If you want to venture into the world of co-selling, then you have to understand how it works in B2B partnerships. If you can take the time to delve into the concept and the general idea of how things work in this style of co-selling, then you can better your sales and your general profitability.
What is a Co-Selling Partnership?
Co-selling is an agreement that usually takes place between two companies. The companies agree to sell one another’s products or services.
What is Co-Sell?
What sets co-selling apart from other partnerships is the fact that there is a mutual benefit. Both parties can gain from the relationship.
What’s a B2B Partnership?
So, what is a B2B partnership? A B2B partnership is where two businesses engage with one another. A B2C partnership is where a business engages with a customer.
Delving Deeper into Co-Selling
So now it is time to delve deeper into co-selling. Co-selling is essentially an agreement that is formed between two companies. The companies agree with each other that they are going to sell one another’s products or services. There has to be a mutual benefit here and both parties have to understand what it is they are going to gain. At the end of the day, co-selling is not about simply selling products. It is about increasing the market reach in general, and it is also about increasing brand awareness too. Let’s say that you run an IT company and that it is your aim to sell servers or even networking equipment. It may be that you choose to co-sell with a software company that works with accounting systems that are based on those servers. The two companies have offerings that work with one another. After all, the vendor who is providing the hardware can offer the physical infrastructure and the other can offer customisable solutions that work to meet the needs of the customer.
How do you Co-Sell?
Now you understand what co-selling is, at a basic level, it is important to move on to how you implement it yourself and how you can get the best possible benefit out of the efforts you are putting in.
Get to Know Customer Profiles
The first thing that you have to do is try and get to know the customer profile you are working with. You have to learn about your expertise, and you also have to know the type of companies that you happen to work with the best. If you can do this, then you will surely be able to learn how you can best serve those customers.
Gaining a Deeper Level of Understanding
If you have the goal of partnering with a company that works in B2B then one of the first things that you should be doing is try and gain an understanding of the general sales process. If you can take the time to do this, then you will be able to understand how to market the product and the service to customers. You will also be able to understand the value or proposition of the service or product. Think about what your customer needs are and what services are called for. If you can do this, then you will surely be able to benefit. If you can take the time to know the ins and outs of the sales process then this will give you a way clearer picture of where you can slot in, in regard to the operation in general.
Map your Customers
Now you have a clear understanding of what services you have to offer and who your ideal customer is, you then have to take the time to understand the general overlap of each customer base. If you can take the time to understand this, then you will be able to get a much clearer picture and a higher level of understanding in regard to some of the quick wins you can make.
Outline Criteria
After you have taken the time to go through the whole account mapping stage, you then need to try and outline your co-selling partnership and what your criteria is for success overall. If you can incorporate this step in the process, then you will soon find that everyone is accountable within the partnership. If you do not do this then you may find that one partner benefits while the other doesn’t and all of this can be avoided if you simply take the time to look at what success means for you, early on.
Discuss Roadmaps
You should have a roadmap so you can figure out what you want out of the partnerships. You ideally need to make sure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to projects in the future as this will help you out a lot in the co-selling process. If you know that you have a lot of partners whom you have co-sold with, or whom you intend to co-sell with then now is the time for you to update them with your product roadmap. You also need to try and leverage your software so you can send notifications to all of the partners you have if you have a new feature you intend to release. Little things like this can help you to make the most out of your co-selling relationship and it can benefit you more than you realise as well so try and be mindful of this if you can.