Last weekend I was on a training ride with my local cycling group. About 40 of us were out for a 60-mile ride on a beautiful Saturday morning, riding the back-country roads through the rolling hills.   One of the most exciting aspects of the ride is when we form a pace line and are all in the same cadence of taking turns pulling at the front of the line and then dropping back.   As I was riding, I started thinking how cadence in channel sales, as in cycling, is essential for improving your efficiency and speed.  We have been training our Channel Account Managers around the globe on best practices for working with you, our channel partners.  Here’s what we recommend we do together to help you grow your business:

1. Annual Business Planning Once a year, members of your firm and SAS should collaborate on a strategic business plan for the SAS business within your firm. This is the time to set the annual goal for software and services revenue, with a concrete plan and KPIs for achieving the revenue target.   A good business plan summarizes where we want to go and how we will get there. The plan should include targets for leads, opportunities, and pipeline, along with the marketing efforts needed to achieve those targets. It should include an enablement plan for sales and technical training. This is a good time to articulate your unique value proposition and the target markets where you will focus your sales and marketing efforts. (See “How to grow your business and your profits leveraging the SAS resell program”)
2. Quarterly Business Reviews An annual business plan is only as good as the execution.   The Quarterly Business Review (QBR) is a vital step in ensuring that the plan is executed, providing the opportunity to make any necessary adjustments to the plan needed to achieve the goals. The same people who were involved in the annual business planning should participate in the quarterly review.   It starts with a review of the prior quarter’s performance to plan to see if we are on track. This is the time to identify any gaps in the plan or adjustments that need to be made, and to lock in the goals and actions for the next quarter.
3. Monthly Pipeline Reviews A monthly touchpoint call or meeting is key to making sure there are enough early-stage deals in the pipe to achieve the quarterly and annual sales targets.   This is the right cadence to check how the pipeline and close rates are trending, look at where new leads are coming from, and uncover opportunities for improvement. This is not a review of individual opportunities, but a higher-level view of pipeline heath. It’s helpful to have both sales and marketing leadership in this meeting.
4. Weekly Forecast Reviews The weekly, or bi-weekly, forecast review is the most tactical meeting in your channel cadence. This meeting, between your sales reps and the SAS sales reps, starts with looking at what has changed in the pipeline since the prior call.   It’s a time to focus on later-stage deals you are forecasting to close.   We want to work together and help coach your reps, if needed, on how to progress an opportunity and uncover any possible obstacles that could disrupt the deal.

We will soon be rolling out an online partner scorecard and business planning tool to help our partners and our CAMs better plan, review, grow using these best practices in channel cadence.   Stay tuned!