It's Physics, Not Magic
Posted on Mon, Nov 02, 2009 @ 11:36 AM
Shortly upon my arrival at Everything Channel (EC), I coined the phrase, "It's physics, not magic." When EC acquired my former company over a year ago, it was in the midst of a transformation from a pure media company to a marketing services company. And providing solution partner (SP) recruiting and inside sales services, which is what my company specialized in, is very different from generating content and printing pages.
So why this thing about physics and magic? Well, as a company EC did not fully realize how this SP recruiting and sales management thing worked. And for the most part, our clients, IT manufacturers, didn't either.
Gambling is not gambling if you know what you‘re doing. A professional poker player knows the number of cards for each suit and is always working probabilities when deciding to "go all in" or "fold". I gotta tell you, I play poker every once in a while with friends. And since I really don't have much of a clue on how to play, when I win it's really MAGIC!
Like gambling, SP recruitment and sales management is all about ratios and probabilities, if you know what you are doing. And for those of us that do this for a living, like a professional poker player, we know the odds and probability of winning.
Let's take recruiting, for example. I tell manufacturers that with unlimited time and money, any recruiting target is attainable. So when we get a request to recruit 500 partners in six months (magic), I tell them how much it's going to cost (physics). To which the response most of the time is, "That much?!" You see, after all the years of doing this, we know what typical yield lists are. We also know how many SPs a good account executive can recruit in one week. Armed with this information, arriving at the project costs is a simple math exercise.
The same holds true for the sales management of new partners. More often than not, manufacturers expect a recently recruited partner to start producing revenue from the word "go". Well, based on experience and backed by research done by EC's Institute of Partner Education and Development (IPED), we know it takes about 18 months to fully ramp a new partner (physics). So expecting a partner to be revenue productive right away is unrealistic (magic).
At times, manufacturers of more commoditized products (displays, hard drivers, etc.) think that the laws of physics do not apply to them. Well, even in these product segments, it takes a good 6-9 months for SPs to "switch" brands and put all their company's efforts and energy behind a new product line.
As everything in life, there is no "free ride" when it comes to recruiting and managing SPs to success. For just about any product segment, there are 3-5 tops brands. This means that SPs have choices in which brands they choose to partner and work with. This simply means it takes time, money, effort and patience on the part of the manufacturer to find and grow new partners. It's physics, not magic.