Building an unfair advantage in your sales channel

Doing more of the same together with an obsessive focus on this quarter’s numbers have been holding many technology companies back from innovating and jumping to the next level of sales channel performance. It is also holding them back from successfully introducing new offerings into the markets.

At CVT we understand that building the right long term sales channel does not mean missing this quarters numbers if it is implemented well and based on a proven methodology.

Using our unique hosted sales channel platform our customers are able to rapidly map and assess the optimum capabilities needed using preloaded templates and embed them into their channel operations with minimum disruption and in real-time. Performance issues are surfaced in minutes and consensus built to create maximum understanding and buy in.
The unfair advantage they get is a rapid and clear picture of:

•  What needs to be done to achieve business goals
•  How much it will cost
•  Who needs to do it
•  How long it will take
• What is the RoI

Is your organisation afraid to leap to the next level?

大企業病 Big Company Sickness

This is the inability for an organisation to remain competitive as it grows.

The innovative direction at CVT (C View Technologies) is very much influenced by my years living and working in Japan and one of the phrases that I first heard back in the late 1980s translates to big-company-sickness. I always thought that this phrase sounded smart but I never really got the full measure of it until I left the large corporate world to start a software business from scratch together with my cofounder Sandrijn Stead.

At CVT we built our Opportunity Capitalisation Dashboard to enable organisations to remain strategically agile and stay ahead of increasingly fierce competition without distracting the day-to-day delivery of the current quarters numbers.

Organisations need a single rolling view of the existing and predicted opportunity levels overlaid by assessed capitalisation capabilities together with what actions are needed to deliver what revenue and by whom.

This approach will get the right people having the right conversations within the organisation and fully clarify tactical and strategic roles and responsibilities.

How successful is your organisation at managing this challenge?

Sales Channels evolution, revolution or something else?

Before choosing one of these approaches for your sales channels we firstly need to understand the key difference between them. Evolution is about gradual change to a desired state while revolution is based on a radical and fast change.

Challenges with Revolution

Revolution is normally radical and total as it quickly rips out the previous systems, people and approaches without allowing for agile course corrections and consensus building.
Some organisations try this approach together with course corrections but it results in symptoms that include:

• Constant reorganisations
• Hiring and firing
• Training that does not improve performance
• Business by latest business book

Challenges with Evolution

Most investors and business leaders demand quick results and, in spite of their sound bites, have little appetite for gradual change. A true learning organisation needs to try new approaches, assess the results and pivot when and where necessary.

Accelerated Evolution

What organisations really need is a predictable and measurable process that drives change in the most expedient way to maintain executive and investor support. They further need to execute this change program without dependency on external parties and with minimum day-to-day business disruption.

Sounds like a big ask but at CVT with our consultancy-as-a-service platform called the Excellence Platform we are delivering this optimum approach to more and more leading companies.

Sales Channel Evolution

Where is your organisation in terms of sales channel evolution?

We all know that the definition of madness is to do the same thing but expect a different result and at CVT we see this all the time in sales channel approaches.

Most companies seem to be locked in a loop between pushing harder on the channel and then trying to figure out a smarter way. One thing we always advise them in order to break this cycle is to work with their sales channel partners to build consensus, surface blind spots and clearly identify the interdependencies at play.

Get the right people to have the right conversations.

We were told recently by one technology organisation that the key advantage our hosted platform brought them was that it got the right people to have the right conversations and in the right context. So many companies have meetings after meetings that just describe the issues in ever increasing irrelevance and result in knee jerk reactions such as poorly defined recruitment, training, outsourcing and technology deployments. No matter how hard an organisation uses one of these clubs to beat itself there will be little progress if any until the underlying interdependencies are clearly understood and consensus is built within both vendor and channel organisations.

Create an unfair advantage.

The highest sales channel achievement that any vendor can aspire to is to create an unfair advantage against the competition by which we mean something that is not easily copied or bought. We help organisations do this all the time but only a few are breaking out of the “hit it with a club” mode and being totally enslaved to the quarterly sales cycle behaviour but we truly believe there is huge opportunity for those vendors that beat the rest of the pack to sorting this issue out effectively.

Hosted Management Consultancy

The new low cost way to rapidly improve your business performance by yourself

The issue – many companies both large and small struggle to remain competitive and grow and need the help of external subject matter experts such as management consultants to achieve this but the timelines and costs involved together with the uncertain results produced continue to frustrate this as a viable option for many organisations. As a result too many companies remain dependent on individual heroics due to being unable to digest new knowledge, predictably improve performance and drive cost improvements.

CVT response – we have spent over two years researching these issues from multiple perspectives and designing a solution that does not just replicate the existing services of management consultants and other such subject matter experts but uses technology to dramatically improve them by delivering them as a hosted self-help software application called the Excellence Platform.

The Excellence Platform – enables organisations to rapidly access and embed the latest knowledge and methodologies via its ability for experts to build their know-how into business modules templates that are offered on the platform for companies to assess and transform their business against. It uses clever logic and interactive user interfaces to enable them to quickly and cost effectively drive permanent change into their business operations.

Removing dependency on external parties and enabling organisations to create and embed their own excellence is core to our vision and strategy.