How do you manage a sales funnel when a portion of your business goes through distributors?

For the purpose of this blog I’ll refer to all intermediaries between a manufacturer and end user as channel partners.  I don’t mean to deny any specific dynamics that must be addressed; rather, I’m choosing to comment on what’s fundamental about managing the funnel through this relationship.

Managing the funnel is every bit as important when working through channel partners.  Manufacturers need to know where deals are in the buying process.  This helps them influence the buying process – create funnel movement.  It also helps them forecast.

The channel complexity I’ve seen with my clients the past 20 years makes managing the funnel a challenge.  One challenge is when the channel partner won’t reveal much about the deal they are working on. They keep information close to the vest. It’s hard to ‘stage’ these deals.   Another challenge is when the channel partner doesn’t invite you to strategize with them to move the deal through the process.  This is particularly frustrating when the channel’s sales competency is low.  You feel defenseless.

Do you ‘stage’ deals based on where the manufacturer is in selling to the channel partner, or based on where the channel partner is in selling to the end user?

The answer could be yes!

One thing to keep in mind is that the funnel is based on ‘opportunities’. It’s not a funnel of accounts.  An opportunity has a dollar value and a purchase date, and likely a purchase order or contract that creates obligation.

If a channel partner can buy $200,000 of your stuff why not make that a funnel opportunity?  A PFA has to bless the purchase, a buying process is present.  Loading distributors has its pros and cons so beware.

You can also base your funnel on the end user purchases from the channel partner.  This is what pulls your product through and sustains revenue growth.  I’ve had clients that needed to pivot the sales team to be more focused on selling to the end user.  They used The Funnel Principle to do this.

Last, for now anyway, you can’t avoid channel conflict in most situations where a distributor is involved.  Here’s another reason to get good at your funnel management within this environment. The funnel gives you the necessary focus and allocation of selling time to what’s important.  Giving more than just visibility, the funnel gives insight that directs the team to the right selling activities.

Good Selling!

Mark Sellers

Author, The Funnel Principle and soon to be released coaching book Blindspots: The Hidden Killer of Sales Coaching

I often feel like I’m operating in hyperdrive, with 15 spinning plates of my everyday life wobbling precariously, getting light headed as my eyes race left then right then left, trying to spot the next one that’s about to fall.

I’m getting drenched with data and drips and insights and hindsights and quests and requests and all I want is a dry place to sip my coffee, or a little Kentucky bourbon at the end of the day. Just a little.

Therefore, to deal with all of this (all of my choosing) I work harder to get better at faster processing the flood of what comes at me. In other words I try to get to conclusions as fast as possible. Process this one. Then move on to the next one.  Wash.  Rinse. Repeat.

I’ve created an illusion.

I compare it in a way to multi tasking which apparently is not possible, they tell me. The brain isn’t capable of doing that. I don’t have time for that nonsense. I spin more plates.

Recently I was facilitating a coaching workshop with front line sales managers. One of them was new to his region. He was a veteran of sales and held management positions in his career. On the shuttle bus to the airport at the end of the week he said his strategy has been to get to know his salespeople first.

I said you’re brilliant.

My advice (since they were paying me to offer it) was this: resist the temptation of quickly coming to conclusions about your people. How long does it take to really get to know someone? Have you figured out your spouse? Your dad? Your sister? Your neighbor?  Do you really know all of the pivotal events throughout their lives that shaped their personalities and prejudices and cause them to do those little things that annoy the kabootle out of you?

I see this front line sales manager as sort of in a construction zone with his salespeople, needing to slow down and put both hands on the wheel.  Then, pave that new road that allows his sellers to get back to full speed as soon as possible.  Go.  Sell.  Now.

Leading people isn’t easy. Front line sales managers have a phenomenally challenging job. Manage up and manage down.  Manage sideways.  Manage high maintenance customers.  They process an avalanche of to dos every day. A fun house of spinning plates. But these plates are not all equally pressing.  Maybe some of them are able to crash to the floor and cause little damage.  The ones with salespeople’s names on them should glow, though it’s not always obvious.  Salespeople don’t want to be processed.

This manager also recounted an earlier job as a salesperson himself.  He said his manager called in daily to ask “what’d you sell today?  Why not more?  What’re you gonna do tomorrow to fix that?”  Coaching?  Maybe in some language I’ve never heard of.  Pity the fool for grabbing the pant legs of his people as he went down the drain.

Frameworks and methods and skills can certainly help sales managers do their jobs. Then there’s Empathy and Curiosity, supported by Patience and Vulnerability.  How do you teach that?  Who’s going to sign off on that training?

Over the past 20 years of training and consulting my firm has had many clients that use non-direct, ‘channel’ salesforces to sell.  So how does the sales funnel best work with channel partners?

Focus and alignment. How common is it that your channel isn’t focused where you want it to be selling?  The problem sometimes is they bring you into deals too late to differentiate or that aren’t in your strategic wheelhouse.  The sales funnel can align and focus selling efforts with your channel.  One of our first significant clients was a division of a large company that sold industrial hoses.  Management asked me how a sales funnel process would benefit their 125 sellers.  I said I didn’t know.  Fortunately, they were smarter than me and hired us to make it work.  The sales funnel process brought greater collaboration and coordination of selling efforts.  That division later was sold to private equity and then bought by another major player in the industry.

1. Defining funnel entries. One of the considerations is to define the opportunities on the funnel as either end user or distributor/channel.  For example, if your team wants to sell through a new distributor to get better coverage then selling the distributor is the funnel entry.  However, if end user pull through is your focus then funnel entries can be defined by end users like a contractor, a retailer, or a manufacturer.
2. Better qualification. It’s not uncommon for a channel partner to bring you into deals late in the buying process.  It’s hard to differentiate beyond price and harder still to shape the solution to favor your capabilities. Chasing these deals wastes time.  A sales funnel process doesn’t eliminate this but should surely reduce the times it occurs.  The key is to have regular funnel inspections with your channel sellers.  In these conversations you can reset and confirm the deals and accounts both of you should focus on.
3. Better accountability. Improving sales productivity and performance ultimately comes down to execution and holding people accountable.  You can’t be shy about demanding that kind of relationship with your channel partners.  The good ones will respect it.

Good selling,

Mark Sellers

Author, The Funnel Principle and soon to be released book Blindspots:  The Hidden Killer of Sales Coaching

All professional sports teams eventually experience the setback of injuries to key players.  My Columbus Blue Jackets hockey team, having another successful year, lost captain Nick Foligno to a season ending injury on ‘x’. They lost key defender Josh Anderson on ‘x’.  Top scorer Cam Atkinson was out for ‘x’ due to a ‘x’ injury.

Next man up!  That’s what the coaches say.  As they should.  Any team depending solely on its starting lineup surviving the physical bashing of the entire season is exposed to too much risk.  The successful teams have a strong bench that is ready to spring into action.

As it is with your sales funnel.

A sales funnel needs the ‘strong bench’ of opportunities that make the funnel healthy.  Too often I see in our clients’ monthly Funnel Audit™conversations funnels that seemingly have enough TVR – enough funnel value to be 3:1 or 2:1 or whatever is the target size – only to see that most of the TVR is tied up in a very small number of opportunities.

The problem with that is it makes the salesperson vulnerable.  If one or two of those TVR deals falls out the funnel value is too low for the close rate to win enough of what’s left to hit the quota. There’s no bench to give the starters a break.

Here’s what you can do to manage through this.

Inspect the funnel regularly. Our clients avoid surprises by constantly looking at the ‘leading indicator’ of the funnel value, TVR.  If there’s not enough TVR they’re aware of it and can act on it.

Purge the funnel.  Purging the funnel once a year sounds wise but Lean would say that’s batching the work and it’s not efficient.  Instead, develop the habit of purging throughout the year. Every Funnel Audit™conversation is an opportunity to get rid of deals that artificially make the funnel look good. As they say, if it’s a pig lipstick won’t hide that fact.

Build a sales funnel full of singles and doubles, not home runs.  Who doesn’t like closing the home run sale?  But more hall of fame hitters get there by getting on base with a high percentage.  I’ve met a lot of successful sellers who close a lot of smaller or midsized sales. They make sure their funnel is full of those sales, as boring as they might be.  They pay lots of bills.

Good selling,

Mark Sellers

Author, The Funnel Principle and creator of the original BuyCycle Funnel sales model

Author of soon to be released book Blindspots:  The Hidden Killer of Sales Coaching

No, not that space. This is actually a photo of my brother in law Steve who once set the record for hours walked in space, but hey, records were meant to be broken.

The space I’m referring to is a brilliant phrase coined by a client of mine, the president of a sizeable industrial products company.

On a recent coaching call we talked about how the best sales managers he knows learned to operate in space.  When I asked him to explain he said these managers learned to think and manage in three dimensions, instead of being handcuffed by linear thinking.  You might call it situational adaptation.

For example, a manager that is hired from another company where she did the same job would have two options for how to do the new job.  One option is to fairly quickly apply proven processes, do some training, and make sure people get it.  That approach usually requires constantly hitting the compliance reset button.

Another option is to carefully observe the new environment over time, ask and learn a lot, process all of the inputs, then make conclusions about people, processes, about how things get done, whatever.  Maybe involve people in the solution design.  Eventually set a course and consistently lead it.

This made me think of someone I know who took a new job with a title similar to one he had in the past, but with a company that was in a wildly different industry than any he had experienced.  The worst thing he could have done was quickly apply processes, frameworks, systems, etc. that he used in previous positions to this new environment. Looking back we both believe he would not have survived.  Instead, he was patient in coming to conclusions yet aggressive in absorbing everything around him.  His superior and colleagues say he’s made an incredible impact at this company in a very short couple of years.

It also made me think about the careers of some musicians.   Neil Young didn’t seem interested in making Harvest 2 and Harvest 3 and 4 and 5 as much as he preferred to create new works like Live Rust (1979 with Crazy Horse), Trans (1982), Broken Arrow (1996), Everybody’s Rockin (1983 with the Shocking Pinks).  Compare those to Silver and Gold or Comes a Time.  Same with Bob Dylan. Compare Blonde on Blonde (1966) to Oh Mercy (1989). By contrast will Jon Bon Jovi be performing You Give Love a Bad Name at your local Holiday Inn in 2025? Sorry, I hear he’s a good guy!

In trying to figure out the secret formula here, this is as close as I‘ve come:

Operating in spacemeans you have learned how to learn.

This isn’t the same as what you’ve learned as in a body of knowledge, or how much you’ve learned about a subject or market.  This is more about how you take the lessons and learnings of your past and apply them to new situations in your present.  This is hard, but it isn’t hard like getting buy-in to something you did 3 times before at 3 different companies or forcing your process on a ‘skeptical’ group.

By definition isn’t every new rep that a sales manager hires an entirely new experience?  Doesn’t that new experience demand a truly fresh, unbiased and tailored approach to being coached?

If you’re up for the challenge your impact could be outta this world.

Good Selling,

Mark Sellers

Author, The Funnel Principle

Founder, Breakthrough Sales Performance

Soon to be released sales coaching book Blindspots:  The Hidden Killer Of Sales Coaching