M & A Rainmaker

If you are a Cisco Partner looking for support and guidance  to drive engagement and accelerate both activity and results with Cisco then I would recommend talking to Channel Intellect who have a client list that includes many of Cisco’s highest achieving and award-winning Partners and also delivers the much-heralded Comstor Mentor Programme. Additionally, Channel Intellect has engaged with Cisco on a number of projects and is, as a result, uniquely placed to provide a comprehensive understanding of how Partners can make the most out of their investment in Cisco.

What Cisco Says….
Bernadette Wightman – Operations Director – UK & I Channels – Cisco

	Channel Intellect has provided a vital and excellent service to support and guide many of our developing Cisco Partners in the UK and Ireland. They have also been able to assist and advise a number of Cisco teams within the organisation in constructing Partner-centric programmes and initiatives. The insight that Channel Intellect provides to our Partners in developing a profitable and sustainable relationship with Cisco has made a positive difference to both Cisco’s and the Partners’ engagement and performance.

Channel Intellect engages with Partners around the “Six Pillars” – a series of best practice disciplines centred around the following focus areas:

• Certification/Specialisation
• Cisco Programs (VIP/OIP/SIP/etc)
• Support
• Market-Specific Initiatives (PSPP/SMB)
• GTM & Marketing
• Relationship Management

Cisco Health Check

The Channel Intellect Cisco Health Check is based on a day’s analysis with a Partner, in order to assess current engagement levels and to advise on how this can be complemented and refined in order to ensure an appropriate ROI is delivered against the cost of maintaining an effective Cisco relationship.

Based around devising an activity plan which embraces the “Six Pillars” disciplines, the Health Check comprises:

• A pre-engagement briefing
• A Partner executive workshop
• A Partner action cverview
• A Costed Channel Intellect proposal

Contact info@channelintellect.com for further details.

Do you remember this blog???

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/16/the-perfect-salesperson-and-the-perfect-sales-meeting-structure/

Well, my client and I have been doing some more work on this. We reckoned that we needed to get down into a bit more detail and sub-divide some of these areas.

Activity

Here we had a discussion about what we think the activity targets should be.

Based around a week as follows, approximately:

1 day cold calling

1 day proposal writing

3 days meetings ( or if no meetings then calls to get meetings )

The target number of cold calling phone calls per week ( my recommendation is to go for researched, targeted phone calls rather than purely numbers based ) -should be say 30 per day? ( Any meaningful conversations to be followed up by a letter, so say 15 letters ? )

The target number of meetings per week – say 3 per day for 3 days = should be  9 ?? ( All appointments confirmed by email/letter )

The target number of proposals per week – should be, say, 6 ? ( All proposals to have summary of meeting, key needs and objectives, how we meet those needs/objectives, pricing and ideally ROI )

Knowledge

Here we divided knowledge up into various segments:

Company – ( The companies background/history, key philosophies and main strengths )

Products –  ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company, 1. Telephony, 2. Computer Hardware – Switches, Routers, PC’s,

Servers 3. ????? TBD )

Services – ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company, 1. IT Support, 2. Billing Services – Lines, Minutes 3. ???? TBD etc)

Competition –  ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company 1. ABC Ltd. 2.  DEF Ltd. 3. GHI Ltd. 4.  JKL Ltd. 5. ???  We would highlight thier strengths and weaknesses ).

Suppliers –  ( The top 3 – say, for an ICT company 1. Cisco, 2. Microsoft, 3. HP )

Marketplace –  e.g for an ICT company – Hosted Computing versus Premises Based, Virtualisation trends, Cloud computing trends ( SaaS etc )

Skills

Here we divided skills up into seperate areas:

Meeting structure ( as before )

Proposal structure ( eg summary of meeting, key needs and objectives, how we meet those needs/objectives, pricing and ideally ROI )

Presentation structure ( eg Intro, summary of needs/objectives, how we meet them, discussion, agreement on way forward )

Demo structure ( eg Understand what we need to prove, prove it, next step )

Questioning skills

Closing skills

Objection Handling

Negotiation Skills

Psychometric profiling ( this is an advanced selling skill )

With each of these areas we can either record achievement as a percentage of the target or mark each area out of 10 as before. 

Now we had some way of focussing on the areas that needed to be addressed.

We could sit down amongst ourselves and give our own targets and also agree these with the salesperson.

Then we could write an action plan to address any areas of weakness or shortfall.