The following post is a guest submission from:
Karl Edmunds, Vice President, Frank Lynn & Associates
The concept of scheduled maintenance in the auto industry is fairly simple. If you follow the scheduled maintenance prescribed by the manufacturer your car or truck will last longer and perform the way it was intended.
In their personal lives many diligent corporate managers follow a scheduled maintenance program for their personal cars. However, these same managers forego scheduled maintenance in their corporate lives for their million dollar channel or go-to-market strategies.
The most common limiting factor is simply the absence of a defined maintenance program. In our work with clients we’ve developed a five step maintenance system:
- Assess Market Position
- In each market, the company must assess the critical success factors that drive results including market share, share of partner “wallet”, level of sales resources, clout or power in the channel, size of the market opportunity, level of potential growth and the availability of investment capital.
- Set Objectives
- Given the existing market position, managers must determine an achievable set of objectives. These objectives must be measurable and achievable.
- Create the Plan
- The plan should draw on the company’s relative strengths, including product differentiation, product breadth/depth, brand positioning (pull), service and support offerings, ease-of-doing-business, etc. The plan should specify activities within the organization, at the boundary (e.g. with channel account managers), and within the partner companies.
- Facilitate Outcomes
- Successful implementation requires a channel compensation plan that rewards partners for the actions needed to reach the objectives (business plans, training, marketing activities, brand loyalty, full-line support, etc.). Success also requires close working coordination between the (channel) marketing staff, direct salespeople, indirect channel account managers and support personnel. Lastly, companies must provide their partners with the most effective and proven tools necessary to enable the “feet on the street” sales people to execute the marketing and selling activities outlined in the plan described above.
- Monitor, Measure, and Adjust
- The final component of scheduled maintenance is corporate oversight facilitated by a system of channel metrics. Increasingly companies are turning to automated business intelligence software that generates channel “dashboards” that help monitor activities, measure results against defined metrics and identify potential adjustments based on market conditions.
When timely scheduled maintenance is effectively applied to all activities within the sales channels, the end of the quarter will be a lot less scary.
For questions and comments, contact Karl Edmunds, Vice President, Frank Lynn & Associates at 312-558-4866 or email kedmunds@franklynn.com
