Channel Number 1

I’ve said it a thousand times, and we’ll carry on saying it: people buy from people, and the more complex the deal the greater the need for human interaction.

It’s the model on which most reseller, value-added resellers and distributors operate. In broad terms, if they want to sell more, they add more sales and account management people. Which in turn, makes their people their number one channel to market.

Typically, they don’t need a lot of information to be able to sell – when it comes to the nitty-gritty of closing a deal (particularly in tech or the more complex products and solutions), there’ll be specialists on hand to work with the account manager to create the relevant solution.

And therein lies a few basic, fundamental issues.

‘Not needing a lot’ often translates into ‘too little’ information of the right kind being supplied. Or the direct opposite happens – whereby a whole host of vendors and partners throw all the content they have at the account managers, and then there’s too much.

Either way, the content often doesn’t meet the needs they do have because not enough structure has been out in place to match the best kind, or most effective types, of content that has an impact across the sales cycle.

These basic, but far reaching issues underpin why we created Carousel.

Know what’s good content, and how to use it

By placing your company’s best-in-class sales and marketing content (and only the best-in-class content) in one place you solve much of the problem, but any new platform or system must be easy to use and intuitive if you want people to make the most of it. When we first pitched a Carousel solution, we simply showed a visual of Netflix and said: “you need something as easy to use as this.” That’s why Carousel runs off…carousels of content. It’s all there, accessible from one page.

Pay to Play

Carousel enables an organisation to be in control of the information that their sales community use, and why they would use it. And the sales people respond, because you’re making it easier for them to do their job. That kind of direct, effective route into your number one channel to market is attractive to your vendors and opens up a number of new ‘pay to play’ opportunities, such as content or content area sponsorship.

Incentives are key, and Carousel comes with a dedicated incentive promotion capability. Instead of relying on in-office communication or notification methods you can display all of your key incentives, in one place, for users to explore at their own pace.

Improving everyone’s experience

Content is no use whatsoever unless you put it in front of the people you want a reaction from. So, crucially, Carousel enables users to send content to their customers direct from the system and then understand whether they’ve looked at it. That type of data can inform the next conversation you have with your customer. And aside from the analytics, the customer has a much better, personalised experience when receiving your content, over and above simply receiving an email.

Because a little effort can go a long way.

Matt Neal,
Managing Director,
Differentiated