Like many other sales leaders, the sense that tectonic shifts in the dynamics between buyers and salespeople are happening has been palpable to me for a number of years.  Researching these changes is why I joined Forrester just weeks before this year’s Forrester Research Sales Enablement Forum.  At the Forum, I had a number of surprise learnings or “aha moments” gained from colleagues and members of our Sales Enablement Council who are learning in real time as sales enablement practitioners. 

A Cross-Organizational System Issue

The seemingly endless search for the right “solution” to improve sales performance feels like a continuous plodding pilgrimage for many sales leaders.  What I learned at the Forrester Sales Enablement Forum, and have experienced with new illumination since, is why the silver bullet solutions (i.e., tools, programs, training, materials, promotions, technology) that leaders in sales, sales operations, HR, and sales training invest in really ever meet our expectations for delivering better overall top-line performance.

There is true chaos that exists in the selling systems of most companies. Various business functions scurry to support the effort of increasing sales. My core learning from the Forum was that we have to ask whether we even have a selling system. My realization in working with clients over the past five months is that most companies “enable” their sales forces through dis-integrated, costly, inefficient, and ineffective multifunction (as opposed to cross-functional) silos of investments that have a poor performance improvement yield. 

Have you ever been in a client meeting that started with all of the elements of success and then, without warning, augured into the ground? These situations have all of the characteristics of a TV sitcom except a TV sitcom is explicitly designed to cause discomfort for the audience, while a meeting is not.

Or are they? I need to tell you about a meeting that went horribly wrong and how the Value Equation would have made a very big difference. While this seems like a worst-case scenario, elements of this story happen much more often than we might believe and they undermine the value we create in the minds of buyers.

The CIO of a large global organization had called an all-day offsite meeting of incumbent technology providers with the objective of each provider presenting the CIO and three senior members of his IT team - Application, Infrastructure and Architecture - with information on new capabilities that will add value to the CIO’s strategy. Having clearly set the stage with this objective, each provider was given 60 minutes to present, and the host of the session went first.

Funny question. The answer seems so obvious, right?  True that when it comes to tangible stuff with clear intrinsic attributes which are, well, easy to value.  Gold goes for $1,390 as of 3:16 pm Eastern time today, and we all know why. It's a commodity, a scarce one at that, and gold here, same as gold where you are. Obvious. 

But what about intangible stuff?  How valuable is fame, how valuable is professional success, leadership, or maybe a strategy? Well, we also know that depends on who is doing the buying and why, which means that value is in the eye of the beholder, just like beauty. So putting a price on some things is tricky.  How much were you looking to pay for that success? And maybe price is not really an issue when a strategy for turning around your $15b company is the goal and its your head if that strategy does not work in the next 18 months, so that will cost you $6m, few questions asked.

So why am I asking such a simple question?

In our research with business and IT executives we ask them simple questions, like what's valuable to them, and they are quite clear.  And their answers tend toward the intangibles versus the tangibles. For example, when we ask, "What would you consider to be a valuable meeting with a vendor salesperson?" the number one reply is "The salesperson clearly shows they understand my business issues and can clearly articulate to me how to solve them." That's an intangible value forged in the cauldron of empathy, credibility, expertise, experience. Also obvious, but perhaps not so easy to deliver.

I was encouraged to see that Huawei had a proper track session on its channel strategy during its 10th Global analyst summit in Shenzhen.  The track is another sign that the company’s enterprise division is maturing and taking the right steps to expand its activities in China as well as globally.

In 2012, Huawei recruited 1,289 distributors, VAPs, and tier 2 channel partners to reach around 3,789 worldwide, which represents growth of 52% in China, Europe, and 26 other key countries globally.  Huawei’s enterprise share of channel sales was around 55% (excludes Operator resale) of its total revenue in 2012, a 32% revenue growth through channels from 2011. Huawei is also starting to build its services and software ecosystems with 700 authorized service partners and 200 ISVs. 

Overall, three key things that stood out to me about Huawei’s partner programs are:  

• A more structured and well-defined partner program: The partner program has evolved considerably since last year and Huawei is working towards mapping its key accounts and streamlining the account management process.  Through the segregation of 5000+ named accounts (key accounts based on deal size) and defining the customer engagement model for high value accounts, Huawei can bring about the clearer channel architecture that will be required to build an open and successful channel ecosystem.