At the beginning of each year, sales ops scrambles to identify the quotas assigned to the “Named Account” teams within their organizations.  They roll up the sales data from within CRM systems, overlay channel POS data, apply a growth factor and bam! … there are the revenue targets for the year.

But are the named or managed accounts always the fastest growing, do they represent the best cross- and up-sell opportunities … in other words, what about the accounts that aren’t in your CRM system … are they being considered in this process? Do you know who the top 100 accounts are by revenue that aren’t named or managed accounts? Are you proactively tracking and identifying the new accounts that your team can be targeting by market segment?

If you intend to hit your sales growth targets, you had better find a way to track sales through all resellers and to all end-customers even if they aren’t in your CRM system. Roll-up the POS data by every account you sell to. Proactively analyze these lists throughout the year (the top 10, 100 or 1,000 non-named resellers and end-customers) to systematically begin identifying the top candidates for new named account coverage. Compare trends for these accounts year after year. Stack them against your named account list and see where they rank.

Start now to develop the next tier of named accounts for 2011. These accounts exist even if they aren’t in your CRM system yet. You can systematically develop a process for identifying the “hot-list” of accounts to track and target along the way, and can proactively add to your managed account list during the year as your coverage allows.

Spreadsheets are the most common tool for managing channel data and tracking channel performance. Many of the world’s largest corporations are still managing significant portions of their channel operations through spreadsheets. They’re calculating incentive program payments through spreadsheets, determining sales rep compensation through spreadsheets, reconciling special pricing discounts through spreadsheets and tracking sales performance through spreadsheets.

Sounds simple and flexible, but is it really?  Spreadsheets also provide the “opportunity” to correct the same data errors week-after-week and month-after-month and year-after-year. The same errors are reported over-and-over again and you correct these same errors over and over since your spreadsheets don’t learn.   And not only do they not learn your corrections, they don’t learn the relationships within the data.  They calculate, they organize but they don’t learn your adjustments or corrections.  Spreadsheets leave that up to you…

Is this the best use of your time?

Indirect channel sales continue to grow as a percentage of overall sales, especially in High Tech products.  New products, new markets, demand for shorter product lifecycles, and faster time to market, all mean more inventory in the channel.  And without proper visibility, it’s easy to find your business at risk with large inventory liabilities when conditions change, or to miss market opportunities due to poor inventory deployment or channel leakage.

In fact, an executive at a large High Tech products company recently told us that it took them 75 days to get accurate information on inventory levels across their multi-tier channel.  As a result, when business slowed rapidly last year, they found themselves with too much of the wrong product in the wrong places in their channel, costing them millions of dollars to correct.  Even though they were using some of the strongest product forecasting tools available, without timely visibility and insight into what was really happening on the ground, they couldn’t tie real-time market activity back to their forecasts to make the right channel inventory decisions.  He has vowed never to find himself in that position again!

Are you at risk as well?  What about your channel inventory?  Do you know where your inventory is in real-time?  Can you quickly evaluate price change impacts due to price protection commitments?  Are you losing revenue from gray market activity?  Do you have obsolete inventory in the channel waiting to surprise you with big returns?  It’s easy to ignore inventory problems when you don’t know their scope and sales are growing, but there is big money on the table if you can optimize your channel inventory management before it becomes a problem.