A recession is possibly the best time to launch a new business or to sell more through your partners in an existing one. It’s also a great time to get ahead in your career as a Partner/Channel Manager. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, so let me x’splain.
As we all know………first, the media goes nuts during a recession. They turn a little bit of negativity into a mountain of pessimism and then it really starts to get going. This makes a lot of companies financially paranoid. Both companies and individual people become socially conditioned to expect the worst.
If you buy into this social hysteria, you become a victim too………..you might really get stuck - please read some of these articles to get out of that trap: http://personaldevelopmentforum.blogspot.com/
But if you tune out such negative traps and maintain a grip on rational and emotional thought, you’ll can build some amazing sales opportunities for your partners.
How……..well, during such times people get scared and start cutting back on expenses. We have already seen this happening as we see companies cut some of the fluff away. They stop buying so much stuff they want, but don’t need. So what really happens is that they go away from “want” based buying to only “need” based buying).
This causes some partners sales people and thereby partners to do poorly, especially partners salespeople that don’t provide stuff the prospects really need or are not able to package it in a way that the prospects think they need it. This is nothing that just happens in the channel/partner space, we all have acted in this way…………. as we all can live without new credit cards, shoes, cloths and gas-guzzling SUVs for a while. Those non-essentials can be put off for some time.
We also become more sensitive to receiving genuine value. When we spend money, we want to make sure we’re getting a fair deal in buying what we believe we need (even if we don’t need it).
Consequently, a partners sales person that provides genuine value in his sales process can actually do better during a recession. More people will flock to those partners sales people in tough times, while the fluff partners sales person and channel businesses will become more and more paranoid.
Instead of focusing on trying to make more money as a Partner Manager, put your time and energy into making sure that your partner will sell real value to the customer (the sales process). Find a way to give people what they want (which in these times is what they believe is there need).
Take note that the keywords here are CREATE and DELIVER VALUE – which for many small partners is not what they do.
Creating value means expressing your unique talents and skills in a way that can potentially benefit others. Delivering value means ensuring that your customers are actually receiving and benefiting from the value you’ve sold (so don’t oversell).
If your partner is not doing both in some fashion, then it’s going to be hard for you to generate sustainable sales income, especially during a recession. I’ll explain why.
If your partner oversells and thereby they have only create value but didn’t deliver it, then their value isn’t being received by anyone – at least that is what the customer feels. Believe it or not……this is what the partners have difficulties in adapting to in such times.
What is money? Money is simply a medium for exchanging value. Money is what you receive in exchange for the value you create and deliver. If you can increase your outflow of value creation and delivery, you can increase your inflow of money received.
If, however, your partnertries to increase the inflow of money without increasing the outflow of value, they are trying to get something for nothing and that strategy does not work, especially in these recession times . This approach is untenable and will ultimately collapse – as we see in so many partners and channels.
It doesn’t matter what happens to the economy — if you get your partners to sell need based value. in the recession times, you’ll do just fine.
I just thought that I wanted to share this, especially since we are in troubling times. Times where your partners need to do more in the sells process. As a consequence, here’s the principle:
Your partners salespeople who can present their products or service (a need) in the way that their prospect wants to perceive it will be more likely to make the sale. That is Recession Selling, let’s put it another way: Prospects are more likely to buy what they need from prospects who understand what they really want, for then they fell you can provide them with value.
You as a Partner Manager have seen it many times………the most effective partner sales professionals help clients fulfill their values. So your Partner sales strategy should be to help your partners differentiate them self’s in selling Need Based Value - not want based value as in growth times.
Regards your Moderator – Mark
PS:I hope this has provided some value (little smile)
