The Secret to Motivating Your Sales Team with Jamie McCoy
Overview: In this episode of Digital Conversations, Billy is joined by Jamie McCoy of Consenna. Jamie discusses the key to motivating sales people, through simple messaging and programs, and unification with other teams.
Guest: Jamie McCoy – Jamie McCoy Dip DigM is the Digital Director at Consenna Ltd. He works to connect seemingly disparate ideas to create innovative solutions to challenges.
Transcript
Billy: All right, everyone. Welcome to Digital Conversations. I am your host, Billy Bateman. And today I am joined by Jamie McCoy, digital director at Consenna. Jamie, thanks for joining me.
Jamie: Thanks for having me Billy.
Billy: Yeah, excited to have this conversation, man. Before we get into it, though, just tell us a little bit about yourself and about Consenna.
Jamie: Yeah, so I joined Consenna just at the tail end of 2020. It’s been a couple of years in the agency space, doing demand generation and lead generation for software vendors, software offers and hardware OEMs, or that sort of stuff. We’ve got real good insight working with, actually directly with a lot of the kind of resellers and understanding a lot of their challenges. Coming to Consenna we do a lot of programs directly with OEMs, with some of the largest OEMs on the planet. It brings its own challenges and its own opportunities and always no two days are the same, which is always good fun.
Billy: Yeah, yeah. And you guys have a lot of a lot of big clients. I don’t know if your you can name them or not. But you work with a lot of impressive companies. So that’s what we’re going to talk about is how do you build a reseller program? What’s the difference between a bad one and a good one? So let’s first start off with like, why a company would consider a software or even a hardware company would consider a reseller program and the benefits.
Jamie: Yeah, definitely. First is always volume. You can deal with 10, 20, 100, 200 resellers who can reach a much larger audience a lot quicker. You have a lot more resource by strength by numbers. What also then can allows you to do is you wouldn’t drive that same level of sales volume through your own single brand. It’s just too hard to get that much share of wallet, share of market space. So hope to diversify a little bit.
The other the other point being it’s a marketplace. The reseller space has been around for a long time. And there’s now a wide wide audience and that’s the only place that they’ve purchased these types of things. Because they can browse around different products, different services, different authors. And it’s almost a bit of a hygiene factor, your competition at all here in this space. And you kind of have to be there and you kind of have to be part of it. So it’s a great space to find that stuff. But it’s fiercely competitive really, really difficult.
Billy: Yeah, and then what are what are some of the struggles and pitfalls? Like we have we have affiliates at Chatfunnels, it’s great, but I know there are some, there are some areas where you can you can step in it. But what are some of the struggles of having a large reseller program?
Jamie: Yeah, well, like, some of the struggles really become each of these individual businesses are, they are individual, and they usually have limited resource. They’ll usually be quite lean in terms of staff in terms of FDE. The pressures on time, and the profit margins for them, usually a lean too. What you typically find is that actually, a lot of these resellers will be heavily weighted towards the resource, will be heavily weighted as a percentage towards actual sales teams, and the kind of sales engine.
So they spend a lot of time they want to spend this higher percentage of the time as possible selling, because that’s what keeps them in business and keeps the going. And for that product knowledge is vital. When you’re speaking about this stuff. You’re speaking to a decision maker and a business, you need to know what you’re speaking about. And if you’ve got two or three or four OEMs that you work with, and they’ve got 15 families of products. Which all have what’s the difference between an a seven, or an eight, nine processor, to our finance director, or an it director. So that can be hard to keep up with. They can get spread pretty thin pretty quickly.
And each of the resellers, they’ll have their own business challenges. Staff leaving, staff turnover, definitely challenges within the business and their own software needs and stuff. So there’s a whole myriad of things that come into that. It can be really difficult to to harness the power of it successfully, you find a lot of OEMs will put a lot of energy into resellers. And whether they put that energy in or not, that kind of level stays that kind of flatline and they can’t really seem to influence or harness it, which can be a real frustration sometimes.
Billy: Yeah, so let me ask you a couple questions about that. So product knowledge is one thing you talked about a little bit. So if I’m putting the reseller program out there and then you also talked about staff turnover. And I think, you put a ton of time and it with our own sales team, making them experts on the product. Because we don’t have sales engineers. If you’re the sales guy, you should know the product. Know how Sell it. How does a reseller, what’s the best way for them to put resources into educating their their partners on products? Where have you seen success? What are what’s not a good idea? How have they done that well?
Jamie: Historically, it’s not done particularly well. Always the top performing conversion tools or campaigns are the longest running because they’ve been there so long for eventually get time to learn what they are. There is a lot of wasted energy on projects or incentives. Which are really, really good ideas, just not given a long enough time, or a strong enough roll out. If you try and put yourself in the end impacted user of everything that you do, and you’re trying to do this reseller channel stuff. As the sales guy, the guy who’s actually on the phone and trying to sell with these businesses.
He’s got 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week. He wants to be selling that time, right? It doesn’t want to have to take an hour to understand your latest incentive, and why it’s going to help him sell more. Has to be really clean messaging really nice and simple. And conceptually easy, not tons of terms, conditions and stuff. If there’s too many loopholes. It’s just too difficult for the sales guy. Again, if he’s not speaking about it, nobody else knows about it. The customers won’t find out about it. So really, it’s just about trying to give something enough time and enough support.
One training session with sales isn’t enough. You need to give ongoing support. And so actually, a lot of a lot of success can be had just by simplifying the message and a little bit, simplifying what you’re asking of. The reseller sales guys, as I said, it could be dealing with three programs per year, and you may have three or four of them as part of his network. So it could be 12 different things. He’s trying to learn over a couple of months, and manage his pipeline and work his data and these callbacks, his relationship, do his job.
You can see how they can get a little frazzled with stuff, and then they think I’m just going to stick to what I know, because if I graft really hard with that I know what I’ll get success ways. Which means a lot leaves a lot of opportunity on the table, because none of the campaigns none of the projects that leaders put in place are bad. Oh they’re all actually pretty good. It’s destined, so it’s cashback. So it’s incentives. It’s just the guys don’t have the capacity to figure it all out. It’s difficult for them, and therefore it doesn’t land and expand as well as it should, which is a bit of a shame.
Billy: Yeah. All right. So what I’m hearing, Jamie is on the education of your your partners, keep it simple. Not too many programs, don’t roll out a new program every month. And be consistent. One or two, a couple options, not too many. And then constant outreach and just educating them on what’s new within your product and any changes to pricing and offerings, keep them very simple.
Jamie: Yeah, I mean, it’s just about support. Everything that you do should be, you should be trying to lighten the load for the sales guys. Whoever cracks the back of that will have the most success, because that’s where the sales guy is going to want to sell most of because it’s easier for him to sell.
He doesn’t care what brand he sells, is just he just wants to sell and make his bonus. So you really make that as you go make that as easy as possible for him. It’s not it’s not rocket science. But sometimes we can try and be so clever with things that we forget who’s the end user of it? And if they’re not engaged, then we’re all bloody fools.
Billy: Yeah, for sure, man. Okay. So if I’m going to be successful with the reseller program, like how do I successfully harness the full potential of it?
Jamie: Yeah, so, I mean, at the start of all of these things, what I was trying to when I’m working with with these campaigns in these projects is. Every idea that you have is always based on an assumption isn’t this always. We think this is what’s happening, and therefore we’ve designed this solution. That’s a really good solution. So what’s always key is, rather than delivering that solution, which can be quite expensive, can be quite a long process, based on the assumption as to kind of flip it and figure out how we test that assumption.
First then you can speak from a place of knowledge, and then you know, whether that idea will actually work or not. So that’s always that’s always key for me is if you’re bringing out a new program, which is a cashback or an incentive or whatever. It’s to understand how do I find out quickly whether this is actually going to have the impact that I want or not. I don’t want to run this campaign for three months, and then learn that that’s not what the challenges that we’re trying to overcome. So, I think for me, it’s always it’s kind of like that scene in Friends. When Joey gets into the map. It’s kind of like that’s what I try and do every time is try and sit in the seat of the sales guy.
Think If I had a sales target, and I’m really tight on time, and my inbox is really busy, and even if you’re having a qualified conversation with a prospect on some devices, and they safety change domain. To actually know what to speak about these ones, that can actually be pretty stressful for the sales guy. Because he’s not sure if they apply to the same program that has been speaking about. If he can get the same guest codes, are they still in stock? How long is the delivery team? There’s a lot that he has to prepare just to be agile. And he’s actually really can’t be agile. It’s keeping them in mind and thinking is this going to help them sell more.
And really, everything we try and do and try support as on selling. Is on helping deliver sales and trying to think of your market as actually is pre sales, and not marketing and sales, you know, the two sides of the same coin. And it’s kind of like this is the bit before you say, oh, that says and we will deal with this stuff, and then you try and sell stuff. Which can which can sometimes happen. So strengthening that relationship between what you’re doing to support and the market and involving them in that conversation. Then that process.
We do a lot of stuff where we try and automate as much of it as possible. Because we know we’re validated the assumption that we had, that a lot of the resellers don’t have large marketing teams. They don’t have large data lists to work, they don’t have even large sales teams. They’ve got kind of small and medium size, maybe three to five sales staff. They’re not huge businesses. What would be the best way to help them sell more stuff, is to do all that for them. Just run all of the automated marketing, make sure that it’s all focused on clean messaging around what’s in store, or what’s on offer, or whatever the latest piece is and then delivering that intent opportunity over to them.
In a timely manner. Here over the phone folders, the downloads, the intense the leads, the opens the clicks, and give it to your sales guys. They can walk through that, and this is what they were sent. This is what they’ve engaged in, so that you know what compensation you’re going to have. Then it sales guys loving life, because he just has to look at what’s been said, and then find people and speak to them about it. These are the people that were interested in it. So phone them and speak to them, and they don’t have to think about anything else.
It’s really trying to tie that back together. Then by by doing that you can start to piece together a bit of what the OEMs really struggle with is visibility, and not visibility of performance, because they know who sells what and how much and what margin. But what’s common, they don’t get any visibility of the pipeline until it’s sold. They don’t know what sellors are working on. It’s hard to get that information from each of these resellers. You don’t know how many of you have ready to close next month. What’s your realistic pipeline that you’re walking towards? They don’t know.
And because you don’t know, it’s hard to influence. You could have by speaking to them found out that actually, if you give me a 5% discount on the rates of these devices. I’ll bring in an extra 70 grand next month, because that’s what everyone’s waiting on or whatever is. If you don’t know that you can’t do it. So it’s trying to plug all of that visibility together and have the pre sales, marketing, the marketing, the pipeline, and the seller, all in one ecosystem and all in one feed so that everyone can see what’s going on and how to influence it. That’s that’s where the real power is.
Billy: That makes sense. And it goes back to something we’ve been seeing just in the market. That we used to have sales and marketing, they were very separate organizations, although they worked together fairly well. But we’re seeing a lot of organizations bring them all together under like a growth or a revenue title. That there’s just more insight, both from the marketing on where’s the pipeline? How’s it doing? Because, marketing’s like, Hey, we gave you these leads and sales half the time says, Yeah, they were crap. And then and then vice versa.
The sales team is like, where are all of our leads? We’re not getting enough. So by bringing them together, they’re helping to solve that problem a little bit by putting it under one umbrella. It sounds like with a reseller program, you need to, although you’re separate, you need to have the same approach. Really get that insight back from your resellers. What does their pipeline look like? Where are the holdups? How can you support them, and vice versa, give them more insight into what’s happening to these leads before they come to them.
Jamie: And that’s exactly how we would sit in the middle of that. So we would sit you know, on the side of the OEM and know that this is the main target as you’re seeing this growth banner that we’re all sitting under. This is what we’re trying to deliver in terms of revenue or growth or whatever. But each of the resellers has a slice of that. And that’s all you’re really interested in. You need to make sure both have what they need, and you don’t get the pounds without looking after the pennies. So it’s really trying to make sure that each of the resellers feel supported.
They don’t feel distracted, they know exactly what’s expected of them when it’s expected.That you’re doing everything you can to help them sell more stuff. Because as we said they don’t care what it is that they sell. They don’t care if it’s this laptop, or that laptop, or this software or that software. They’re agnostic, they’re not interested. That’s not what the business is, their business is selling any of it. And if you can say this is the stuff that’s easiest to sell right now, because there’s lots and stock. You can get it delivered or you can be signed up within 20 minutes, or it can be delivered within a week.
And there’s less incentive running, that means that they can get money off or they can get cash back, if they trade on all devices, or whatever it looks like. Then they know exactly what it is that they’re expected to sell. How to sell it, and why or sale, and they can just go and do a good job. One of the one of the kind of best parts in my career coming to where I’m at now is. Previously, when I had worked in marketing teams that are separate from sales teams, right. Then when I was at the agency, we were doing demand Gen, and we were doing lead gen.
So I had to sit with the sales guys and understand what was happening with these, as you said, with delivering all these clicks, why is nobody sellling anything. The rubbish, that’s the wrong people. It’s their own data. So it did all that usual stuff. That was really good experience for me, for coming into this space and coming into this role to really understand the what are the challenges. You really need to be supporting and holding the hand and helping the resale and at the end sales guys, because they want to sell.
They’re not not selling because they don’t want to, they really, really want to. You need to make it really easy for them. And they will do it. And if you can get them onsite and really empower them. The results are phenomenal. And then when you multiply that across the channel of 200 resellers, you can you can double or triple your revenue just by really cleaning up the messaging and making it really simple to just sell your stuff.
Billy: Yeah. Okay. I love it. Man. I love it. Before we end, I want to ask you, Jamie, is there there anything we haven’t hit that you think we should talk about before we close?
Jamie: No, I’m pretty pragmatic with everyting. And I think I’m pretty blunt with a lot of things. For me, again, it’s just just simplify and know that it’s very tempting and very exciting to get all lost up in the stratosphere with complexity and automations and drip campaigns and triggers. Which is all excellent stuff. And that’s all the pre sales activity. And there’s not a ton of that really the sales guys cared about. They don’t really care about what the money’s been, they cared about what was the last thing that they engaged in? And why did they engage in it? How should I be approaching them? What should I be speaking to them about?
Keeping into context, all of these resellers, even just in the UK space, there’s 1000s and 1000s. And Northerners globally, there’s a huge huge base for resellers. They’re all contacting the same contacts at the same businesses so these it didn’t doesn’t finance today are getting 10 calls a month from you and your peers at your competitor businesses. So again, making sure that they understand and that it’s a longer sales cycle and everything at the moment. Nothing’s commoditized and productized to be a one call close. It just doesn’t happen.
Relationship selling is making a massive resurgence and you can bring that relationship piece into your call and in your language in your approach and the pre sales marketing. Really stamping that across making sure that branding is nice and strong for the resellers and making sure that handles as strong as possible. But once you crack that and you make it nice and easy for the resellers. Those guys want to sell you just got to empower them.
Billy: Okay, well, you’re gonna do a reseller program. The secret is make it easy for them. Is what I’m hearing from Jamie. Dude, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate all of these insights. And for the listeners. If you like what you’re hearing, remember to rate review and subscribe and you’ll get more conversations like this every week. Thank you, Jamie, and we’ll chat later.
Jamie: Thanks for having me.