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In the
There is a saying that if I have to beg for your at-
tention, it isn’t worth it. It is true, but that doesn’t stop
businesses and channel managers from interrupting
and annoying people who don’t want to be bothered.
The reason that the funnel has flipped is due to
marketers ruining everything. Spamming, shout-
ing, robo-dialing, gone are the days of just throwing
away a direct mail piece. Voicemail, spam filters,
delete keys, temporary email addresses, and ad
blockers all have been invented to help people avoid
the onslaught of unwanted solicitations.
I was yelled at recently for putting someone on
my email list in 2012. He never said remove me. He
just simmered until he exploded one day years later.
And it turns out he would never buy from me anyway.
There is a lesson in there somewhere.
But that won’t stop you from heading into the
office and doing the same thing. You will add email
addresses to an email list. You will try to recruit a
bunch of agents who may ink the agreement but
never sell a single thing. You will chase master
agents and value added distributors to get the
chance at thousands of partners, more than 99 per-
cent of whom will not sell your stuff.
Everyone has their own strategy, and certainly ev-
eryone has quota. Quota makes us do dumb things,
especially when we focus on quota instead of on daily
activity, follow up and making friends. (Yes, sales is
first and foremost about making friends.)
Comcast and AT&T can sign up thousands of
agents because of demand. There is heavy demand
for cable broadband. AT&T doesn’t sign up thou-
sands for a lot of reasons, one of which is control-
ling their brand, an asset worth billions. Amazon is
selling Comcast services and VoIP installation now.
There is D=demand.
For most of telecom there isn’t demand. The duo-
poly – the ILEC and the cableco – are known entities,
but most other competitors are not. Being a brand
has its own demand.
Too many channel execs confuse their programs
to be similar to Cisco or Microsoft. Cisco and Micro-
soft have channel partners who are invested. They
spent time and money to get certified. They spend
time and money to stay certified, educated and up-
to-date. Their business model encompasses Cisco or
Microsoft (or Dell or IBM or HP or even Apple). That
isn’t the case for most other programs.
Demand creates invested partners. This de-
mand meant that the vendors needed logistics and
distribution. This meant Ingram Micro or Tech Data,
value added distributors, with a purpose to distrib-
ute hardware for the vendors to the VARs, which
would install and maintain it for the customer. The
VAD would even manage software licensing. The
VADs allowed the vendors to scale to tens of thou-
sands of partners.
In the land of business IT, Microsoft and Cisco
are staples. There is demand for buyers. VADs fa-
cilitate that for the channel program. How does that
work for a cloud company or hosted VoIP company?
They have not created (1) demand from buyers; (2)
market awareness; (3) invested partners. Heck, they
are still spamming and dialing to get anyone to sign
up to sell their services. It’s like the skinny kid with
acne a week before prom.
A lot of the components to create demand are out
of your hands. It is a company issue. Branding, de-
ployment, customer experience, etc., are all ways to
create awareness, which helps to create demand.
Yet there are still things you can do. Find out how
your customers are using your services. Get testimo-
By
Peter
Radizeski
Attention and Demand
70
Channel
Vision
|
May - June 2016