New Research from The B2B Institute finds that companies with a share of voice (SOV) larger than their share of market (SOM) tend to grow, where those with the reverse condition don’t. Channel marketers are in a prime position to grow SOV by extending their brand through their partner networks.
The research found that brand building, while a long-term endeavor, excels at driving growth. The effects of brand building last longer and accumulate over time. Sales activation is a shorter-term focus which, when combined with brand building, creates the optimum reward in building share of market.
A Sales Hub is the platform that can deliver both—and cut costs.
In the white paper, Six Best Practices to Empower Your Dealer and Distributor Networks, the fifth best practice is customizing to address unique needs and the sixth is reducing costs. Since these work hand in glove with a Sales Hub, this post takes a deeper dive into how to accomplish both while contributing to the growth of your company—and your brand.
Balancing Brand Building with Sales Activation
A Sales Hub that allows you to truly white label it in deployment for your brand, customize for workflows, and to match dealer and distributor needs allows you to extend your brand into the field in the hands of your dealer’s and distributor’s sales reps. We’re not just talking choose your colors and insert your logo—although you could. You’ve got the latitude to easily build out your Sales Hub to your specifications. We help you do that.
When dealers and distributors take your mobile app into the field, your branding—and theirs—will be on display in every customer conversation. Every virtual product tour, every brochure and supporting content asset engaged with will help to create more share of voice.
In conjunction with brand building, a Sales Hub is all about sales activation. Whether it’s priming sales reps with Agenda Builder so they curate the right content and product information in anticipation of meetings with customers. Or refreshing their product knowledge just-in-time by engaging with a 3-minute Microlearning module that highlights upgrades and new features so they can speak confidently while walking a buyer through a product comparison.
With easy click-to-share functionality, a dealer’s sales rep can share the most current content with customers and receive an alert when that buyer engages so they can continue helping their buyer buy your product. The increased relevance just adds to advocacy from your customers, also adding to share of voice.
Using Visibility to Achieve Balance
As was discussed in a recent post about how partner experiences increase dealer productivity, you’ll also have the analytics you need to make decisions that result in the right balance of brand building and sales activation, given your growth and partner performance goals.
Your organization spends a lot of time and resources building your brand. A custom Sales Hub extends those branding efforts to your dealer and distributor networks. It allows you to coordinate focus amongst your partners by alerting them to new product launches, updated features on existing products and current promotions with communications designed to match the mobile workstyle of your dealer’s sales reps.
Building your brand within your dealer and distributor networks results in preference for selling your products, adding your partners’ sales reps’ voices to your share of voice in the market.
A Sales Hub Drives Efficiency at Scale
The two rules in business are grow revenue and keep costs low. Now that we’ve discussed the need for balance between brand building and sales activation to drive growth in your partner networks with a Sales Hub, it’s important to consider how it can also contribute to reduced costs for your partners and channel programs.
For our customers with global partner networks, they’ve seen efficiencies at scale as sales reps increase their use of intelligent sales tools and reduce reliance on manual effort.
Below are 5 examples to consider:
Reduce Print and Postage Costs
A global customer recently created their first totally digital product launch. They’ve estimated that the reduction in print costs, along with postage and shipping to partners in different regions, will save them $250,000—enough to more than pay for their white-labeled, custom Modus Sales Hub for a year.
Increase Sales Rep Responsiveness and Deal Cycles
Moving from print to digital content and sales collateral sharing means that your dealers’ sales reps will gain insight to when and what content a buyer engages with. This enables them to respond in real-time based on their buyers’ specific interest, shortening the buying process and adding more value to buyer conversations.
Reduce Partner Training Costs
Microlearning provides small-scale learning modules easy for sales reps to ingest and retain as they access them as they need them. This not only means your dealer’s agents will be confident they’re up to speed on the newest products, but that they’ll branch out and sell more of your portfolio as it’s easier to gain competence about more of your products. Holding on-site training is expensive and time consuming. With Microlearning, you create modules that are used over and over as different reps need to gain specific expertise, on their timeline and at their convenience.
Reduce Time to Proficiency for New Dealer’ Sales Reps
Onboarding new reps is a continuous challenge at the rate of rep turnover. Be the partner who’s the easiest to work with by providing training that orients new reps to your brand and products and gets them in the field faster, selling knowledgeably. Your partners will thank you for the assist and their reps will be predisposed to offer your products before offering your competitor’s.
Save Partners’ Sales Rep’s Time and Effort
One of the biggest values of using a Sales Hub is that data can be captured in real-time, during the meeting as dealer’ sales reps work through interactive content, such as ROI calculators and product assessments, syncing that data to the CRM. This eliminates the need for them to manually enter data into the system after the meeting, reducing time out of field (TOOF). They’ll also save time by accessing the content they need from one media library aided by tags and AI-driven search within the text of PDF documents. Logging in and out of multiple repositories takes a lot of time and effort with many reps saying they can’t easily find what they need to get sales done.
Get More, Save More with a Custom Sales Hub
Channel marketing programs deserve the same attention to detail that we provide our direct sellers. When you look at the upsides of brand building, sales activation and reduced costs, you’ll find a compelling case for using a Sales Hub to put all your partners on a level playing field. Imagine the difference it can make if you’re able to increase the percentage of reps meeting quota and even exceeding expectations.
Even better, the ability to white label your Sales Hub to extend your brand into the field and implement custom workflows that address your partners’ needs adds to the value of the sales tools it provides. Given that partner revenue is a big part of the top line for many organizations, a Sales Hub provides you with a way to get more and save more at the same time.
