Why Sales Reps Aren’t Using Your Channel Management Software
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We hear it all the time. The sighs of exasperated channel account managers and channel marketing managers who toil away implementing and maintaining legacy PRM systems that are rarely, if ever, actually used by their partners’ sales reps. We understand. The channel can be a messy place with so many moving pieces, from marketing content to training materials, deal registration to campaign management. Suddenly the software you’ve built to solve your channel management problems is only causing you more headaches when sales reps can’t find the tools, training and resources they need to do what they have been hired to do — close business. In this 30-minute webinar from Allbound, your partner sales acceleration specialists will share the impact thoughtful, relevant user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) can have on your indirect sales channel by boosting adoption, improving engagement and driving more sales for your company.
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Why Sales Reps Aren’t Using Your Channel Management Software
- 1. WEBINAR Why Sales Reps Aren’t Using Your Channel Management Software @goallbound #NeverSellAlone WEBINAR Why Sales Reps Aren’t Using Your Channel Management Software @goallbound #NeverSellAlone
- 2. Jen Spencer Director of Sales & Marketing | Allbound jspencer@allbound.com @jenspencer Hello, I’m Jen. I’m a revenue-driven inbound marketer who loves animals, hates traffic, and is passionate about empowering businesses to grow through their indirect sales channels.
- 3. Hello, I’m Ryan. I love crafting user experiences and I love design of all kinds. From interior design to digital design. I also love French Bulldogs, outdoor activities like climbing, kayaking and snowboarding and I have an unsettling penchant for watches I can’t afford. Ryan Sherman Director of User Experience | Allbound rsherman@allbound.com @rshermanaz
- 4. Today’s Agenda • Software for the Channel is Important • Trademarks of Great Software • Configuration vs. Customization • Content Experience • Q&A
- 5. Why aren’t you using my content?
- 6. It’s taboo… The channel is a messy place. Shhhhhh….it generates a lot of revenue.
- 7. Channel software has two key components: The Content The Software
- 8. What are the trademarks of today’s most effective software platforms?
- 21. RYAN
- 22. Sometimes poor UX isn’t as obvious.
- 24. Seriously? We need to talk.
- 25. Simply said, “keep it simple.”
- 27. How is what you’d like to do helping you achieve your goals?
- 28. You can’t engage your users if your content isn’t engaging. Period.
- 29. Make your messaging… 1. Clear 2. Concise 3. Consistent.
- 30. You don’t need to be a designer to initiate good UX. You just have to listen.
- 31. Audit your content and your information architecture.
- 33. “Good enough” shouldn’t be good enough. “Good enough” shouldn’t be good enough.
- 34. “Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity.” – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
- 36. Jen Spencer Director of Sales & Marketing | Allbound jspencer@allbound.com @jenspencer Ryan Sherman Director of User Experience | Allbound rsherman@allbound.com @rshermanaz For information about Allbound, visit www.allbound.com or call us at 480.685.5474
Editor's Notes
- JEN Thanks for joining Allbound for our webinar, “Why Sales Reps Aren’t Using Your Channel Management Software.” We’re excited to share some great content with you over the next 30 minutes, but first let’s take care of some quick housekeeping. We are recording this webinar, so if you need to step away, or during the webinar you think of a friend or colleague who might also enjoy this content, you’ll have a recording delivered right to your inbox tomorrow. Our marketing team will also be live tweeting throughout the webinar, so you can contribute to the conversation by following @goallbound on Twitter.
- JEN I’d be remiss to continue further without doing the polite thing and actually introducing myself! Hi, I’m Jen Spencer. I’m the director of sales and marketing here at Allbound. And, a little about me: I’m a revenue-driven inbound marketer who loves animals, I hate traffic, and I’m pretty passionate about empowering businesses to grow through their indirect sales channels. And, I’m joined by one of my colleagues, Ryan Sherman.
- RYAN I love connecting with new people and talking user experience and design. I’m the director of UX for Allbound and also a front-end developer so I tackle pretty much everything as it relates to the product. Today I’m excited to talk to you about some of the many reasons your sales reps aren’t using your channel marketing software.
- JEN First on our agenda, I’ll talk about why software specifically for the channel is important Next, Ryan will take us through the trademarks of great software Then we’ll look at the difference between software configuration and customization – and how that difference can affect your user engagement After that, we’ll talk about the core of any good sales & marketing software platform – great content, and the experience that comes along with bad, good or great content. And, we’ll close with Q&A, so jot those questions down, or plug them right into the question portal of your control panel. As time allows, we’ll tackle as many as we can live during the session, and we’ll be sure to answer each and every question directly should we hit our 30 minute mark.
- JEN Why aren’t you using my content? – Insert cartoon of marketer banging his or her head against the wall. As a content marketing professional I am intimately aware of how much time, energy and money goes into producing quality content that actually yields sales results – whether that’s pre-sales content like training materials, top of the funnel content like infographics, or engaging mid to end of funnel content like customer success stories. It all requires a significant amount of work. Now take that into the channel. Here at Allbound we work with channel account managers and channel marketing managers every day who come to us struggling to see engagement within their channel partners. And this is a big deal – because over 80% of revenue actually comes from an indirect sales channel, so mediocre engagement is not acceptable in the channel.
- JEN And, here’s what we know. The channel is a mess. It just is. There are so many moving pieces, from marketing content to training materials, deal registration to campaign management. Suddenly the software you’ve built to solve your channel management problems is only causing you more headaches when sales reps can’t find the tools, training and resources (All of that amazing content you’ve been creating) that they need to do what they have been hired to do — which is close business. Of course, we wouldn’t present this problem to you without identifying a solution, and when we see a problem, we think software.
- RYAN First, we have to breakdown the two main components of your software. The first and most obvious is the software platform itself. The second component is a piece that a lot of marketers take for granted. That is the content itself. The key to success is to make sure that both of these components are working as hard as possible for you. We will start off by examining the software component first.
- RYAN When we talk about great software we talk often think about things like Facebook, Uber, OpenTable, Amazon and the like. The problem is that we don’t generally list our business applications in the mix. That’s because the general state of affairs with so much of our business software is that it’s ugly, complicated, not user-friendly and we consider it more of a chore. We have somehow lowered the bar and along with it our expectations. To engage the user, business software needs to have the same things we look for in our personal software apps. They need to be beautiful, intuitive and easy to use. They need to delight and surprise us and make it a treat to use, not a chore.
- RYAN All of those items we just mentioned about the trademarks of great software really boil down to just one thing, USER EXPERIENCE or UX if you are hanging with the cool kids. When we talk about UX we are really talking about a mix of several elements including human interaction, usability, design / aesthetics, utility, accessibility and performance. These elements are fairly simple to understand but what many people overlook is that UX starts BEFORE you even start using the software. Things like how easy it is to register for the software and get started using it can play a big role. Our User Experience guidelines are as follows: Clarity - How well is the information you are trying to communicate being delivered? Flow – Is there a logical progression to follow? Relevance - Is the content that’s being delivered relevant to the target audience? Utility - Is the software easy to use and interact with? If we take a look at the Wayback time machine we can see the progression on some popular SaaS products. Where they started and how they have progressed to where they are now. Let’s take a look.
- JEN So consider the software your indirect sales team — those hundreds or thousands of sales reps employed by your strategic partners and resellers — uses while they’re out there selling your product to your target audience. What software are you giving them to enable their success? Is it the kind of software that provides them easy access to the tools and resources they need to be successful? Is it the kind of software that anticipates their needs and enables them to champion your value proposition? Is it the kind of software they want to work in, or is it a legacy system that technically gets the job done, but is one that no one really wants to spend much time in?
- JEN Part of what we’re doing here at Allbound is trying to break some of the oldest habits in the channel. Channel management software doesn’t have to be transactional, and it doesn’t have to be nearly as complicated as we — yes we — business professionals in sales, marketing and business development keep making it. At the end of the day, you want to grow revenue in your channel. Your channel partners’ sales reps want to blow their quota out of the water. You have this in common, so what kind of software are you using to support this desire to simply sell more? Make sure it’s the kind of software those reps will actually want to use.
- RYAN We will start off by examining a few past and present examples of software that has come a long way. It’s a great way to explore poor examples of UX vs the good to get a sense of what works and why.
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- RYAN Sometimes examples of poor UX aren’t immediately obvious. In the case of the image here there is obviously a more appropriate way to layout the keys. At least you can argue that the keys are clearly labeled but of course their placement bucks current convention for no apparent reason and make it less obvious to users which key does what.
- RYAN Of course sometimes it’s blatantly obvious when something just doesn’t work. As you can see user experience is just about software. It transcends into anything we interact with as humans. There are SO many reasons why this situation would prove for a very poor user experience. This setup must break at least a half dozen man codes here. While I will say they DO manage to squeeze a lot into a small space, this is a perfect example of how sometimes less is more.
- RYAN Alright, in all seriousness, if your channel management software looks anything like this screen then it’s probably time for an intervention. If your channel stack is this bad then I promise you, lurking somewhere in the dark corner of a desk drawer secretly hidden away in a sales rep’s cubicle is a voodoo doll made up in your likeness with a dozen needles stuck in the torso and missing a few limbs.
- RYAN The complaint we hear most often from sales reps we talk to is that the systems suppliers force them to use to get the resources they need is too complicated. We all know the channel can be a complicated place. Often times we have a full stack of software that the sales rep is expected to interact with. There are often systems including LMS, deal registration, lead distribution, content repositories and the list keeps going. Now multiply each of those systems by multiple suppliers that sales rep might be responsible for selling and it quickly get’s out of hand. At Allbound our primary objective is to simplify the channel. One of the ways we do that is by combining a lot these separate systems into a single platform. But even if your current channel software stack requires the use of multiple systems, try to make each of those systems as simple as possible. That means removing or at least simplifying processes that unnecessarily complicate things. Simplifying those systems and ideally consolidating them to a single system can dramatically simplify things for the sales rep, ultimately increasing their engagement with your products over your competition.
- RYAN Focus on configuration over customization. All channel management software is designed with a certain use case in mind. They are designed to be configured in a certain manner to function in a pre-determined fashion based on research and hands on experience. The more customers try to customize rather than configure, the more they veer from the pre-determined path the application was developed for which can lead to unforeseen complications. Often times we’ll find customers getting wrapped up in their own business processes. You need to stop and ask yourself who that process is benefitting. If the answer isn’t the user, then you need to stop and rethink. The key is USER experience.
- JEN What’s been interesting for me as a marketer as we’ve been exploring this topic over the last few weeks is that I’ve personally seen how the desire for brand experience can sometimes overtake user experience. Our Director of Customer Success, Matt Hensler, wrote a blog on this very issue earlier this month, and in his post he pointed out that a surprising number of companies still wrongly believe that creating continuity around brand experience means that every in-person or online touch point looks and feels the same. What we’ve discovered is that overemphasizing your company’s preference for color and typeface can actually detract from your users ability to be successful using this very revenue-focused software. And, I’m not knocking brand alignment – it’s important. But if you are prioritizing getting all of your technology systems to look, feel and function exactly the same way, how is this helping you achieve your goals? Instead, we encourage you to trust and listen to the architects and implementation specialists of the system you bought. Every platform is built from customer use cases, research and hands-on user experience. As my colleague Matt said in his post, “After all, SaaS companies like Allbound only exist because people find the application useful.”
- RYAN Let’s talk about the elephant in the room for a minute. No matter how great your channel management software is you can’t engage your users if your content isn’t engaging. Period. Your content is JUST as important as the software that serves it up. The content is really the second component of any channel management software and unfortunately it’s often an after thought. One of the main reasons sales rep engage with your software is to find the right content at the right time. The software itself is just the platform to deliver your content.
- RYAN Make sure the message your are delivering in your content is clear, concise and consistent. This is where user feedback becomes extremely important. You may think your content is perfectly clear and makes sense, but sometimes you can unintentionally be giving conflicting messaging that leaves users confused. Only include relevant content that delivers a clear and concise message. Poor content can do more harm than limited content. If your users aren’t confident that every piece of content they digest is going to be of quality then they won’t waste the time to keep looking.
- RYAN You don’t need to be a good designer to initiate good UX, you just have to listen. But before you can listen you have to first ask the questions. We have a test group of users who we frequently go to for a reality check to see if our content or designs are resonating and if people are taking away our intended message. Find a small group of users from different backgrounds and with different view points. And then start asking them questions. Do they understand the message you are trying to convey? Do they find the content useful? Does the design and layout make it content that they want to consume and potentially share? With deadlines looming it may seem daunting at times to get some user feedback on each piece of content you create but the more frequently you go through this process the more you will find the patterns in what your users are looing for making it easier to predict what they looking for.
- RYAN Take the time to think about the filters that will be applied to your content. This makes it easy for your users to find the right content at the right time. Be consistent. Don’t use the term “Battlecards” in one section and then refer to them as “Sales Cards” in another. Make sure that you have an action plan on how to organize and categorize your content. Document the architecture to your team and make sure they follow it. At Allbound we have a dedicated Customer Success team to walk you through the process of aligning your search filters with your content marketing strategy. If you don’t have a customer success team available to you then be sure to put some extra thought into this part of the process. Just like your content messaging, you want to make sure that your filters are clear, concise and most importantly consistent. Also be sure to audit your content on a scheduled basis to make sure that all of the content you are making available is updated. Nothing is more annoying for a sales rep than sharing outdated or simply incorrect information with their clients.
- JEN OK, so I could jump in here and talk for a whole separate 30 minutes on content alone – why it’s beneficial, how to use it with both your direct AND indirect sales teams, and how to justify it’s ROI, but you’re in a User Experience webinar, so instead when you receive the recording of this webinar in your inbox tomorrow, I’ll go ahead and also include a copy of our ebook which covers how you can be leveraging modern content marketing strategies in your indirect sales environments.
- RYAN The bottom line, “good enough” shouldn’t be good enough. If you want great results from your sales reps you need to give them great resources.
- RYAN The old saying that “nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity” holds especially true in the channel. So if you think your current channel management software is missing the mark somehow then don’t wait to do something about it. Every day that goes by is another missed opportunity. Users will engage with software that ultimately helps them accelerate their sales and when they win, YOU win. Take a hard look at your software platform as well as your content to determine where you can make impactful changes. Thank you all and thank you Jen for letting me get on my soap box! I always appreciate the opportunity.
- Now we’d like to open the webinar up to questions from our attendees. If you have a question, please go ahead and enter it in the question field of the webinar control panel. Some software has both a desktop version and an app, but other software takes the desktop version and amends it to work on a mobile device. What is your philosophy? Do you think color impacts user experience, and if so, how much?