done.

The successful sales leader in today’s environment will democratise leadership. In other words, they will accept that every member of their team is now, by necessity, a leader. As such, they must be provided with the right tools, offered powerful motivation, then encouraged to add value to the business in an environment of collective power and responsibility.

What does this mean on a practical level? In terms of providing their people with the right tools, it means sales leaders must accelerate digital transformation and ensure their people are confident with using the new systems.

The State of Sales report told us 77% of sales leaders say their digital transformation has accelerated since 2019. This is an excellent sign, as it means members of sales teams will be better equipped to build relationships with customers independently and effortlessly.

In fact, digital technology’s automation of previously manual processes – logging sales data, generating quotes and proposals, prioritising leads, reporting progress, etc. – will free sales team members to focus more on increasingly important issues, such as building trust with customers.

The report also points to the necessity for greater training of sales staff. Tellingly, our research said high performing sales leaders are 4.8 times more confident in their training abilities than their underperforming peers.

With 70% of businesses currently retraining their field reps to sell from home using new tech and different communications methods, it means those that don’t continually train teams to adapt in new conditions will be left behind.

Sales leaders must take a reality check

Is it any wonder that sales leaders are having a difficult time managing culture, when sales reps themselves are struggling with having to adapt to new ways of selling? In fact, 79% of sales reps tell us they’ve had to adapt to new ways of selling very quickly.

In that case, the leader’s task changes from one of setting performance goals to enabling success through empowerment and training. That empowerment comes through a mix of technology, new responsibilities, changing sales metrics and shifting focus – to the building of trust with customers, for example.

Importantly, the expectations of leaders must change. Our research revealed just 54% of outside reps feel expectations from sales leadership match the current selling reality. And only 46% feel their relationships with customers are stronger than they were in 2019.

Becoming familiar with the reality of the market and aligning expectations with that reality are vital ingredients for sales leadership success. That familiarity, the State of Sales report tells us, comes from a mix of national, local and industry news sources and internal insights such as customer communication and customer purchase activity.

Sales leaders must get comfortable at the big table

The big-picture shift is in the fact that the strategic importance of sales operations is increasing.

To experience success, sales leaders must not only focus more clearly on the changing market and on their own, individual staff members. They must also focus upwards, on the organisation’s strategies, to ensure their own goals and processes are aligned.

This is clearly happening right now, since 75% of sales operations professionals tell us they have new responsibilities and 85% sales professionals agree sales operations is increasingly strategic.

Further, 89% of sales professionals tell us sales operations plays a critical role in growing the business.

To navigate uncharted territory, organisations have to become tighter units, all sharing a clear understanding of a common goal. Sales teams, with silo walls removed, have become a vital part of that goal becoming a reality.

Find out the latest sales trends and insights guiding sales professionals to recover and grow in the fourth edition of the State of Sales report.

Want to hear what other sales leaders think about the future of selling? Register for our upcoming webinar Unpacking the State of Sales: What are the next steps for sales leaders? on 29 October, 2020 and hear from the best in the business, including sales expert Tony Hughes, Trailblazer Fisher & Paykel and Salesforce ANZ Chief Commercial Officer Ian McAdam.

The post It’s time for sales leaders to rethink how they lead appeared first on Head Of Sales.

I’ve worked with thousands of sales people in many different industries. Professional selling is changing rapidly with technology-driven automation and commoditisation resulting in more than one-third of sellers losing their jobs in the coming years.

For any sales person to prosper in their career they need to move beyond being good at building relationships to also embrace the holy trinity of sales mastery:

• Lead with insight as a domain expert
• Create tangible business value for clients
• Leverage technology to be effective and efficient

Make no mistake, relationships alone are not enough. Buyers today are busy and stressed. They are not looking for new friends. They instead want greater value from fewer relationships. They care about how you can help them achieve their goals and manage their risks.

Lead with insight: Don’t wait for your employer to hand you mythical silver bullets… you instead need to self-educate by researching and writing about the disruptive and transformative trends in your customer’s world.

If you can’t write then you can’t sell.

There are four reasons to create and publish content:

1. Educate yourself and develop domain knowledge and expertise
2. Connect with industry leaders to build your sphere of influence
3. Attract clients and an audience to support your business goals
4. Build your personal brand evidencing credibility, value and insight

In an online world we are known by who we associate with (connections) and what we publish (insights). According to IDC research, 75% of buyers research the seller before engaging. What do they see when they view your profile? Do they see a credible domain expert worthy of trust and an investment of their time or do they see a mere salesperson? We must create own own narrative that sets us apart and earns engagement at the most senior levels. It is vitally important to publish thoughtful posts in your LinkedIn profile.

Creating business value: Move away from talking about who you are, what you do and how you do it to instead lead with why a conversation matters. What business outcomes can you deliver for them and what risks can you manage?

The language of business is numbers not words

Lead with why it is important and what it can do for them at a business level. Have evidence to support your claims. Know your best customers and why they decided to implement change within their organization. Understand their business case and the challenges they faced in change management. Bring this wisdom to new prospective clients and set an agenda that sets you apart from the competition.

Leverage technology: The best sales people combine proven old world practices with modern ways of executing. Building relationships and evidencing credentials and value can be done online. Buyers expect the sellers to arrive having done their research. Don’t waste the customer’s time asking them to educate you about publicly available information. Embrace a social selling framework to modernize the way you sell.

Social Selling Definition: The strategy and process of building quality networks online that attract clients and accelerates the speed of business and efficiency of selling, as achieved with a strong personal brand and human engagement through social listening, social publishing, social research, social engagement, and social collaboration.

Also use your company’s CRM system better than anyone else. Work with marketing for lead nurturing with automation tools that keep prospects in your orbit without you annoying them or them wasting your time.

While sales individuals need to focus on ‘sales mastery’, the sales organization needs to focus on ‘sales enablement’.

Sales Enablement

Most businesses do a good job in segmenting their markets, customers and products but what is often missed is the insidious impact of commoditization. Every product or service becomes a commodity over time as features that once differentiated drift back to parity as competitors catch up. According to Corporate Executive Board research, 86% of the time that sellers pitch their ‘compelling value,’ buyers perceive it as neither unique or compelling but merely features also offered by other suppliers. Every business needs to look at itself from the outside – how do customers really view us comparatively? If you sell a commodity, then face the awful truth rather than cling to expensive sales models where customers are unwilling to pay for the low value and high costs associated with a field sales force.

There is no such thing as a high margin commodity and the value they offer must stem from insight and wisdom rather than mere information and service. The first law of selling is that people buy from those they like and trust. They then seek best value and lowest risk. The key for every seller is to understand that ‘value’ and ‘risk’ are all defined by the customer. In selling, we are delegated down to people we sound like and this means that salespeople need to learn the language of leadership if they want to engage at senior levels. They need to be equipped to discuss the business case, delivering outcomes and managing risk.

If a product or service is a commodity then the sales model should be engineered accordingly; make it easy for the customer to obtain information, become convinced and then transact in a way that’s easiest for them including web, phone or channels. For products and services that actually are high value solutions then force the field sales team toward value through insight. Support them in developing domain expertise, genuine insights and business acumen to enable them to operate at a higher level. Product marketing needs to focus on differentiating what is being sold; and sales people need to differentiate by how they sell.

What are the critical elements of sales enablement and how do you create a framework for effective sales execution? There are three essential ingredients plus the catalyst of sales management leadership. The three ingredients are sales methodology, sales process and technology platform.

Few people can articulate the difference between methodologies and process yet these elements are distinctly different in complex B2B selling.

Methodology is the framework for formulating strategy and tactics to win; it’s also how you create your competitive deal strategy, identify risks, cover the political power base within the relationship map, and identify the best way to create compelling value for the buyer. But which methodology should you use? There are a number of well-proven methodologies including TAS, Miller Heiman, RSVPselling, and others. Success with methodology does not depend on which one you select but simply on how well you use it for opportunity coaching with the team.

Process is how you build a sales funnel and execute the sale; it’s how you qualify opportunities and progress through the deal stages with discovery, proposal, demonstration, closing, contracting, on-boarding and then doing win/loss reviews and case studies. Process steps need to be supported by the right tools such as a call planner, qualification tool, discovery questionnaire, proposal templates, win/loss review forms, and territory and account plan templates.

Platform is the technology you use to enable and automate your sales methodology and sales process. It is where you have a single source of truth about customers and opportunities. It must also be your coaching platform where there is transparency concerning pipeline depth and opportunity quality. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is the ideal platform but CRM needs to be a strategy, not just a technology and reporting tool. To be implemented successfully, it must go beyond the mere functions of accounts, opportunities, pipeline and forecasting; it must instead enable the mapping of relationships and force discipline in deal stage progression with qualification scoring and action tracking. It must also include close plans with customer validation of critical dates. Finally, CRM needs to incorporate tight integration with both marketing, social (such as LinkedIn) and after sales support to provide a single view of the entire customer lifecycle from targeting, marketing, lead nurturing and selling through to account management, support, service, satisfaction and upselling.

This approach uses CRM to place customers at the heart of everything you do and provides the platform for being truly customer-centric. It also delivers transparency with deal quality and revenue predictability. It’s where sales people manage their opportunities and the tool that sales managers use to coach their people. This approach is designed to serve the sales people in improving their efficiency and effectiveness. Because it provides them with value and enables their manager to coach for improved win rates, they actually populate the systems with accurate and useful information.

When CRM is implemented with customers and sales people as the priority, and when it’s the platform for deal coaching and the enabler for sales process; then system success is assured. The synergistic outcome for management is accurate reporting and revenue predictability. The corollary of this is that CRM failure comes from implementing it as a reporting tool with poor alignment to sales methodology and sales processes. Many CRM implementation fail and it has nothing to do with the technology provider; here are the critical success factors for successful CRM:

• Obsessively focus on the system serving sales and customer support staff
• Integrate with social platforms such as LinkedIn and InsideView (for easy sales research and insight into Trigger Events)
• Integrate with marketing for lead nurturing (to build sales pipeline)
• Create a single view of customers and prospects (to be informed)
• Embed methodology and process coaching (qualify, call plan, close plan, etc.)
• Simplify reports and KPIs which can actually be managed (activities)
• Support customer lifecycle post sale (cases, complaints, renewals, etc.)

With accurate data in a CRM the next issue to decide is what metrics provide meaningful reporting. A common mistake made by management at all levels is to seek to manage by results. Jason Jordan writes insightfully on this topic in his book, Cracking The Sales Management Code, highlighting that only 17% of the 300+ possible sales metrics measured are actually manageable. As an example, you cannot manage revenue, but you can manage the activities that create it. Rather than command sales people to bring in more revenue, they need to be guided in which activities are most likely to create the type of revenue you are seeking. Managing activities is the key to delivering the right results and this leads us to the catalyst that brings methodology, process and platform technology together for successful sales enablement – the sales manager.

Sales management is without doubt the most important link in the revenue chain for any organization. The right sales manager creates emotional commitment and belief within their team, they coach and mentor for sales success, they develop the right strategies to focus effort where the team can competitively win and they drive the right conversations with the right roles within the right targeted prospects. They also create organizational alignment with upstream marketing and downstream delivery, support and service to build a business with quality customers.

Sales management leadership is the catalyst that brings it all together: people, process and technology within the right strategy and a culture of excellence in execution. The type of person capable of delivering all this is an engineer rather than a warrior, they have empathy yet hold people to account. But the best sales manager in the world cannot be successful if their boss has them endlessly in internal meetings and reporting up. The sales manager needs to be a coach rather than an administrator. She needs to spend more time in the field than in the office, and more time strategizing and reviewing opportunities with sales people than managing reports. A great coach does not jump in and take over, nor do they do the sales person’s job for them. They don’t feel the need to rescue people and instead understand that people are best motivated by reasons they themselves discover. They focus on planning and debriefing to create constant improvement.

The Holy Grail of sales enablement is the seamless integration of the right methodology, efficient sales process, all enabled by Social Selling and CRM technology used to coach sales people by an effective sales leader focused on strategy, execution and building a positive team culture.

The very best sales operations bring people, process and technology together to be obsessively customer-centric.

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Preparing for this year’s list of future channel trends has been an immersive experience, to say the least.

In 2019, I was able to talk to 497 companies one on one about their channel strategy and programs, including 130 of those face to face. I received 78 briefings from the technology companies that are inventing new ways to automate and scale indirect sales. I also had the honor of speaking (over 40 times) to tens of thousands of channel professionals globally and participating in countless webinars and podcasts. Finally, I was able to share channel data and insight 129 times across the 54 global channel magazines.

Added to this, we acquired the amazing SiriusDecisions company a couple of days into 2019 and added it to the collective wisdom of 675,000 consumers and business leaders around the world that we collect through rigorous and objective surveys.

To sum 2020 up in simple terms, we are seeing a monumental shift in how buyers acquire products and services and how companies are reacting with their go-to-market and routes-to-market strategies. Over 80% of my time is spent in the technology industry, where 64% of all dollars flow indirectly. That is US$2.26 trillion (with a T), if you are keeping score.

2020s Trends

1. Indirect Sales Will Shrink Every Year For The Next Decade

We are watching several buyer trends in this area. First and foremost, 73% of B2B buyers report that buying through eCommerce, web direct, or marketplaces is very convenient. Consumer trends, such as direct to consumer, are starting to shift into business. Brands are developing the capability to sell and fulfill directly to consumers, and this will extend to their B2B buyers, as well.

The cloud and emerging technologies such as AI, automation, and the internet of things (IoT) are growing quickly and carry lower indirect percentages than some of the legacy technologies they are replacing. For example, after 20 years, software-as-a-service is still stubbornly sitting below the 30% mark for indirect sales with no signs of change. Salesforce is recruiting 250,000 new partners in the next four years and has effectively shut down its reseller program.

The $2.26 trillion of indirect technology spend will continue to grow, but grow more slowly than direct sales causing the 64% split to drop each year for the next decade.

2. Marketplaces Make Their Mark

Forrester is predicting that 17% of the $13 trillion in B2B spend will flow to marketplaces by 2023. While some of these marketplaces are indirect (e.g., Amazon or Alibaba), most of them will be run by big tech vendors (e.g., Microsoft, AWS, Google, Dell, Salesforce, or IBM).

I foresee 20 “super” marketplaces taking a sizable share of this marketplace revenue and creating a whole new set of tech jobs (such as marketplace SEO, community managers, and ecosystem strategists).

3. Channel Leaders Contemplate A Trifurcated Channel Model 

For 38 years, the channel has been synonymous with resellers and transacting partners. Programs have been anchored on precious metal (gold/silver/bronze) pyramid schemes, and the partner journey has been predictably linear from recruitment to onboarding, incentives, co-marketing, and management. In 2019, we saw Microsoft announce that 7,500 new partners were joining the program each month. What it didn’t announce is that 80% of those partners are nontransacting.

What is a trifurcated channel?

–> With buyers spending 68% of their journey digitally before speaking with a salesperson (direct or partner) and an astounding 71% of them reaching vendor selection after a digital-only journey, brands are wising up to the importance of getting in front of customers early and often. Creating an “influencer channel” made up of affinity partners, referral agents, affiliates, advocates, ambassadors, and alliances is critical to success in 2020, and the program will need to serve these early digital influencers in a nonlinear fashion.

–> The traditional “transactional channel” doesn’t go away. In fact, those partners that have spent years on the “long-tail” list may actually find a home somewhere else in the program that has, up till now, only pushed them to resell. Tweaking channel data management, automation, insights, onboarding, incentives, co-selling, and co-marketing will determine winners and losers here.

–> Because almost every company in every industry is thinking about or actively converting to a recurring, subscription-based model, a new “retention channel” is starting to take hold. Knowing that the customer journey never ends in a subscription scenario and that brands will need to re-earn a customer’s business every 30 days, partners that can drive adoption, ongoing customer experience, and the ability to upsell and cross-sell become critically important. These partners appear as consultants, integrators, adjacent ISVs, accountants, digital agencies, etc.

The prediction from a few years ago about millions of shadow channels entering the market came true. When looking through this trifurcated lens, more than 80% of these (potential) partners will show up before or after the sale, and channel leaders need to break the transactional channel mold.

4. Channel Professionals Become Ecosystem Professionals

In an Accenture survey, 76% of business leaders agree that current business models will be unrecognizable in the next five years — ecosystems will be the main change agent. Reading the annual reports of the Fortune 500, it is becoming abundantly clear that every company is becoming a technology company, such as, for example, the legacy manufacturer of forklifts that integrated IoT sensors in its product and now delivers thousands of data points per second to construction companies, architects, and others in the value chain. The company has partnered with AWS, Google, and Microsoft and is busy building a tech partner ecosystem.

One of the most common things I talked about with the 497 companies in 2019 was the idea of the expanded channel Venn diagram including influence, transactional, and retention type partners and how to manage them all with one program. The average program has 90 different elements, and implementing it across transacting and nontransacting partners is surprisingly easy. Partners of all types (transactional and nontransactional) need to be found and recruited, onboarded, educated, trained, incentivized, motivated, loyal, and have the tools necessary to support/promote your product or service from a sales and marketing perspective.

The program needs to be automated, flexible, scalable, and anchored on self-service. The effective use of technology tools is no longer optional — ecosystems don’t run on spreadsheets.

5. Emerging Tech Is No Longer Emerging — It Is Here

In 2019, we saw many of the emerging tech categories that we have been watching for years turn into multimillion dollar revenue streams for partners. 2020 will be the year of switching early adopters into an early majority for technologies such as IoT, AI, automation, 5G, advanced security, and blockchain.

The fastest-growing subindustry in the technology space has been RPA, or robotic process automation. RPA blends workflow automation with AI and software bots and has become one of the foundational tools of digital transformation. One of the leaders in the Forrester Wave evaluation on RPA was UiPath, which grew 5,614% to become the fastest-growing software company to $100 million in revenue in history, with 70% of the opportunity flowing through partners. (It eclipsed previous holders of the title: Microsoft, Salesforce, and, most recently, Slack).

To get an idea of the size of the emerging tech ecosystem, Forrester is currently watching 800,000 firms globally — all potential partners of those brands that are looking to influence a particular set of buyers.

6. New Channel Tech Companies Emerge In Ecosystem Space

The channel software tech stack from 2019 included 106 companies that were broken down into six categories, including partner relationship management, through-channel marketing automation, channel incentives and program management, channel data management, channel enablement, and channel finance.

In 2020, we are seeing several moves toward channel software that supports transacting- and nontransacting-type partners. From a functionality perspective, support for resellers, managed services providers (MSPs), referral partners (affinity, affiliate, advocate, ambassador, digital influencer, etc.), alliance partners, ISVs, consultants, and shadow channels is a necessity. Attribution, which has traditionally been in marketing domains, is quickly becoming a critical skill for channel professionals growing a trifurcated channel.

In 2019, we saw M&A activity such as Impartner acquiring Amplifinity, Loyaltyworks merging with Incentive Solutions, 360insights acquiring MTC Performance, and E2open acquiring Averetek, as well as some pure ecosystem technology plays by Impact, WorkSpan, and Crossbeam, along with early-stage companies Apideck, TidWiT, and P2P Global.

7. Partner Experience (PX) Will Catch Up To Customer Experience (CX)

B2B channels are in transition — from a tiered, resale, and fulfillment function to a more fluid indirect ecosystem of affiliates, advocates, alliances, and referral partners. Upward of 70% of global revenue comes from third-party channels, and partners play a key role in shaping the customer experience. But most organizations have been slow to make the link between partner experience and customer experience.

A strong 43% of global B2B marketing decision makers rank improving customer experience as a top priority in 2019, while 39% are looking to improve the partner experience. We predict marketing decision makers will rank improving partner experience on par with improving customer experience in 2020, and both will rise to more than 50%.

Brands are wising up to the notion that customer obsession also means partner obsession and are looking for channel organizations to deliver.

8. Channel Account Managers Turn Into Community Managers

The average channel program will grow the number of partners by 10X in five years, and 80% of these new partners will be nontransacting partners. The complexity of finding, recruiting, and managing these new partners, each with their own unique set of business practices, target markets, value proposition, and culture, will be daunting. We estimate that there are over 600,000 partners worldwide when you include broader technology channels such as IT, telecom, print, pro A/V, etc. This doesn’t include the millions of companies that are converging into the tech services space from far and wide.

The small- and medium-sized business channel, which makes up over 90% of these firms, is significantly influenced inside its own chosen communities. For example, if you were to look at the MSP market, you would find 31 distinct communities that highly influence the 50,000 MSPs globally. Targeting these 31 communities is a manageable and, for many vendors, profitable market.

Communities offer a smaller group of like-minded people (perhaps even competitors) who share similar experiences and challenges, have the ability to collaborate, and help improve decision making. The feeling of belonging is strong, as well as the affinity of membership. There is a feeling that communities are more democratic, as they are built by the membership, and participation is encouraged and celebrated.

Brands will create mini channel chiefs (or community managers) for each part of the channel Venn diagram they want to succeed in.

9. Superconnectors Pave The Way To Channel Recruitment

Channel leaders are struggling to find ways to expand recruitment across many new partner types without making significant investments. Superconnectors provide a gateway to diverse partner ecosystems and play a key role in guiding vendors to maximize their visibility and influence in front of these new channels.

Leveraging online resources, a brand can easily map out a channel ecosystem based on a particular buyer role, subindustry, geography, sector, size, segment, partner business model, or solution specialty. Mapping what partners read, where they go, and who they follow is a key activity in understanding the makeup of the influencer communities and, more importantly, the top 100 superconnectors in any particular niche.

As I listed out in detail in 2019, the global channel community reads a total of 54 channel magazines, listens to 64 podcasts, belong to 24 associations, participates in vendor and distributor communities, and follows thought leaders to over 150 channel-related trade shows per year. If you collect all of the speakers, board members, contributors, digital creators, consultants, analysts, and media professionals and scored them on visibility, you would have a stack-ranked list of the most influential people.

You then need to meet the top 100 superconnectors, educate them enough to be dangerous (to the point that they can explain to others what you do and how you are differentiated), and most importantly, get them to endorse you (unprovoked) across their platform(s).

10. The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Takes The Channel Reins — Beyond The Org Chart

In the technology channel, I estimate that there are 10,000 vendors that publish a channel program and actively support it with personnel and technology. When we ask about organization structure and reporting lines, we still see about 80% of partner organizations that are siloed.

Even if the reporting structure is directly into sales or marketing, the channel organization usually employs its own channel sales, marketing, operations, and finance teams that report to the channel chief and don’t collaborate much outside the silo. In the partner-obsessed world where partner experience is paramount, attribution is a key measure for the majority of partners and nontransactional programs become ubiquitous; the ability of a channel organization to succeed on its own is becoming improbable.

Ten years ago, organizations looked at their direct sales and marketing organizations and (correctly) decided to pull them under a single leader. To reduce the friction and put responsibility in the right buckets, the CRO focused on the entire cycle from top-of-funnel activities to customer success.

In the 2020s, organizations will start to break down silos and get the channel integrated into the entire customer cycle. This means neutral compensation, strict rules of engagement, and a cultural DNA that squashes channel conflict.

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