Your organization’s direct sales reps spend nearly 65% of their time on non-selling tasks. Imagine how much more non-selling time your dealer’s and distributor’s sales reps log with the additional systems they must navigate to sell suppliers’ products.
Being easy to work with works in your favor for partners who will choose the path of least resistance to get a sale done—even if that means selling another manufacturer’s product because they were able to find the current specs on that product with a click. Unfortunately, when they looked for your brochure, they weren’t sure they had found the most current product.
Or, perhaps they haven’t been trained on the latest product and didn’t have time to figure out what they needed to know, so they were more comfortable with your competitor’s product because their familiarity was higher.
One of the best practices is simplifying everyday tasks for sales reps. In this post, you’ll find additional depth on how to help your dealer and distributor networks achieve this best practice with intelligent sales tools.
A simplified sales enablement platform for dealers and distributors can simplify everyday tasks and reduce time spent on non-revenue generating activity. As selling time increases, so will sales. The beauty of this is that deploying sales enablement for your indirect sellers also simplifies everyday tasks for channel marketers.
Simplicity for Indirect Sellers
- Lower the effort spent on meeting planning: There’s nothing more awkward than for a buyer to stand around waiting while a sales rep searches for information to help them visualize a product they’re interested in purchasing. Collections help sales reps easily curate content as they plan for a meeting. When meeting planning is simplified, sales reps not only have more time to sell, they have better sales conversations that help them win more deals.
- Improve product launches and promotions: Channel marketers cite the challenge of ensuring that information about new product launches and promotional offers gets into the hands of your dealers and distributors. A platform that automatically syncs new information to the appropriate dealers and distributors and sends alerts to sales reps’ devices to get their attention changes the game. With the latest information in hand, customer experiences become consistent and well-executed and sales reps are well-positioned to achieve higher win rates.
- Increase depth of sales across your portfolio: Dealer and distributor reps don’t have the same relationship with your company as your direct sales reps. They likely receive less training and gravitate to selling the products in your portfolio that they know well and have sold before. Providing on-demand learning in small doses that helps dealer reps upskill when time permits means they will gain the confidence they need to sell deeper across your portfolio.
Simplicity for Channel Marketers
- Lower partner portal maintenance: When you’re enabling your channel partners via a
centralized Sales Hub, you’re also saving yourself time and effort. Update content once and the Sales Hub will automatically sync content across dealer hubs, ensuring the latest, approved versions are the content in use. Even if a dealer’s rep has previously emailed content to a buyer, if the buyer clicks on the link after the content has been updated, he’ll be viewing the latest version.
This removes the worry for channel marketers that outdated content will remain in the field after its expiration date. You can also easily set expiration dates on content so it will be pulled from use at that time—without you having to lift a finger. This brings advantages by allowing you to automatically manage promotional assets for limited time offers.
- Simplify reporting: With a centralized Sales Hub, you can pull reports on dealer usage, content engagement, sales rep product certification, training completion, and more. Reports can be generated by dealer, by territory or region, and in the aggregate across all dealers to monitor sales of a specific product, for example. Customizable dashboards and reports mean you have expanded visibility without the effort of working in spreadsheets to compile data submitted by dealers individually or pulled from disparate systems.
- Increase Territory Manager efficiency: Territory managers are often stretched thin with the
challenge being how to have the most impact across the dealers they support. A centralized Sales Hub for dealer and distributor networks allows them to identify gaps in proficiency or in sales performance with specific dealers so they apply their efforts where they’ll have the most impact in the field.
Intelligent Sales Tools Keep Reps in the Field
Imagine if the tools you were able to offer your dealer and distributor networks not only increased proficiency for selling your products, but also contributed to reducing non-selling activities by at least 10%. What would that extra time mean for revenue growth and channel program performance for you and your partners?
As selling becomes more complex, technology can help, or it can add more drag as sales reps have to log in and out of more systems to get their jobs done. A simple and easy-to-use platform that maximizes selling time and increases selling knowledge provides a needed boost to your dealers and distributors and makes you easier to do business with. Simplicity will work in your favor with more productive partners.
Request a demo today to see what the simplicity of a centralized Sales Hub can mean for your channel partners and your partner program performance.
