Report: 90% of US companies struggling to fill sales roles

Impartner. The company is based in Utah’s tech hotbed, the Silicon Slopes, and bills itself as "the world’s largest and fastest-growing pure-play Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution provider," has released a new report revealing that the process of recruiting and hiring enterprise sales professionals is becoming even more challenging. 

The company points to its new US-based study, stating "nine out of ten hiring managers find it difficult to recruit and hire direct sales professionals, with more than half (57%) reporting that the problem has intensified over the past year and a half. These hiring challenges directly prevent companies from reaching revenue goals, according to roughly three-quarters of those surveyed."

Then we're told that "the biggest single driver behind this hiring difficulty is a lack of candidates with relevant experience (cited by 46% of respondents). Other reasons include a shortage of candidates who understand the company’s solutions (22%), high compensation requirements for qualified candidates (16%) and increased hiring competition from peer organisations (16%)."

{loadposition alex08}In addition comes the statement that, despite a number of actions to boost hiring with better recruiting tools and increased compensation, "hiring challenges are still holding back the bottom line."

So, what's a solution to the revenue conundrum posed by the lack of better salespeople?

We're information that this is where "indirect sales comes into play."

Dave R. Taylor, CMO of Impartner, said: "The golden age of the channel has arrived.

“In a business climate where qualified enterprise sales candidates are costly and in short supply, companies can’t put all their revenue eggs in the direct sales basket. Why struggle to hire direct sales people in an extremely competitive market that’s stifling your ability to increase revenue, when the indirect sales channel provides an immediate avenue to growth?”

However, Taylor notes that to continue to scale, "companies that already have a channel need them to work harder than ever before to make up for the inability to grow their direct sales teams, and companies without a channel need to create one at the risk of being left behind in the market."

In either case, Impartner points to contemporary PRM solutions, like it own, which "play a critical role:"

1. For companies with an existing channel, if they’re still struggling to manage a partner program on spread sheets, using a dated, home grown portal with limited functionality, or using a myriad of point solutions which create a frustrating user experience for partners, they will underperform competitors who have an updated PRM solution. On average Impartner PRM customers see a 31% increase in revenue and a 23% decrease in administrative cost in the first year of use alone by being able to automate administrative processes and optimize partner performance at every step of the partner journey.
2. For companies without an indirect channel, they will fall behind competitors who do because they lack the additional “feet on the street” they need to be able to make up for the lack of enterprise sales talent available in the market. A contemporary PRM solution helps companies ramp their partner programs 46% faster and their partners to revenue productivity 37% faster.

In the past, Taylor notes that "many companies have resisted indirect sales because of a perceived lack of oversight and visibility. However, solutions like Impartner PRM erase that concern, but making it possible to manage indirect channels with the same level of visibility and control as they have over direct sales."

Talking up the company's capabilities and solutions, the company explains that "delivering a fully customiaable, enterprise-class application for managing all aspects of the partner lifecycle, from recruiting to co-marketing and selling, the company’s highly engineered Velocity 3-step onboarding process can have a company’s partner portal up and running in as little as 14 Days."

Impartner also reminds us that it delivers "the industry’s most advanced SaaS-based Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution, helping companies worldwide manage their partner relationships and accelerate revenue and profitability through indirect sales channels," with a multitude of awards and the abovementioned, turnkey solutions that can deploy "a world-class Partner Portal in as few as 14 days, using the company’s highly engineered Velocity onboarding process, which is guided by an individually customized Customer Success Portal."

You can try a free demo of Impartner PRM here. 

Here's the company's infographic on the topic - please turn phone horizontal when viewing on mobile to see the full image: 

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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.