In a recent expert interview, Stephen Drees and Jim Kahmann of The Allegiant Group explored the issues surrounding changes in the field of sales channel management, and thrashed out its continuing role in fostering long-term customer loyalty for suppliers and their channel partners.
The resultant paper, entitled Allegiant On Sales Channel Management - Navigating the Changing Channels, explains that, as the business environment becomes more competitive and organisations seek to reduce go-to-market costs, companies are relying increasingly on indirect channels to generate sales.
Indeed, one of the problems that many suppliers face is that there are lots of different types of indirect sales channels (e.g. brokers, agents, distributors, resellers, dealers, and so on) - and understanding how to manage them all effectively not only increasingly important but also increasingly difficult.
Indirect sales vs. customer loyalty
According to Drees and Kahmann, problems often arise when a company sells through indirect channels instead of the channels it owns and controls directly.
One of the most troublesome issues is how indirect channels affect customer loyalty. The advent of the internet and its increasing role within the sales channel mix has created extra opportunities - and also complexities - for companies and their sales partners.
Download the paper
Allegiant's paper (presented in the form of an expert-to-expert discussion) provides an overview of the key issues of effective sales channel management and explains how to make best use of these relationships to achieve the most important end objective: the creation of repeat sales by nurturing end-customer loyalty.
The paper is available as a free download (as a PDF document) - click here.
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