Part II – Acting Locally

First, to recap initiatives that you should be involved in from a corporate perspective include:

• Feeding best practices back into management (the process being owned by the SE Manager)
• Contributing and reviewing channel certification exam questions
• Reviewing training content that is to be delivered by education services

The benefit, though not always immediately apparent, is a stronger partner sales force that you benefit from directly in your territory to help extend your reach. If we assume all of the elements in Part I are in place, each of your partner SEs has been through in-depth product training, has passed an exam, and has access to many of the same tools you’re using the field.

So what can you do now?

Communicate with your Channel Manager

Make sure you’re involved in the communications loop that’s established between your CM and rep. You need to understand strategically where your company is making investment in partner relationships. This ensures you’ll be spending time with partners that are more likely to generate net new business for you.

As you get further along in the process, your feedback on the capabilities and competence each partner brings will be invaluable feedback to the channel organization, who may lack the ability to gather this insight. You understand the gaps as they actually exist, not based on their interpretation alone. Together you can identify changes to local strategy which may involve additional contact or reallocating your/their time.

Provide initial mentorship

Keep in mind that while you sell your company’s products exclusively, much of the time they do not. Your partner SE is likely supporting many more products than you. Therefore, never expect them to have the time to dedicate toward matching your expertise. So help them out.

Lab Environment

Start by offering to come into their office or meet with the SE if remote to help them set up a lab with your product. Help them get it working in a virtual environment if possible. Setting up a standard lab build you can replicate in the field would be a nice touch. The more touches they get with the product the more comfortable they will become. Those extra touches are the key to building up momentum and getting them in the habit of leveraging them.

Shadowing

Keep the momentum going by having the SE shadow you on a sales call or two where you’re doing more of a cookie-cutter presentation or demo. If they’re far enough along technically, bring them in when the account is one you may want to turn over. If they’re more green, give them a neutral environment where you/they won’t be concerned with having to immediately establish their technical credibility.

Bring them into the community

As I covered here, creating a local community of users around your product is a great opportunity to help generate customer goodwill by giving them a platform to benefit from each other. This is also a good arena to bring in a trusted partner. Keep in mind that if you have several partners in overlapping segments you are essentially bringing competitors together. You want to avoid adding a competitive sales element to your user sessions.

Ongoing support and training

While partners should be leveraging technical support as you do for certain situations, there are technical sales-related questions you can help them with on an ongoing basis. This is just part of being a good mentor and territory manager.

There will also be product upgrades, maintenance releases, new modules, etc. that will benefit from your review with them. Depending on the company/industry/partner, it will make sense for you to have an ongoing lab session with them to cover this information. Some agenda items include:

• Reviewing the technical sales cycle on your joint opportunities
• Q&A on questions they never got around to sending you
• Providing a refresher or prep on features/functionality they may haven’t touched in a while or may need to demo soon
• Product training on new versions and modules. Or you can deep dive on something they’re running into frequently
• Health check on their lab environment

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Again, I think it’s always crucial to keep in mind an appreciation for the product breadth your partner SEs support. Go the extra mile to help them out and make it easier to sell your product. It easily comes back tenfold in extending your reach in the field and keeping your own solutions top of mind.

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Part I – Thinking Globally

While individual SEs can make a big difference in the channel readiness of a region, there are several activities that significantly benefit from economies of scale and which I would argue fall outside the ownership of the individual SE/rep to manage.

There are three categories of enablement that should be managed by company. The first is access to technical sales materials. The second is quantitative skills evaluation (testing/certification). The third is product training, though as I’ll explain this last one is very much a shared responsibility.

Technical Materials

The channel manager should ultimately be responsible for ensuring the channel has sales and technical collateral available in a central repository that is access controlled. Input on the technical collateral should come from product management and the SE organization. This should include properly sanitized tools which internal SEs use on a daily basis.

These materials can include:

• Overview of technical sales process
• Technical qualification questions
• Customer presentations (ideally broken down by scenario)
• Recorded demonstrations for rehearsal. This is especially important if your presentations are well annotated.
•      A recorded whiteboard presentation can also be very useful
• Instructions for creating lab environments.
•      One possibility is to also offer a remotely hosted demo environment that pre-sales and partners can leverage
• High level positioning material against competitors. For dog-fight scenarios requiring more explicit collateral, the territory rep and SE should be engaged
• Proof of concept agreement and test plan
• Utilities and supplemental product documentation

SE management, then, is responsible for ensuring a systematic approach is taken to capturing best practice material from the field and getting that in the hands of information development. This includes competitive material, evaluation plans, scripted demos and whiteboards, etc.

Certification

Certification in this context is the formal process by which is channel partner is authorized to sell your solution on the company’s behalf. This is typically conducted by running a certain number of people from a partner through a training session. In larger companies there might be a formal test (or even series of tests) that the partner can then take to gain access to the program.

The metric being measured is that the partner knows your internal sales process and technical capabilities well enough to effectively generate sales on their own.

The SE organization should contribute individuals for quality assurance over the certification process, ensuring that test questions are relevant and that completion of the stated objectives adequately validate the partners’ ability to function autonomously in the field.

Training

Channel management and/or the education team must ensure there is a standard course that partners can take to become technically competent in selling the product. In all but the earliest stage companies, the benefits of scale here are substantial for having a dedicated course.

Managing this centrally ensures quality and consistency as well as affords the possibility of building standard course materials around it. This technical training should include the following:

• Hands on – You want the partner SEs first interaction to be in a controlled and structured format to get them through the first few use cases. Even better if they can complete a full installation and customization of the product for those use cases. The environment they end up with should be very familiar to the remotely accessible demo environment if one has been created.
• Practice messaging – We all learn better if we get to do, versus only watching others. Repetition is also important. Go through a first and second meeting presentation. Have some volunteers repeat the presentation. The sales force will default to selling what they are most comfortable messaging. Have the audience call out objections. It’s better to tackle them inside than outside.
• Tools review – Leaving the training, the partner SE should understand the technical sales cycle, how to qualify and position, and be comfortable with all of the tools that channel and SE management have agreed are essential. For example, if the product is resource intensive, they better be comfortable with sizing an environment.

Having regional SEs perform this baseline training is a recipe (at best) for inconsistent knowledge transfer and time away from customers. Better then, to have SEs in a contributory and validation function to ensure the training covers all the necessary elements they themselves rely on to perform their job functions.

That said, one training course is not an end, it is a beginning. Having that consistent base of knowledge and materials will greatly assist the local SE with picking up the torch and moving them forward as we’ll see in Part II.

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This small utility uses a periodic, imperceptible mouse input to keep your screensaver from coming on.  You can run it at will or with a little tweaking you can get it to run in the background at startup.

To automate, drop it in your program files and create a shortcut file using the -j switch to turn it on at runtime. Set the Run option to Minimized. Then copy the shortcut file into your Programs>Startup folder. The Target should look something like: ”C:\Program Files\MouseJiggle.exe” -j

And that’s it. Just remember not to rely on your timer to start your screensaver and that you should lock your desktop manually when you walk away–which really is best security practice anyway.

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