“Mind if I come in?” said the Fox to the Hens.

Multiple distribution channels, with different products and services moving through each. Layers of sales and support staff, resellers from small to large, all with different needs at different times—and all required to adhere to the beat of the same corporate drum.

Ain’t life grand?

The more complex the merrier in my opinion.

A corporation’s multiple sales channels are usually siloed in distinct ways. Products, service, and support can vary radically depending on the channel and who’s selling what to whom. This could be by design or inherited via acquisition or diversification. It could be corporate strategy to keep them at arm’s length, with separate bottom-line expectations for each. Oceans may separate them for that matter.

We work with a global company with distinct B2B and B2C channels. Prospects and clients meet specific financial criteria within each channel, with products and services varied accordingly. But here and there, the company identified natural brand extensions best sold and serviced by independent resellers.

The infrastructure required wasn’t that dissimilar from the internal systems already in place. But the security requirements of these types of extranets was tantamount. In a way, it felt like letting the fox in the henhouse.

While our client operated a highly secure intranet of its own, these external sellers needed to communicate seamlessly with corporate for legal, compliance and accounting tasks. Likewise, Resellers had to meet the same stringent requirements mandated by HQ when it came to their own business practices: customer complaint capture, dispute handling, fraud detection. Data for all these items are sent to HQ in specific formats and specific intervals. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Managing users, processes, controls, and data between large and small businesses can be challenging. We thrive on it. And—more importantly—we’re good at it.

Got something we should take a look at? Ready when you are.

How to Teach Old Data New Tricks

Several years ago—actually quite a while back—I was on a mission to uncover what a group of franchisees really needed to know in order to sell more of their stuff. I made visits to the biggest ones and asked a favor: Could we take a look at their customer data for the last 3 years just to see what we could find? We didn’t share it with anyone and we didn’t charge them, either.

One owner sort of laughed and told me he doubted I could teach him anything about his business; he owned one of the most successful agencies in the country. The others were thrilled.

Off we went. Sliced and diced, appended segmentation data based on domicile and buying propensities, and conducted recency/frequency analyses. Then, we looked at average profit per transaction by customer type and supplier.

Wow. Wow. Wow!

The new rules of road were really the same for each agency we analyzed:

• Best customers are those who repeatedly deliver a profit-per-transaction equal to or greater than the agency average.
• Take care of the clients you have but only target prospects that align with your best customer profiles.
• Timing of sales outreach is everything, and can vary by target propensity
  • It’s not just how quickly you can close the sale when you touch base with your clients. It’s knowing the interval between sales—by each best customer type—that’s worth your marketing dollar’s weight in gold.

  And that big naysayer? Sales of one particular type of service increased by 30% in the following 18 months. Our program got them Agency of the Year.

  We never made a dime but it changed my views on everything.