Your Sales Team
Executing a Partner driven sales process is fragile. Relying on human execution, the potential for error is great. It is a sobering fact that your reseller-partners’ sales professionals are an essential power that governs your business. They represent the front line for communicating your value propositions to your customer base. Undeniably, your partners’ sales representatives can easily make or break the opinion of your company in the competitive marketplace. It is a grave truth that they have power that directly impacts your revenue line.

How do your partners’ sales teams operate in the context of one-on-one sales calls with your end-user prospects? What do they really say? Are they able to manage hard-hitting objections? Can they coherently express your products with intelligible clarity? You have revenue figures, but do you really know the content of the message that they carry? Are they more loyal to your competitors than to you? Do they accurately reflect the benefits associated with your products? Can they articulate your company’s core message? Are they carefully appropriating suitable knowledge so as to expand sales opportunities with your end-user customers? What kind of information have you utilized to create partner training? Have you ascertained unbiased information that will allow you to deploy customized training for each partner based upon that particular partners’ lack of skillfulness or insufficient product knowledge? Do you deploy the same training to each partner without gaining a deep understanding of its respective sales strengths and deficiencies? Even if your partner is producing, is it possible that there is a large gap between the perceived success of your partners’ sales team members, and the reality of its missed potential? Blaire Group’s Partner Sales-Audit^SM is designed to answer these questions and other unsolved mysteries about your partners’ sales functions. A Partner Sales-Audit^SM will give you a greater span of control over your partners’ sales teams by equipping you with detailed knowledge. Knowledge that will help you manage them, instead of them managing you. Knowledge that will help you optimize them, rather than aimlessly accepting norms that are harmful to your revenue achievement goals.

What is a Strategic Partner Sales-Audit ^SM?
A Partner Sales-Audit^SM will provide a weighted, quantitative scorecard analysis for each audited sales representative’s performance regarding fundamental selling skillfulness compared against “best practices”. Further, it allows you to measure your partners’ sales representatives for product knowledge, brand loyalty, and critical messaging. Additionally, a comprehensive findings report is provided to illustrate trends and effectiveness for Partner based sales teams; it will allow you to compare sales effectiveness and loyalty against each of your reseller-partners. A Partner Sales-Audit^SM will help you understand how committed your partners are to you and your product offerings. Blaire Group Analysts will engage each of your selected reseller-partners’ sales professionals in lengthy telephone sales calls. Utilizing a “mystery prospect” model, and under the pretense as a bona-fide prospect, each sales call will be skillfully conducted so as to “inspect” each sales professional for vital measurements that will be customized by you. It will give you an independent assessment for each of your audited partners. The results deliver powerful information that will assist you with:

• Assessing your partners’ sales skillfulness against the bar of excellence,
• Evaluating what level of loyalty and commitment your partners extend to you as compared to your competitors,
• Equipping your partners’ sales teams by customizing meaningful training programs based upon independently verified, unbiased, and factual information,
• Executing sensitive channel cleansing decisions, i.e. partner promotion, probation, and dismissal decisions,
• Revealing critical areas of reseller-partner deficiency by identifying fundamental limitations. Sales process & methodology, product knowledge, brand loyalty, messaging, and other performance disciplines will be measured,
• Determining whether your partners’ sales teams are adequately communicating your messages, your product solutions, and your value propositions.

What will a Partner Sales-Audit^SM provide?
Similar to a financial audit, a Partner Sales-Audit^SM provides an across-the-board assessment of the relative strengths and weaknesses for both individual sales professionals and entire sales teams.

A Partner Sales-Audit^SM helps companies identify both positive and negative trends amongst its reseller base. The results deliver powerful information that assist with customizing future sales training efforts by targeting critical areas. Your management team will be presented performance in the form of quantitative and qualitative results.

An un-audited sales team results in:

• Unmet sales objectives,
• Loss of client opportunities due to ineffective technique,
• Confused customer base due to non-uniform messaging,
• Missed revenue targets due to poor execution

A Partner Sales-Audit^SM provides a weighted, quantitative scorecard analyzing each sales representative’s relative performance regarding pivotal sales technique metrics. Additionally, a summary weighted scorecard is provided to illustrate trends and effectiveness for the entire sales team.

Imagine the power of knowing what your reseller-partners’ sales professionals are really saying to your clients and prospects? By conducting a Partner Sales-Audit^SM, you’ll get detailed answers to the following questions:

• Are your partners’ sales teams communicating the correct message?
• Do they convey products and services effectively?
• Do they employ professionalism regarding basic actions like rapid follow-up or probing for a deeper understanding of your prospect’s pain points? Are they adequately articulating the vision of your company and its solutions?
• Are your partners’ sales teams demonstrating loyalty to your product offerings? Will they misuse your leads?
• Do they speak in terms of benefits or features?
• Are their presentations overly technology-driven and potentially unintelligible to the laymen?
• How do each of your partners’ sales compare against each other? Is there a correlation between brand loyalty and revenue production?

How is the Partner Sales-Audit ^SM Scorecard organized?
The scorecard is presented in three formats:

• Sales Member Scorecard - each sales professional audited is presented with a scorecard reflecting his/her individual audit,
• Sales Team Scorecard - a trend analysis documenting statistically significant performance for each reseller-partners’ sales team,
• Competitive Analysis Scorecard - documented results from each partners’ sales team audit evaluated alongside each other,

Each scorecard is fully customizable and organized into the following nine sections:

1. Core Message Presentation: This section examines the accuracy and clarity of the presentation of your corporate history, company philosophy, and core competencies as expressed by your partner’ sales team. Errors in fundamental messaging skills can be fatal to any selling process and must be corrected immediately.
2. Essential Communication: A thorough examination of necessary communications skills is conducted. As an example, research indicates that vocal tone boosts communication effectiveness by 80%. Sales teams who have not mastered vocal intonation skills are regarded as poor communicators.
3. Brand Loyalty: Do your partners’ sales professionals display loyalty to your brand? What do they say to a neutral buyer? How do they react to a buyer who inquired initially about your products due to your advertising? Do they steer the buyer to a different product based upon spiffs or other incentives?
4. Qualifying Inquiry: This section analyzes appropriate qualifying skills. Do your partners’ sales teams qualify appropriately? Studies show that top sales producers win, as the result of having mastered superior qualification techniques.
5. Product Knowledge: A complete examination of product knowledge and product messaging is conducted. Do members of your partners’ sales teams thoroughly understand the prospect’s challenges? Do they recommend appropriate solutions? Failure to do so can result in prospects that do not put confidence in your company.
6. Use of Persuasive Resources: Do your partners’ sales professionals leverage helpful, persuasive resources? Example: Guiding the prospect to your homepage and performing a simple demonstration could ignite interest and accelerate next step action items. A lack of resourcefulness may undermine credibility.
7. Closing: Closing a deal is a natural step in a cycle that is comprised of a series of closes. Do your partners’ sales team members understand that every meeting should conclude with some type of close? Example: A “next step” roadmap should be identified at the close of every juncture. Each meeting is simply a fulfillment of previously agreed-upon objectives that graduate to the next step.
8. Professionalism: This section answers basic questions about each sales professional: Do they exhibit professional behavior? Are they helpful and courteous? Do they exude confidence and motivate prospects to conduct business with your firm?
9. Subjective Commentary: A value-added section in which the analyst has the ability to express findings in paragraph format that might not be reflected in the audit data.

How is the data tabulated?
After conducting each audit, your analyst completes individual scorecards and ultimately calculates the entire group’s performance, which highlights trends. Your analyst will additionally gather competitive data to provide an assessment of your team’s performance compared against your selected peer and competitor group.

For each sales team member, the Sales-Audit^SM SM results will reveal strengths and weaknesses by category.

What are weighted values?
Scores are carefully determined by using The Blaire Group’s Sales-Audit^SMWeighted Value System ^SM for factors that you deem most important. Fully customizable weights are multipliers that provide scoring intended to mirror your corporate priorities.

For example, weights of 10, 20, and 30 can be selected based on the following criteria:
10 = Significant
20 = Vital
30 = Critical

What does the scale mean?
When evaluating your sales team, performance will be ranked by the following guidelines:
0 = Failed execution, no attempt made
1 = Made attempt, but not convincing
2 = Demonstrated competence
3 = Excellent, perfect execution

Summary Evaluation
When the percentiles have been formulated and the sales team has been ranked, your analyst will evaluate both individual and overall team performances. Your management team will be presented performance in the form of quantitative and qualitative results.

The Blaire Group shares your high standards. Our percentile rankings are as follows:
90 to 100 Percentile – Exceeds expectations
80 to 90 Percentile – Meets expectations
Below 80 Percentile – Fails to meet expectations

Sales-Audit^SM Consulting