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.