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His business, Go To Market works with resellers and their vendor partners to increase sales productivity and develop and implement marketing strategies while acting as a management coach and mentor for smaller reseller organisations that have revenues as low as $5 million per annum, which seems to be the entry level we heard from most consultants.

“The first thing we start off with is determining what their goals are for the year. What is in the pipeline and what is already booked? Then we can look at the gap”, explains Paddon.

He first helps you identify where future sales might come from: Your installed base? Existing customers who are candidates to be up-sold to new products? New customers who can be sold existing products? Or even new customers that can be sold new products?

Naturally you need a different strategy to achieve success in each area. To build new customers you need sales people who are “hunters”, to exploit existing customer relationships to gain new sales, a “farmer” might make a better representative for your company.

Paddon says he next looks at the value proposition the reseller brings to the table. What is their value to the customer? What can they deliver? Is it unique? Is it highly prized? Next he does the same process with a focus on the vendors involved. What is the vendor’s value proposition? Do they provide leads, training, pre-sales, margin?

Once Go To Market has a picture of the business in mind they take a closer look at the sales reporting. “Management already understands the need to know what deals are going to close in short time,” says Paddon, “but if we are going to grow the business a company also needs to understand what prospecting is being done.”

“We know from research in the U.S. that 80 per cent of the leads from telemarketing aren’t followed up”, Paddon says, by way of example. Of those that are called, 30 per cent are hot prospects. Forty per cent are actually good prospects, but give the sales rep an answer that sounds like a no but really isn’t. It is more like “Don’t bother me now, come back in six months time”, Paddon suggests.

But the sales rep never comes back. Paddon talks about “Lead Relationship Management” programs which help resellers improve the consistency, predictability and quality of their sales pipeline. You have to track not only how many leads end up in a sale this quarter, but put in relationship building programs to develop the prospect over time.

If you track this properly, you can determine how many and what type of leads you need to generate a sale. By implementing a program for quality lead generation, argues Paddon, then tracking your success and cultivating leads over the long term, resellers can outperform the market.

The process has another effect though. It not only brings growth results, it allows you to build a solid picture of your sales pipeline and future revenues that you can present to potential investors. It becomes a part of the company’s business plan, part of its monthly cash flow analysis and profit and loss predictions.

Give this data to your new part-time CFO and they become part of the evidence of your company’s worth. So when you go to investors you can say: Here are our main revenue streams and this is what underpins them.

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