Developing a Reseller Strategy for WindStream, Leader in MicroWind

Anyone who’s ever used a reseller channel (dealers, retailers, VARs, distributors, mass merchandisers, etc.) knows that this whole approach to marketing and sales is the ultimate “double-edged sword.”  The most obvious benefits include an enormous and more-or-less instant expansion of your sales force with very little overhead, and thus a huge amount of leverage in terms of reaching your target end-user customer segments.  Where it would require eons for you to develop these relationships from scratch, resellers come with them neatly tucked into place.

The most obvious downside is lack of mind-share.  These people don’t work for you; you cannot manage them directly, so if you don’t provide them adequate training – and, more importantly – incentive, you’re headed for certain failure. 

But the problems don’t end there.  Sometimes there are subtle dynamics affecting resellers’ behavior.  The classic example in modern times is the development of sales channels for electric vehicles.  I know people who think that all these new EVs coming out of R&D and onto our roads are going to be sold successfully through the same channels as cars with internal combustion engines.

Wrong.

There are probably a dozen subtleties that I can’t see from here, but here’s a concept that’s not even a bit subtle: car dealers do not want to sell something that will run 500,000 miles before it needs so much as a tune-up.

So, what does this imply for a reseller strategy for my client WindStream?  Here’s a company with a breakthrough in “microwind” (small, cost-effective wind turbines).  They have a manufacturing facility in Indiana, busily cranking out product to an international customer base with an enormous appetite for clean and relatively cheap electricity.  Couldn’t they develop their own sales force, and jet them all over the globe selling to military bases, schools, shopping malls, etc.?

Of course, if they didn’t care about the burn-rate of investors’ capital.  So, soon we’ll have mass merchandisers selling to do-it-yourself consumers, and a blend of contractors with robust businesses in energy efficiency and renewables repping the WindStream product from here toHalifax.

My experience as a business consultant includes many dozens of case studies in this space, including a headline project for Hewlett-Packard, in which the client’s “DARs” (distributor-authorized resellers) experienced tens of millions of dollars of sales over a period of just a couple of months, based on the demand we generated for them in financial apps and ERP (enterprise resource planning), running on H-P servers.