Teledirect: Case Studies - Information Technology Industry - Inside Sales/Sales Channel Management

The Client
The client is a leading IT manufacturer supplying the computing and communications industries with computers, servers and networking and communications products. It has a multi-tier sales distribution model, where each country has one or many distributors, serving its tens of thousands of Premium Partners and resellers.

The Case
The client wishes to be closer to the market place and its channel members. Their objective is to communicate its channel programs timely and effectively, and to increase product sales.

The client recognised that a regional Telesales Account Management team was needed to strengthen its channel relationship and acquire channel intelligence. They looked to Teledirect for a solution.

The Strategy
A team to manage the complete channel business process involving the top tens of thousands of accounts across 20 APAC countries was established within two months. Reseller contacts and their individual profiles were gathered by Teledirect and stored into a centralized database system.

Teledirect designed a new CRM tool that allowed Telesales Account Managers to track each unclosed issue and email/SMS information to other stakeholders in one transaction. In addition, Teledirect designed a web-based reseller system that allows resellers to enter issues and sales leads. By doing so, the client could obtain up-to-date consolidated market information on all sales leads across the region.

Channel sell-thru information is tracked weekly, and fed into Teledirect’s data analysis tool. Sales trend Information analysis generated includes:
• sales trend by country
• sales trend by product
• sales trend by reseller

This allows the Client and Teledirect to work together in new channel program development. For each new channel program, Teledirect is involved in the following:
• Communication of the new program
• Enlisting of customers during the program
• Fulfillment of the program deliverables.

All programs help to generate additional sales revenue for the client.

The Result
With Teledirect’s help, the client increased its channel relationship reach by 900% from the top 5% resellers to the top 45% resellers in each APAC country. The sales contribution from the covered segment increased by 30% in the first quarter of operations.

The Conclusion
The Inside Sales team is on a trend of achieving a quarter on quarter growth of 50%, and the client is exploring ways of increasing the total team size to cater for additional business generated.