Know why your company’s channel sales growth won’t budge, but don’t know what to do about it? Here’s three simple steps to getting your channel sales growth back on an uptick:
1. To increase channel sales growth, reconnect with your first loves
… Or channel partners. It’s cheaper to keep (and sell more to) them – literally. New clients require more time and money to acquire, yet existing buyers are the exact opposite. In fact, current partners are 6-7 times less costly and spend 33% more on products than new customers. Refocus on the friends that brought your company to this point, and cross-sell or upsell products to them where it makes sense. That is, build buyer personas of each customer you’d like to reengage and identify new ways to help them exceed their company goals with your products. This – combined with an incentive program to reward frequent buyers – boosts customer loyalty and revenue.
2. Ditch your current sales process – you may have outgrown it
Plants outgrow their pots. Children outgrow their clothes, and company’s face growth plateaus when sales processes no longer fit their needs. To declutter your sales process, begin with narrowing down the number of steps between lead and opportunity. With more than 5-7 steps, key tracking data may be passed up for bigger steps in the process. Some steps are really just extensions of a larger block in your sales funnel, making it more difficult for you to match your sales process with the right CRM solution.
Trimming the number of actions in your sales operations isn’t the only part of ditching your current sales process.
3. There’s one more – aligning sales with marketing to increase sales
A house divided faces one ultimate ending – failure. In your company’s case, the house consists of marketing, sales and their dual goal of increasing B2B revenue from their respective lanes. Yet when these departments are misaligned the threat of decreased sales growth becomes a reality. Rather than struggle with poor sales prospects, align marketing and sales by placing them in the same sales funnel with defined steps on measuring MQLs, SQLs, data and hand-offs. When that’s all said and done, implement a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to outline the expectations of both parties, ensuring harmony and reducing finger-pointing.
Getting your B2B sales growth back in shape may seem daunting at first glance, but many of the solutions could be sitting right in front of you. For more in-depth ways to kick starting B2B sales growth, check out our presentation.
