There are various innovative ways we can look at selling T&M products and services in India.A particular situation prevailing is that a particular representative is usually tied to a foreign company or a multinational export distributor,and he is made to follow a distribution or selling model suiting to that specific principals.The selling model can be pure play direct sales force,where you are distributing exclusively their boxes and building brand strength for that overseas company. The brand image gets built at the expense of distributor manpower quality and coverage.The IP and all the hard work is done by the specific employees of the distributor and the insularity gets built between the market and the overseas sales management based in the region.At certain point of time they decide to go direct and leave the good people high and dry in the Country.It doesn't lead to a strong channel network on the ground.
Charles Handy in his book -The age of unreason- has described various ways for a company to build overseas business based on earliest "outsourcing" way.Keep the direct costs limited to Top in resident country manager and employ natives to run after the business at highly sales percentage commission based compensation with very little,or zero fixed compensation.Generally in India such a model doesn't work,as the self motivation for a T&M product line-where the deals and customers are few and far between- is very thin and they prefer to look out for steady income.Professional grooming and sales training is rare and ultimately smart competitors steal away the good people,or these people pick up their own line and leave! It is not a great Win-Win ending either way.
With Indian Ecosystem for both the Hitech customers and pure play distributors changed since 1991 Liberalisation and telecom mobile penetration ,the technology can help address this situation.Our ultimate objective is to create a robust well oile sales and support machinery on the ground and not loose smart people to the OEM regional Asia op team of Competitors.A stable sales force will lead to growing business,but needs sustained skills and people practices.This will be possible if our sales roles are flexible,dynamic,innovative and in tune with market conditions.That actually requires us to understand three to four crucial skills are critical in building sales team.Ability to get orders,from large and geographically spread small accounts,Supporting on pre and post sales basis and be able to collect our Accounts Recievables in time are those qualities .All leadership have to recognize,reward and retain these attributes for a buildup.
For a typical product boxes or hardware company channel sales models are fading very rapidly as role of personal selling is changing everyday.From Peddlers to Sales Engineering to Consultative Seller they are constantly on the run as the loner! Take care of them both as professionals and humans and they will be foundation for good leadership in the field.Ignore them and your organisation will be constantly fragile. Choice is yours to build a solid thing,or constantly firefight!
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