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Stop! Ten Good Reasons Your Channels Sales Training Will Never Work
by Ed Shineman and John Hoskins
Implementing sales training with your Channel Partners (VAR’s, Distributors, Agents, Brokers, Wholesalers, Solution Providers) on the surface appears to be a high-yield activity to help you gain mind share and market share. STOP!
Beware that the same pitfalls that make marketing training to your own direct sales force difficult also exist in your channel—only the demands and objections are intensified. Here is a list of typical issues:
 Value Perception is Low
Remember that you are only part of the mix of business for this company. If what you are selling doesn’t almost sell itself, you have one strike against you. If your product is commodity-like or perceived as low ticket and low margin, then it won’t get any attention. Finally, they like getting a lot of support, but detest paying for it. Best to work on your rationale and business logic positioning before introducing your training idea. How will it increase their revenue and profit? What’s the effect on cash flow?
Complexity and Ownership
Channels hate it when suppliers make them fill out a myriad of IRS-like forms in order to qualify for promotion allowances, jump through hoops to become platinum instead of gold-level partners, train on 1001 products when they’d rather just sell one or two. If your training initiative appears to layer on more administrative activities, they don’t want to do it. Make it easy for them to participate, but place a value on the offering. Skin in the game is key to commitment.
Trust is Low
They worry (with some reason) that their supplier will compete with them—or that customers they have nurtured will want to deal directly with the source if your people are too involved in their sales force. They worry that they will be undercut by another Channel who has gotten a better deal. So be prepared to address the unspoken fears and anxieties they may not express when entertaining your idea.
Support Demands Are High
This is a bit of a paradox, because while most Channels desire help in complex customer situations, they are sometimes reluctant to ask for it. Why? Because they fear loss of control of the account. Meanwhile, they worry that their supplier is awarding “first team support” to their direct sales organization while Channels get the leftovers. The training initiative can actually help you teach them how to utilize resources more wisely and qualify opportunities more thoroughly before raising their hand for help too early. In many cases, they haven’t thought through their sales process. Reps wind up acting as highly paid bird dogs versus sales consultants who create value and orchestrate major complex sales.
No Surprises—No Loyalty
Channels don’t like learning about your next-generation product in the trade magazines or from customers. They want to be treated like an insider and have an insider’s edge on new products and new business practices. Utilize the forum of sales training to introduce them to new products. No VAR wants to go to bat for a stale product. If you lose your competitive edge in the market, they will jump ship as soon as they can. However, sales people sell what they are comfortable and confident in representing; even your well-engineered better mousetrap won’t make them better salespeople. They will tolerate your conclusions about what is good to sell, but act on their own advice and belief systems.
Is There a Cure?
So how can you overcome obstacles to well-intentioned sales training initiatives with your channels? Here is a list of topics you and your organization should review before planning any new training initiative. It may be difficult for you to score a “perfect 10,” but your odds of boosting bottom-line results for you and your Channels Partners will increase exponentially if you consider these guidelines for planning a sales training initiative:
1. Lack of Senior Management Buy-In
At both organizations—the sponsoring manufacturer and the principals at the distribution level. This means not just “buy-in” (read: dollars and cents), but “sit-in” (read: time) of the training itself. If the management teams of the constituencies are not prepared to “eat the food they serve,” then they won’t do a good job of reinforcing it. Who will be the line champion of the idea at both organizations? If it isn’t VP level and above, then it’s just another program. Field response is to go to the training, tolerate the experience, and then at the breaks whisper to their buddies in the bathroom, ”Relax. This, too, shall pass.”
2. No Expectations
Workshop facilitator: “Bob, tell me why you’re here for the training today. What are your learning objectives?” Bob: “I don’t know—my boss sent me!” Are the participants prisoners or sponges? You have to appeal to the learners’ highest level of thinking so they know the strategy and why it’s important to senior management. If they have not agreed with their manager to some personal behavioral change goals and measured outcomes from the training, then why bother?
3. No Consequences
Okay, dust off your Tony Robbins tapes, please. People do things for pain and pleasure. Sales forces are no different; in fact, it’s even more true for them. Point out the good, the bad, and the ugly for the Channel and its sales force. Are rewards and recognition systems aligned with the behavior you are looking for? If they don’t see the WIFM (What’s In It For Me?), your training message is dead on arrival. This is common sense. If the sales force does not perceive the offering as lining their pocket (however you define that), then they will sell what does.
4. No Measurements
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Agree with your Channel principals on some metrics. It might be win-loss reports, pipeline growth, bid-to-order close ratios; you can figure this out. Just agree to a reasonable reporting mechanism—one that doesn’t require the Cray technology to crunch the numbers or report information so late that it’s better written on parchment and delivered by carrier pigeon.
5. No Coaching
One of today’s often-stated, yet rarely monitored or met, sales management standards is time in the field making joint sales calls. We’re talking about the old front line maxim of managers spending at least 50% of their time out pre-call planning and post-call debriefing. In a white paper on the effectiveness of sales training, Neil Rackham of Huthwaite states that one study he undertook proved that 87 cents of every sales training dollar was wasted due to a lack of coaching. If your Channel’s sales management is not involved in the process, you are sending good money after bad. Get a commitment to post-training field visits and train the managers in how to plan and execute coaching plans.
6. No Follow-Up
Training that works is line driven and drip fed. Irrigation methods of flooding the student’s mind in marathon sessions and expecting behavior change are ineffective and inefficient. Think modular, learning bursts, repetitive sessions over time that build on the skills taught. If your company has quality initiatives, borrow a page from the CQI world and consider quarterly or trimester booster shots to keep the learning alive. All skills are subject to atrophy and memory loss. (Just think of your golf swing after the winter hiatus!)
7. Whoops—Wrong Content
Two things here. First, consider the source material. Sales training programs come in many sizes, shapes, and flavors. Many are what we refer to as heavily borrowed; few are heavily researched. It might surprise you to know that there are many programs that actually advocate skills that lead to sales failures. Be careful that you are not licensing material that isn’t tested and proven; it would be like buying software with a major virus or bug. Yet, with sales training you are unlikely to discover it. It will show up in the results far too late to fix.
Second, be sure you’re fixing the right problem. Do some needs analysis even if you think you know the answer. Take time to go out and observe sales behaviors before prescribing a solution. The classic is negotiation training. A rep who knows how to sell value doesn’t need to negotiate. Reps taught negotiation skills will negotiate—and guess what happens to margins and deal size?
8. Ouch —Wrong Learning Methods
Hey, it’s almost 2000. We can pretend that overheads are no longer valid teaching tools. The best methods suit the MTV generation of today: bite-sized chunks and lots of interactivity. If you want to change behaviors, remember to work on ideas and beliefs, too. Information is not instruction, so avoid the death by info-a-thons that most training programs offer. Finally, if you want to build skills, be prepared for practice. The next point is linked to making it perfect practice.
9. No Relevance
Oh please, don’t make me practice selling or working on something that isn’t real. Selling your products, in your markets, to your customers. against your competition, is the only kind of reality your people understand. Generic solutions don’t cut it anymore. So, our advice is to customize the training program to reflect the strategic selling issues you are wrestling with today. This also suggests that you must budget time and money on an ongoing basis to revise and upgrade the material in order to keep it current. But lay the foundation of language and process, and then build your case examples to address the explicit needs of your audience.
10.No Integration Process
The audience for sales training should include a myriad of people and touch numerous functions outside of sales. This is like messaging in any marketing campaign. Number and breadth of impressions is critical. The concepts taught, the language, process, and skills must be integrated in all that you do. Examples include: new hire selection standards, performance appraisals, job descriptions, field travel reports, account plans, sales force automation systems, marketing literature, President’s Club gates, product launches, other training, and on and on. Make the message stick the Jack Welsh way: repeat it until they are sick of hearing it. But guess what? Then they will remember it and use it.
In Summary
There are no silver bullets to offer. It may simply boil down to three questions:
- Might your Channel Partners think it is gratuitous of you to even suggest they need sales training?
- Would they hold your own direct force up as a model for selling professionalism?
- Did anybody ask you for training?
If you are tempted to avoid addressing the issues and questions posed above, then checking off the box “Channel Trained” on your business plan may be the only tangible result you can expect. But if someone asks you for an ROI on your Channels training investment, what are the odds of having a good answer? We think your chances of success will increase dramatically if you work through the 10 items listed above.
Have we seen successful Channels training initiatives? You bet. However, we’ve been asked to clean up enough “training road kills” to know what not to do.
About the authors: Ed Shineman is founder and CEO of FUSION, a training industry consulting resource dedicated to “helping education companies teach better and sell more.” John Hoskins is co-founder of Advantage Performance Group, where he heads the firm’s Sales Supremacy practice.
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