Zach Selch says most manufacturers have only 8 out of 40 distributors actually performing. His strategy flips that to 80% engaged and competent, potentially doubling short-term growth and achieving ten-fold growth over 3-7 years by fixing how companies acquire, manage, and hold distributors accountable.
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You know how you have 40 or so distributors and about 8 of them are engaged and competent and about 32 of them are mediocre and disengaged.
Of those 8 engaged ones, maybe 2 to 4 produce most of your international sales revenue.
At this point, either you're nodding your head because this is familiar to you, or you are not familiar with this. And maybe this message isn't aimed at you either because you aren't tasked with international sales growth or you're doing this so well that you really don't need any help from anybody. If this resonates with you, I'm about to tell you how you can invert that number. You can have 80% of your distributors engaged, competent, and accountable.
and the other 20% either on an improvement plan or in the process of being replaced by better partners in 12 to 14 months.
This inversion can drive 100% growth in the short term and tenfold growth in the 3 to 7 year timeframe, allowing you to access a bigger piece of the 96% of the world market That isn't domestic.
Zach is a true visionary, and I trust him for that. He knows how to motivate teams. My trust in Zach's unorthodox ways brought my company from a few millions in revenues to nearly $100 million.
Before I dig into exactly how you can achieve this, let's look at what might be holding you back from results like this today. First, most international sales managers are working with distributors, that were collected over the years from trade shows and that reached out to the company, not partners that were identified and onboarded with intent as part of a carefully crafted strategic plan. And these distributors often do not have the needed competencies, connections, or bandwidth to sell the product. Secondly, most manufacturers struggle to build mindshare with their of your salespeople. These salespeople often sell dozens of products and work with those products that they're most comfortable with. Thirdly, very few manufacturers have in place processes that drive a cadence of accountability with their channel organization. Imagine what life would be like If you had a partner as good as your very best distributor selling in each and every target market in the world, if every distributor in your organization knew how to sell as well as your best salesperson, if each and every member of the global sales team followed the right processes.
I have witnessed firsthand how Zach can take an underwhelming international sales team and channel and in record time turn into a high-performing powerhouse. His depth and experience in building an international channel is unparalleled. Zach's direct and pull-no-punches style cuts through the noise and gets to the vulnerabilities and remediation plan.
Zach is a brilliant sales manager, pulling together a very diverse team and coaching everyone to develop their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. By restructuring the sales process and coaching the team to work together, Zach was able to drive the sales growth substantially past anything that was anticipated.
I've had the pleasure of being mentored by Zach as I've built my sales career over the last 18 years. He really knows how to navigate diverse markets and to help coach sales teams to successfully close business using his targeted sales messaging approach.
Building a global footprint was key to the growth of our brand and our fund, and Zach was very helpful in advising us as to the early steps for expansion. Now we sell on 4 continents and we own brands from multiple countries.
I'm Zach Selch. After 35 years as a director and VP of global sales for 11 startups, a Fortune 1000, NASDAQ 100 company, and a $500 million manufacturer, during which I closed over a billion in sales to over 150 countries and onboarded over 1,000 distributors, I decided to shift to what I really enjoyed— mentoring global sales leaders. Over the years, I've mentored 10 CEOs, dozens of VPs, and hundreds of salespeople. This past year, my clients have won presidential export awards, been selected as Exporter of the Year by the Small Business Administration, and have generated tens of millions of dollars in growth over the previous year while entering dozens of new markets and onboarding a total of over 100 new distributors.
If we work together, you will acquire tools to build a solid data-driven strategy including identifying the correct markets, planning your go-to-market activities, building your team, and creating all the mark-on collateral and training materials that you need. You will learn how to find, recruit, onboard, and manage engaged, competent, and accountable distributors.
With the correct level of bandwidth, you will have the tools to turn around the weakest distribution team, either improve or replace, and you will have the tools to put in place a cadence of accountability that will drive permanent, predictable, and profitable global sales growth for years to come.
Here's the process that we will go through together.
First, you will have access to my comprehensive video training course that was developed for the U.S. government to support export sales training. Then we will have a workshop where we will build a strategic plan identifying target markets, Build an ideal distributor avatar. Audit your export readiness. Start work on improvement plans for your organization. We will build a list of priorities based around both driving improvement with your existing partners and engaging new markets and partners.
Then we'll put in place a weekly plan of accountability where we attack each of the priorities.
Execute, and then move on to the next, driving weekly improvements that will drive astounding growth compounded over the year. Obviously, that is a lot of work. There is an alternative to this: staying where you are, a small fraction of total company sales, struggling with distributors who ignore you, unable to forecast accurately, making quota every few years. Can you stay this way when you know that it's possible to have engaged, competent, and accountable distributors selling your products in every target market, driving up explosive sales growth?
No principal understands Africa, and nobody, I said nobody, understands how to get channel partners to perform like Zach.
Very, very few people around the world know the world as well as he does. To my knowledge, Zach has sold and closed deals pretty much anywhere.
As Vice President of Sales in Brazil, I worked with Zach for almost 20 years, and no American knows how to boost sales in Brazil like Zach does. His inciting approach taught us to increase sales in Brazil in a genuine way. We established an unknown brand as number one in record time in our country. In every province.
The next step is pretty simple. Click the button below to set up a free 1-hour coaching strategy session. There is no obligation to work together, and while you will gain an understanding into what it's like working with me, you will actually be able to get a fair amount of value out of that hour should you decide that this isn't for you.
