The explosion of web based buying alternatives is ratcheting up channel conflict for many sales organizations. Channel conflict can quickly erode the sales force’s carefully crafted value propositions, while undermining profitable revenue growth. Worse yet, unauthorized resellers’ activities can destroy brand equity and firm reputation — generating disaffected customers and bad online reviews — while alienating authorized channel partners.
These issues aren’t new to large consumer brands. But now every distribution intensive business-to-business sales organizations will face these issues, if they’ve not already. Confronting unauthorized, sometimes anonymous, third parties marketing their goods in competition with trusted partners, most will be unprepared to fight in channels they previously found easy to manage.
This panel examines the impact of channel conflict on business-to-business sales organizations, while presenting channel conflict resolution strategies for sales management. It includes case study examples of successful tactics, and insight into implementing effective MAP programs across offline and online channels.
