It’s time to question the assumption that the largest channel partners and resellers deliver the highest levels of service. The argument goes that these resellers have the resources, processes, systems and experience to deliver excellent service to every customer, every time.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Under attack from their cross-channel competitors and having to routinely sacrifice margins, bundle in services, discontinue unprofitable lines while attempting to stay up to speed with new product introductions and the technologies behind them, the largest resellers often deliver the worst customer satisfaction. They have too many distractions to find new markets as efficiently as smaller and more focused resellers do.
Channel Loading Now In Progress – What about Satisfaction?
Well into the 4th quarter, these largest resellers are getting loaded up with inventory, motivated by Market Development Funds (MDF), CO-OP Programs, even cash sales incentives taken directly to gross margin, they are doing what they do best: move product.
Nailing sales quotas is critical right now. Yet so is retaining your brand name and reputation as well, and your customer loyalty above all. It’s time to start evaluating your channel partners for more than just their ability to move tonnage when it comes to products and more on their long-term ability to deliver solutions that stay relevant. It’s time to see which resellers can also lead you into new markets too.
Time to Start Managing Channels by Value
The mid-tier and smaller channel partners and resellers need to be looked at from their contribution to value-added services they add today and have the potential to in the future. Entirely new market segments, many of them vertical, are being found today based on concentrating on nurturing and measuring channel partners on value, not sales alone. The 20 year dominance of Printronix for example in bar coding and now RFID is attributed to this strategy.
Concentrating on the value partners are delivering can give you insights into entirely new markets – insights not possible with just a sales volume standpoint.
Getting There from Here
It seems counterintuitive to say that focusing on nothing less that sales results given the economy and all the bad economic news is foolish. Bet remember that the best performing companies look at these slow times to aggressively invest time and effort to get stronger, more knowledgeable, more agile to capitalize on the bounce-back of the global economy. The catalyst of this idea comes from the blog post Crisis Advice from GE's Immelt: Stay Committed to Growth. In this blog post is a great quote:
“Keep your company safe but keep building the future.”
Building for the future means getting to the truth of what your resellers are really contributing. Sure, the largest and best financed resellers can help you slam-dunk your quarterly and yearly quotas. But what about your long-term relationships with customers? Your brand reputation? Your ability to find entirely new solutions based on the lessons these resellers can give to you? The fostering and nurturing of customer loyalty?
You’ll never know if your largest resellers are contributing to or detracting from your brand and customer loyalty until you start measuring customer satisfaction. Consider these potential ideas to gain greater insights into customer satisfaction across your entire reseller base.
- Getting Your Channels Twitterpated. Get on Twitter and post customer satisfaction surveys often, solicit feedback, and track customer satisfaction by reseller and post it on your Intranet sites. It will surprise you; often the largest resellers have the worst customer satisfaction scores.
- Facebook Applications for Tracking Reseller Satisfaction. Go after your customers using Facebook as well, and get them to opt in and provide the best and worst experiences they have had with your products and channels.
- Look To Your Resellers Who Excel At Customer Satisfaction for new market ideas. There is an abundance of examples that show how small yet highly focused resellers can give you entirely new ideas of how to find new markets and dominate them. The slow yet deliberate path of Printronix to dominate the bar coding and then the printing of RFID tags was a 20 year overnight success story. It all started with resellers who found this market opportunity.
Bottom line: Get ready for the turnaround by measuring how effective your channel partners are in nurturing customer satisfaction, because in discovering that you will find new market opportunities as well.
Courtesy – Louis Columbus, Perfect CEM
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