Want to know how to get more out of your channel? You can keep your resellers from sending unsold product back or heavily discounting stock.
Your channel sales compensation plan can help.
In a recent webinar with Channelinsights, Xactly and Salesforce, experts reviewed how to get more from channel sales by making sure you are rewarding selling out, getting products in customers’ hands, rather than selling into the channel, getting products on store shelves.
When you set incentives on final sale, not pass through sales, you avoid encouraging sales people to “jam the channel.” That’s because sales people are motivated to make sure that resellers can move the product as quickly as possible at the highest price possible, which is likely your company’s goal, too. When channel reps are aligned with key business goals you can bolster your bottom line with channel sales.
Need to revisit your channel sales plan? Start with this partial checklist:
- Group your products. You can do this by company goal, revenue or margin, just make sure you can tell which products are priority products.
- Reward the behavior you want. Look at your comp plan. What are you really rewarding? Make sure your plan does incent overstocking shelves.
- Get data. In order for any plan to work, you need quick access to clean data from the channel on who sold what for how much. Waiting months to reward reps, simply erodes the power of the incentive.
- Friend technology. Get help recruiting, managing and maintaining channel partnerships through a CRM system that can help you best track your successes and learn from your failures.
Want to know more? Check out the full checklist and get other quick tips in the webinar.
