With increased competition and evolving consumer preferences, companies must adopt intelligent approaches to identify the most effective sales channels, empower their teams, and incorporate technology to automate processes and improve overall sales performance.
Problems arising from a lack of sales channel management
Poor sales channel management brings a series of problems with it. In addition to any conflict between them—such as channels that may end up competing with each other—the organization may also face obstacles such as:
- Inconsistencies in messages to consumers about products or services that could harm the brand image
- Unfair competition, as other companies can take advantage of gaps and bottlenecks in processes to siphon off customers
- Failures in logistics and distribution, as problems in sales channels directly impact these other areas of the company, whether due to the lack of availability of a product or excess stock, for example
- Low customer satisfaction and loss of brand loyalty
- Compliance risks, especially for regulated sectors, which can bring legal penalties or damage to the company's reputation
- Loss of growth opportunities—after all, with good management of sales channels, the company may also gain the chance to expand into new markets or segments.
Importance of efficient sales channel management
Managing sales channels helps companies map opportunities and potential customers, aiming to improve customer service and understand the most diverse scenarios for marketing products and services.
This way, sales aligns with the company's strategic goals, with the aim of sustainable business growth always emphasized.
Some of the reasons why sales channel management is fundamental to success:
- Expands market reach, allowing companies to reach a larger and more diverse audience
- Strengthens relationships with partners, such as distributors and resellers, to increase trust between all parties involved in the business
- Improves customer experience, ensuring more consistency at all points of contact, to build an even stronger brand among consumers
- Optimizes operational efficiency, reducing costs and ensuring an even more qualified supply chain
- Obtains customer feedback, acquiring insights into the market's and consumers' real needs, for new business opportunities and process improvements.
Step-by-step best practices for managing sales channels
To improve the management of your company's sales channels, here's a step-by-step guide with five essential practices to identify the best opportunities and boost the growth of your business:
1. Identification of sales channels
First, you need to identify the channels that best suit your product, service, and target audience. But how to do this?
- Analyze the market to better understand where your audience is present
- Check the competition to see which channels these companies are using and study new opportunities for growth
- Experiment with different sales channels, such as direct sales, ecommerce, marketplaces, and social networks, among others, to see which generate better results in a given period
- Evaluate the performance of sales channels, both in terms of return on investment (ROI) and other strategic performance KPIs
- Better understand customers to see where they prefer to buy your products or services; this customer feedback can be done through surveys, web forms, social media interactions, and more.
2. Use of technology
With technology, companies can automate repetitive and manual processes, ensuring teams have more time for strategic actions. This means your organization will have greater efficiency, quality, cost reduction, and customer satisfaction.
In addition to CRM (customer relationship management) tools that facilitate monitoring of the entire sales funnel across diverse channels, it's also essential to think about software that centralizes information and improves the performance of sales and customer support teams, for example.
A low-code business process management (BPM) system, like Qntrl, helps companies improve their business processes by providing tools to model, analyze, and optimize these operations.
In addition to rapid application development, without needing to be an expert in systems programming, BPM software enables even more flexibility, customization, and collaboration between teams, preparing the company for business scalability.
3. Standardization of processes
Standardized processes ensure more consistency in the quality of customer service and customer experience across the company's most diverse sales channels. Standardization reduces time and effort with well-defined workflows, defined responsibilities, and everyone on the same page, in search of the best results for the organization.
4. New growth strategies
Focus on seeking new channels to increase the company's exposure while the organization works to maximize the performance of existing channels. For example, think about new strategic partnerships and other forms of collaboration with companies with complementary channels.
Or, you can diversify sales channels and expand to other platforms, such as opening new physical stores or creating virtual stores. Tactics to strengthen customer relationships on existing and new channels are also valid for providing personalized service and boosting sales.
5. Team training
After you've identified the channels and gaps in your processes and new sales opportunities, you need to train the teams. How? Through specific training for each sales channel, sale and negotiation techniques for physical and online points of sale, and more.
It's essential to highlight that monitoring teams is also important, with a clear focus on continuous development, so that everyone can improve their respective performance in each of the company's sales channels.
Here's a tip: Efficient channel management improves the customer experience and your business' entire sales operation. With this, companies can effectively structure current sales channels and increase the reach of their products and services with new channels, thus ensuring a more strategic position in the market.
