What sales channel do you need to support your growth? What type do you need? How many do you need? How do you equip them for success?

The articles presented below answer these and many more questions about how to design, build and optimise a sales channel in a well-run business.

At align.me (pronounced without the dot), we’re often known by customers for only one of the services we deliver. You might know us as a sales training company, a marketing training company, a planning consultancy, an outsourced marketing company (only in Australia) or the providers of the popular marketing planning software Funnel Plan. Clearly, we are all of those things.

In the articles below though, we explain that there’s no point building a marketing plan for the wrong sales channel. A successful sales channel will be skilled, chosen for their capacity to help your chosen target market to understand the problem that you solve uncommonly well, and to believe uniquely in your ability to solve that problem.

How busy should your sales people be? [video]

How busy should your salespeople be? How many meetings should they have every week? More than they're doing at the moment, and less than you think. Let me explain why. https://www.youtube.com/embed/saucAqP7lcQ What are you overlooking in your calculations?     Factor #1 Firstly, I would like to highlight why the number of meetings your sales people should be doing is less than you think. Below is the basic math for this calculation, taking into consideration what is often overlooked. You may live in a different country, whereby your holidays and jurisdictions are different, but the same READ MORE

Channel Partner [video]

Do you want sell through a channel partner? Or build a program for recruiting and managing multiple channel partners? Let me share with you six steps for finding and managing the perfect channel partner. First, understand that a channel can refer, or sell, or distribute, or implement, your product or service Focus on different types of channels at each stage of market maturity. I'll go into this shortly, but for example, in the early market we want direct channel, that is our own salespeople, whereas later in the maturity of the market, we want to be READ MORE

Your channel partner strategy plan begins with ‘who’

Your channel partner strategy plan needs to begin with "who"? But like so much of strategy, the "who" question isn't "who should my channel be?", but "who is my buyer?", and therefore "what sort of channel do my buyers need?" We're arguing here that your channel partner strategy plan needs to be based on what your buyers need, not on what you need. What type of channel your buyers need, and how many channel sales people you need to provide to meet that need, changes as the market matures. We'll show you how to work out your channel READ MORE

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