A channel sales strategy is a great way of scaling sales effort, but with it come inherent problems. Providing the right partner support is vital.

How can you ensure competence and confidence in a sales force you don’t directly control? How can you ensure training costs don’t spiral or become a real barrier to recruiting new channel partners? How can you motivate channel sales people to sell your products or services (especially if they have choice and are more familiar with competitors’ offerings)?

The answer is simple in concept – make it easy for them to sell your solutions well. Although this can often be complex in execution, Cotoco has everything you need to make it happen quickly:

Research – what are top performing sales behaviours in the context of channel sales? With the world’s largest research programme of its type run by Cotoco Chairman, Professor Colin Coulson-Thomas, Cotoco is uniquely positioned to ensure your channel programme is based on what will actually make a difference to win rates.

Methodology – traditional sales training takes time and costs a great deal. Cotoco has perfected ways to capture how top performing sales people sell your solutions, and make it easy for channel people to adopt. In hours. Not days or weeks. This makes it much more likely that channel sales people will engage with your solution.

Technology – Cotoco has developed a unique technology to deliver top-performing sales guidance whenever and wherever channel sales people need support. By capturing best practice in a software framework, it becomes completely scalable. It works on and off-line – so sales people are supported where it matters most – in front of the customer. This support means that it is much more likely they will engage with customers about your solutions. They know they have the answers (and they know what the questions will be beforehand!)

What if channel sales people can see themselves selling your solutions and get excited about it? What if they find it easier to sell your solution than a competitor's? What will happen? It is a MYTH that channels sell on brand and margin – the REALITY is they sell what is easy to sell. And this is what Cotoco can do for you – make your solution the easiest and fastest to sell.

Cotoco has been behind some of the most successful channel operations over the last decade. The strategy of researching top performers and providing highly practical tools to channel partners, in order to make it easy for them to adopt top performing behaviours, is highly effective.

One suite of channel sales tools Cotoco produced has over 10,000 registered users in over 100 countries. Scale is not a problem. In a recent survey our client, a global networking company, found that 69% of partners reported that using the sales tool shortened sales cycles. It can only achieve this by making it easier for customers to say “Yes”.

And increased win rates is not where this strategy stops. Our technology also has inbuilt systems to keep all users up-to-date over the Internet. So no matter how far and wide your channel partners are, ensuring they have the latest collateral, the latest case studies, the latest message becomes simple.

What is more, it also gathers usage statistics. This opens a window onto your channel partner activity. You can see your sales tool being rolled out (or not). You can see what channel sales people use (and what they do not). This unique insight takes the guesswork out of channel marketing and allows you to focus resource where it matters, like never before.

These channel sales tools are highly visual and engaging, so if you wish to fully understand how they can be a strategic tool to grow channel sales, call us on +44 (0)2380 689610.