If you had an objective of knocking down 300 pins in a bowling alley, you could practice for years yet never bowl a perfect game. Of course, if you gathered a few friends across all the lanes, you’d easily reach that target. Just like in the bowling alley, sometimes you need to expand your sales strategies across multiple channels to help you reach your goals.
Selling manufactured products through the same channels will often get the same results, with little changes to market share or growth over time. But, finding new sales channels can help you scale and boost profitability. What if a company like Bosch or General Electric contacted you and wanted their sales channels to sell your products? It could be like winning the lottery.
But there’s one hitch—your product is configurable and made-to-order and pricing isn’t easy for an inexperienced salesperson. Bosch requires you to provide a configurable online guided selling solution. That’s when you need a Configure, Price, Quote software designed for multi-channel sales organizations. Here are three ways CPQ software gives new capabilities for accessing new sales channels and dramatically scaling up your revenue.
Multi-Channel Sales Strategy #1 – Selling Through OEMs
While you’re reviewing Bosch’s offer, you may wonder if selling through an OEM is the right move. Your first question should be—what channel will serve my customer best?
Customers may want to be as close to the source of innovation as possible for new products. They’ll only buy proven products through channels. But then you can snowball your sales.
A large brand like Bosch would give you almost instant access to a large market. The right CPQ software would let you add Bosch’s logo in their CPQ portal. They could add their own users and you could immediately expand your sales.
Multi-Channel Sales Strategy #2 – Selling Internationally
Traditional ways to expand globally involve setting up an overseas office. But this means adding costs like working with independent reps, going to trade shows or embarking on a trade mission. Instead, you could go the modern digital route with CPQ software.
Customers often want to buy from a local distributor that has local relationships. That distributor is going to need an easy way to price and quote your products in their currency and language. Marketing internationally would let you sell to more markets and increase sales.
The capability to allow distributors to log into a dedicated sales quoting portal in the local language is built-in to some CPQ solutions. Leveraging these features, you could onboard local distributors who could configure and sell your products to their customers, thereby expanding your own footprint.
Multi-Channel Sales Strategy #3 – Multi-Brand Selling
Multi-brand selling lets different sales rep firms and distributors sell the same products you make today under different brand names into the same territories. There may be slight changes or less options between the two brands.
Let’s say you sell your product as Brand A, with 80 sales reps. Then you sell the same product through a different manufacturer’s company, as Brand B. They have 60 sales reps. Both Brand A and B are selling in the same territory, giving you coverage through 140 sales reps. You could also sell through Brand C through a national distributor. Then there’s Brand D who sells your product on Amazon or Grainger.
A multi-brand strategy lets you put labels on the same product, but for different manufacturers and sales channels. They’ll be able to quote custom configurations of your product using the same CPQ quoting software you use.
An eRep Channel Sales Success Story
Addison, an eRep client, and a mid-sized manufacturer of specialty air conditioning equipment is using eRep CPQ for their sales channels. They wanted to triple their sales, so they reached out to several large international manufacturers with large sales channels who needed their products for strategic reasons.
Within 45 days, eRep spooled up the same products with guided selling features for the brand’s sales reps. This let them add several hundred sales people to their sales force and increased orders dramatically within a matter of weeks. They did this with two other manufacturers, too. The result has been more than a 5x increase in sales within a 3-year period. eRep dynamically swaps the images, submittals, and logos depending upon the Brand so each Brand’s sales reps feel the products are part of their product line.
Having eRep helped them secure the contracts needed to be an OEM for these large brands. Now they’ve increased their sales by selling through the worldwide sales channels of three Fortune 500 companies – substantially increasing the value of the company.
Increase Your Channel Sales with eRep
Contact us for a free complimentary consultation to examine how your company can use eRep CPQ software to grow your revenue with a channel selling strategy.
Image by James Collins from Pixabay
