Email deliverability: Key to the inbox The following are excerpts from my interview with Chris John. You may also enjoy listening to my complete interview (download mp3 audio here) where talks about deliverability, IP addresses, SPF records and reputation. Your email newsletter templates are meticulously crafted, down to the last color and font, for maximum visual appeal. You know your audience and write relevant articles. You follow opt-in email list rules (aka CAN/SPAM). As for what happens between “send” and […]

Sell More by achieving ‘Good Enough’—The Perry Marshall 80/20 Growth Principle The following are excerpts from my interview with Perry Marshall. You may also enjoy listening to my complete interview (download mp3 audio here) where Perry talks about 80/20-Rule topics beyond sales and marketing, including time management, giftedness and living without regret. Assume you’re selling a $100 product and you get 100 people to buy it, generating $10,000 in sales ($100 x 100). You’re feeling pretty good about yourself. But […]

I want you to take a ride on Mr. Peabody’s wayback machine to 1980. Intel, the undisputed 8-bit microprocessor king had stumbled. Xerox had just selected Motorola’s 16-bit processor for their next generation word processor (the predecessor of the office PC). That loss was the tipping point for Intel technology.

Week after week another Intel customer announced their intentions to “play with another team.” Intel was on the ropes. Japanese competitors were waging a price war on DRAM and EPROM memory chips while Motorola and Zilog were giving them Hell in microprocessors. It was a two-front assault. Many predicted doom. The stock was tanking.

In Santa Clara the sky was officially falling.

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What do you stink at?

Discovering your weaknesses is the opposite of discovering your strengths. How many books have you read about discovering your weaknesses?

Think about it. While I have many on my own bookshelf about finding my strengths… StrengthsFinder, Now, Discover Your Strengths, What Color Is Your Parachute?

… not to mention all those personality and psychological assessments I’ve taken (Myers-Briggs, Glamour Magazine, et al)… I have zero books on the topic of weaknesses…

When it comes to Channel Partners, it’s not uncommon for the staff responsible for Channel Partner relationships to have little or no field experience. Perhaps this explains why so many channel managers rely [way too much] on “conventional wisdom.”

But which piece of Channel Partner conventional wisdom is the worst offender?

To answer this question I interviewed noted channel veteran, Allan Behrens, Managing Director at Taxal Limited.

The cool thing about Allan is that he’s been successful on both sides of the aisle, giving him a perspective on Channel Partners few others share.

In the 1980’s and early 1990’s, he helped build HP’s Partner Channel in Northern Europe and then left HP to become an HP Channel Partner. That’s a real testament to the strength of the program he created.

Are you a “new thing” miser? When you discover a new way to solve a nagging problem or a cool, new vendor, is your first reaction to share it with your Channel Partners, or do you hoard it?

Today’s question is actually not about the existence of services and products you could share with your Channel Partners. Rather, it’s really about what you share. And of course, by your answer you’ve just told me everything I need to know about the value you place on your Channel Partner relationships.

Have you ever dated someone who exists to talk only about themselves. The kind of person who hums the words to the parody song, It’s all about Me, Jesus?

Yeah, Questions ARE Powerful

It works for your Channel Partner sales reps… A properly synchronized set of questions help reps guide customers to the best solution for customers—especially for considered purchases of capital equipment. It’s what solution selling is all about.

To bring this to practical application I asked Susan Pryor Welter to explain just how she does this for her Channel Partners.

Susan is Director of Sales for Summit Industries, LLC, manufacturers of the AmRad™ Medical X-ray equipment brand. Summit sells exclusively through Channel Partners.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to begin training sessions with a simple activity.

In one of my workshops for sales and marketing people I give each person a standard deck of 52 playing cards (no Jokers) and ask them to complete a simple assignment: Sort your deck of cards. Nothing further. Just sort the deck.

Besides a few odd looks, when I remind them they have only 3 minutes, they get busy.

What do people do? Here are some common variations:

• Four stacks: one for each suit (most common).
• Two stacks: face cards and numbered cards.
• 13 stacks: one stack for each card value.
• Three stacks: face cards looking left (Kings of Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs; Queens of Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs; Jacks of Diamonds and Hearts), face cards looking right (King of Spades; Queen Spades; Jacks of Clubs and Spades) and number cards. Card shark warning: don’t bet against this person
• Two stacks: red and black cards.

If you’ve gotten your hands on a copy of my 99 Questions to Jump Start Your Channel Partner Brain book, you’ll see this Acknowledgement:

“I want to thank Jim Sheffler for getting me off on the right foot early in my career at Intel. Jim (then at Hamilton-Avnet) and I sold millions through distribution. We made a great team.”

Jim played a pivotal role in my favorite Channel Partner success story.

While I’ve had many, many other Channel Partner success stories, like my #2 favorite win: A $1million deal for CellBlazer data-over-cellular modems to IUSACELL (Mexico City) in 1992 for a non-mobile, local telco bypass (thank you, Butch Dawkins and Daniel Rios), my work with Mr. Sheffler tops the charts.

The tag-team of Sheffler & Fox (c.1981-83) was a combination of opposites and similarities…