Sales Coverage

Critical to managing and improving the channel business proposition is the appropriate sales coverage of Channel partners, as well as your sales coverage of customer accounts that are represent opportunity for your channel partners. Many types of coverage options exist, of varying intensity and type, from direct involvement of field sales, pre-sales support and services personnel through remote-based telecoverage and web-based information services.

Understanding the costs, impacts and appropriateness of these coverages, and optimizing your coverage resources, requires sophisticated modeling that is ideally suited to the dynamic CDS modeling approach. CDS can and has been used to model the effectiveness of experienced vs. inexperienced sales and partner coverage, the time ramps to increase this experience and effectiveness, the effects of attrition and new hiring on results, and the incremental effect of different kinds of coverage, applied at different organizations within partner and customer organizations.

For example, using CDS, it is possible to predict the effects of telecoverage and “deal support” provided directly to partner sales force personnel, vs. field-based partner headquarters coverage or web-based sales support. Since these types of coverage effects vary widely by the partner’s specific business model and the other elements of the business proposition, and costs of coverage vary as a channel grows, it is important to take a dynamic modeling approach to understanding the consequences of a given coverage model.