When the rubber hits the road, not only is selling much more difficult in the B2B environment, but the buying journey for your prospects becomes far more complicated. This is because the process is no longer linear like before; instead, buyers must loop back across different requirements, which complicates matters.
According to this Gartner report, customers who felt that the information provided by suppliers helped advance their purchasing decision were 2.8 times more likely to experience greater ease of purchase. They were also 3 times more likely to commit to a bigger deal with less regret.
What does this tell us? In this day and age, the quality, timing, and delivery of information play the most pivotal role in closing deals!
Controlling these factors gets trickier the bigger your dealer network is. Nevertheless, it is in your best interest to help your distributors to sell more, be better at selling and generate more interest in your products. It’s a simple formula, if they win, you win even bigger!
Managing your dealers isn't just about sending them information packs. It takes a little more pizazz than that. Your role is to empower all the players within your organization. There's no better way to do that than with a nurturing sales enablement tool like Showell, which addresses all the most common problems businesses face with an extensive dealer network.
How To Manage Complex Dealer Networks and Simplify the Buyer's Journey
Create the Best Buyer Experience
Showell helps you to align often fractured dealer networks and creates a consistency that resonates with end customers. It does this through tools that allow you to easily manage, edit, share, and present sales collaterals on the fly. Salespeople can then customize content to create a more substantial repertoire with prospects while still sticking to your brand's core values.
Uniformity of this caliber helps deliver a message and impression that is tried, tested and true. With Showell, administrators can also grant regional privilege rights to specific stakeholders, provide access across the board, or even allow certain dealers to add their own content and have internal control of their assets.
Providing Relevancy in an Instant
When using Showell, your distributors and sales networks will only have access to the latest, most up-to-date content and information. Whether that be product specification sheets, training materials, 3D diagrams, training tools or presentation decks, you won't find files from 2015 clogging up the sales flow.
This way, you empower your teams to be agile without the fear of communicating outdated numbers or specs. Showell also works offline, meaning if your dealers need to grab materials in a pinch, they won’t be waiting for the Wi-Fi to kick in.
Read more about: A Deep Dive Into Sales Presentation Apps: Why, For Whom, and How? →
Using Analytics to Strengthen Sales
Looking at numbers and data points only ever brings clarity. That's why Showell uses analytics to help businesses better themselves. This way, your company and distributors will no longer operate in the dark. Track the details you never even considered a metric, like the level of a buyer's interest based on how they interact with your content. Then set KPIs to track conversion rates and see how sales representatives perform when they utilize and share your content.
Showell is like a living breathing system that measures and creates benchmarks for achieving better results.
Learn more about The What, Who, Why and How of Sales Content Analytics →
Absolute Ease of Use
Showell as a platform has a lot to offer, but to start with, its ease of use makes everything else just fall into place. This is particularly true when adopting the platform for the first time and onboarding new dealers. That instant ease of use sets the tone for a fruitful workflow that drives results.
Implementing new solutions is daunting for anyone, especially considering the time it takes to fully onboard the tool and the users. Showell was designed to fit in place with just one to two training session, which allows you to implement the platform within your business and get familiar with the tools.
It's even effortless for customers who need to review large documents and information packs, which are always just one click away through Showell’s Digital Sales Room.
Align dealer sales with your company strategy
Lastly, but most importantly. Aligning your dealer sales with your overall company strategy is essential to manage complex dealer networks.
There are several steps to consider when aligning dealer sales with a company's overall strategy:
1) Communicate the company's dealer-based sales goals and strategy to distributors, and ensure they understand how their sales efforts contribute to these goals
2) Provide training and resources to dealers to help them effectively market and sell the company's products or services
3) Establish performance metrics and incentives that encourage dealers to focus on the company's strategic initiatives
4) Regularly communicate with dealers and gather feedback on their needs and challenges. This will help you to understand their perspective and make adjustments as needed to align their sales efforts with the company's strategy
5) Establish clear communication channels and establish trustful relationships with key dealer stakeholders
6) Provide dealers with a clear value proposition that demonstrates the benefits of your products or services
7) Monitor the progress and adjust as necessary to ensure that the sales strategy is aligned with its overall business strategy.
One of the ways to get this set is to arrange regular sales kick-offs and gatherings for your dealer network. Here are practical tips for organizing a Kick-Ass Sales Kick-Off for your sales teams.
End words
Ultimately, by making the lives of your dealer networks easier, translates to the sales process and customer journey.
We've seen it – the issue of dealing with silos, inconsistent onboarding, and content not being used by your team. We made a solution with these pain points in mind. Showell is an award-winning tool made to centralize all sales collateral for ease of onboarding, present with ease and assurance that you will have nothing but updated content, data to track engagement and activity to understand your prospects better, and so much more.
