How to Get Your (Un)fair Share of Attention from Your Partners
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A lot of our clients find challenges and obstacles in successfully selling through partners. As vendors, they have to compete for time with other manufacturers. They struggle to stay on partners’ radars. And when vendors and their partners aren’t aligned, no one wins. So how can a vendor stand out and get their (un)fair share of time with their partners — and work toward more shared success?
We believe that the best sales partnerships start with a classic strategy: mutual empathy. Mutual empathy means working to understand and acknowledge what someone else needs, and helping them understand what you need. With mutual empathy, you are both invested, you can hold each other accountable, and together you can achieve a better outcome.
When you approach partner sales with mutual empathy, you’re thinking like a true partner and a trusted advisor. You’ve taken the time to truly understand your partner’s business and demonstrate your interest in their priorities and motivations. You’re not just focused on your business, your quota, or your products.
Especially right now, when vendors are contending with supply chain struggles, product shortages, shrinking margins, and ever-increasing customer expectations, every vendor needs to think about how they’re showing up for their partners. Are you just pushing your product, or are you telling partners, “I understand where you want to go and I can help you get there”?
Let’s explore how a vendor can stand out and get their unfair share of time with their partners. We think about three important elements: leadership, support teams, and sales.
Leadership: Top-Down Empathy
Many partner sales strategies focus on the details: sales enablement, marketing messages, and training. But the most important way to develop a better relationship with partners is to build a strong relationship with the executive team. In order to motivate sellers, marketers, and everyone else who is part of the sale, you need to start at the top. I always tell my clients: Make sure the owner, manager, or executive team are on board. They need to be all in.
You get that buy-in by understanding what motivates the leaders. What are their goals? What pressures are they getting from their board or stockholders? How are they measuring success right now? What are their longer-term objectives?
Once you understand their business, you can present your value proposition in terms of what it means to them. The discussion shouldn’t be “I have a new product for you to sell,” it’s “I know you’re focused on gaining new clients and improving profitability. Our new solution can help you increase new clients and contribute to your profitability. The target market is huge and this is an opportunity to really meet your goals this year. I’d like to sit down to let you know what the investment will be, what we will do to mitigate risk and accelerate your time to revenue, and what the impact will be to your metrics.”
Best case scenario? The leadership is so invested that they make time to hear you out since the conversation will be all about their business results. They agree to make necessary investments (adding champions, changing their compensation plan) and they agree to regular checkpoints to make sure progress is on track. If it’s truly a good fit, they will see that it would be irresponsible to not sell your solution.
Once you have that buy-in, you can help executive leaders motivate everyone else in their organizations. Help them set team goals, schedule meetings to review progress, establish accountability around deliverables and deadlines, and tie compensation, quota, and rewards to the business results you’ve discussed.
If you’re not sure how to tie your solution to their business, here are some questions to prepare for ahead of time:
How will this solution / initiative help them meet their financial targets (top-line, mid-line, bottom-line)?
How will this initiative/ solution help them meet their strategic targets (bring in new logos, new industries, etc.)?
How will this initiative / solution impact their cash flow?
How much software, hardware, services, etc does each $1 of your solution drag?
What will the impact be on their company valuation? A recurring revenue model can double the valuation of a software company.
Think broadly about the executive leadership. Often, there is more than one person who can play the role of an executive sponsor. You should develop your relationships with every potential executive champion.
Supporting Teams: Lateral Empathy
Below the executive team, there’s a large supporting cast of players who can make or break your success. Marketing, service and tech support, procurement, contracts — all of these departments make sure the end customer gets the solution they need and is happy with it. So, it makes sense that you should support these teams and make their work as seamless as possible.
Your partners have choices, and each of these supporting teams are going to veer toward the vendor who creates the easiest, simplest, and most financially relevant experience for them.
For example, let’s say you want your partner to sell a particular service, but procurement knows that they have to go through 5 approvals to place the order with your company, or they don’t have an easy way to order that service. You’re not going to get sold without their buy-in.
Or, if their marketing team doesn’t have any collateral or messaging support; they’re unlikely to go through the efforts, especially if one of your competitors has made it easier for them to run turn-key campaigns.
Or, what if the partner’s contracts group gets bogged down the last week of each quarter and can’t process new deals. You need to know that so you can be empathetic to this team and avoid that week when they’re under water.
Just like with the executive team, the question to ask is: “How can I understand what’s important to these people? How can I support them, work with them, and demonstrate mutual empathy?
The visual we use is a stool. If you only focus on one or two “legs” of the stool, you’ll fall down. So consider the multiple departments that you’ll need and give each your full support. The exercise here is to meet with each team to understand their concerns, needs, and wants:
What are their metrics that matter to them? How will your solution / product help them achieve those metrics?
How simple or complex are your operational processes and policies such as purchasing or contracts — in general and also relative to other vendors?
What critical dates or seasonality do you need to be aware of and potentially work around?
How can you show empathy to each department by addressing the specific needs and nuances they have?
The Teams on the Ground: Bottom-up Empathy
With the executive team and the supporting teams on board, the team on the ground is ready to sell, but you still need to empower and enable them. These teams might be sales, technical, and/or marketing personnel.
They also need to understand the “why” or the value proposition for them. Why is it important, good, and/or relevant to get on board? What makes this so compelling that it’s worth their effort to change?
Once you have a clear message about the opportunity, you still have work to do. The goals are to make enablement:
Simple: Are your resources easy to access and understand?
Sticky: Have you implemented videos or gamification?
Shadowing: Do you have a method where the partner can learn by shadowing an expert as they get up to speed?
Timely: Is your enablement in the moment on “real deals” or is it months ahead of time (thus fading by the time the recall is needed)?
Relevant: If you want your partners to sell to the mid-market, is your material geared to the mid-market (quantities, pricing, sizing, etc), do you have mid-market references and use cases (not just enterprise), etc?
One final piece of advice is to understand the key influencers in the various groups as well as the potential blockers in the organization. The blockers are those who typically say “no” to any new idea and are resistant to change. Your challenge here is to create a plan to neutralize them.
At the same time, you need to work with the individuals who are particularly influential in the organization. These are the people others look to when they determine if they should get on board. Your goal here is to bring these influencers into the conversation early so they can influence the design, provide helpful insights, and send signals to others that they are a strong advocate.
When you develop value propositions with these audiences in mind, you’re certain to meet your objectives and get your unfair share of the pie from your partners.
For more reading on building partnerships:
How to Build Successful Channel Partnerships
For more reading on partner enablement:
Partner Enablement Guide: What It Is, How to Do It, and How to Make it Stick
5 Best Practices for Channel Partner Sales Enablement