Mastering Influence - the Key to Unlocking Your Channel

There is a great deal written on the academic theory of influence and motivation in humans. In the channel typically we end up reverting to some very traditional forms of persuasion; be it reciprocity, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your’s (sell my product and I’ll give you a fiver); scarcity, prices available for a limited time only; or more negative coercion, such as risking punishment (withdrawing of a rebate) if we don’t conform.

I’m sure you’ve all had varying degrees of success with these tactics and I’d be very interested to hear your personal experiences.

Influence must transcend tactics. I’d argue it is probably the principle on which your channel success depends and for that reason we built a business around it.

Without getting into complex channel eco-system design thinking, the channel in its simplest form is made up of a series of buyers.

Distribution buy from you, reseller buys from distribution (or you) and customer buys from reseller. Simple.

Success is dependent on influencing those buyer behaviours all the way through the value chain.

In order to achieve this we need to understand each and every one of our channel buyer personas.

A distributor thinks and acts very differently from a reseller, a Managed Service Provider's thinking is not that of an e-tailer, your partner's owner thinks very differently to one of their sales reps, whose responses are nothing like their technicians and your end-customers think and behave very differently from all of them. I could go on.

In each and every case you have to deeply understand the subtlety of each individual persona in order to have any chance of influencing them.

Assuming market acceptance of your product, it is (theoretically) easy to influence your partner by offering them the best margins in the market.

However, if your end-customer is not interested in buying your product today; or your reseller sales reps have a better reward for selling something else; or partner technical teams are deeply entrenched in your competitor’s “University”; or your backend process is not set up to support your channel partners with quick turnaround on price, you won’t get very far. 

The theories on influence have been around for a long time, they are more prevalent in today's channel than ever and I'll share more on the theme over time.

Nail buyer behaviour and focus your investment on influencing individual agendas and you will have the channel in the palm of your hands.