Don't expect your partners to sell for you... Sell with them!
No company in this world can build a sales force big enough to engage their addressable markets thus, looking to partners to sell with you is crucial. To have a direct sales team of your own is to win battles. To win a war, you would require allies who will fight by your side as part of an ecosystem where one feeds off the other. It is where the sum of parts do truly make a whole.
There are indeed many parts that are required to be put together before we even think about building your intended ecosystem. As you will see over the next several articles, the plan to build, drive, manage and maintain an ecosystem will take quite a bit of effort even before the real work of engaging partners begin.
For a start, it is vitally important to figure out the value you and your products / services bring to the table. I have been told before, in my face and I quote, “If the partner does not know the value we bring them then they are not fit to be our partner!” Questions then are “Do we own the partner? Is the partner on our payroll? Why should the partner pay attention to us and not our competition?” It is obviously much more complex than this, but these fundamental questions alone should start you on the path of figuring out the value you bring your current and potential partners.
In your mind you are thinking... “The only value I have to my partners is how much margin I can give them and if there are any projects for me to pass on to them.” I will not argue with that but then begs the question of how you can make a partner want to do more with you and build a better business together with you? We shall discuss this in detail in our next article.
This series of articles will be covering off topics that will help you with your channel ecosystem blueprint.
I am looking for comments, challenges and questions for further articles so please send them in at anytime. Much appreciated!
No company in this world can build a sales force big enough to engage their addressable markets thus, looking to partners to sell with you is crucial. To have a direct sales team of your own is to win battles. To win a war, you would require allies who will fight by your side as part of an ecosystem where one feeds off the other. It is where the sum of parts do truly make a whole.
There are indeed many parts that are required to be put together before we even think about building your intended ecosystem. As you will see over the next several articles, the plan to build, drive, manage and maintain an ecosystem will take quite a bit of effort even before the real work of engaging partners begin.
For a start, it is vitally important to figure out the value you and your products / services bring to the table. I have been told before, in my face and I quote, “If the partner does not know the value we bring them then they are not fit to be our partner!” Questions then are “Do we own the partner? Is the partner on our payroll? Why should the partner pay attention to us and not our competition?” It is obviously much more complex than this, but these fundamental questions alone should start you on the path of figuring out the value you bring your current and potential partners.
In your mind you are thinking... “The only value I have to my partners is how much margin I can give them and if there are any projects for me to pass on to them.” I will not argue with that but then begs the question of how you can make a partner want to do more with you and build a better business together with you? We shall discuss this in detail in our next article.
This series of articles will be covering off topics that will help you with your channel ecosystem blueprint.
- Value - Why would a partner want to do business with you?
- Markets - Who can you sell to?
- Products - What products are you selling to which markets?
- Partners - Which partners can you leverage on to sell deep and wide with?
- Excitement - How to excite partners enough to be your allies?
- Enablement - How do we educate them enough to sell with us?
- Engagement - How to partner our partners in their major accounts / projects?
- Channel marketing - How to effectively use marketing to help drive channel sales?
- Measurements - What do we measure to ensure that we are on the right path?
- Management - How do we manage for desired outcomes?
I am looking for comments, challenges and questions for further articles so please send them in at anytime. Much appreciated!
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