There is a universal challenge when it comes to both scaling and generating partner revenue. Strategic partnerships can easily help you to source and accelerate sales. On top of this, it can also help you to attract customers that will lock in and reduce your overall churn rate. The problem is that scaling a partner program can be somewhat difficult. It requires you to have a very strong foundation of trust, access, data, and security. Companies that are trying to build and scale their revenue-generating relationships tend to face two different challenges. This includes sharing data before they have built trust with a partner and having a sales team that can’t co-sell without the right data.
The World Trade Organisation has stated that 75% of the trade flow in the world runs indirectly. This means that it is not done through direct selling, but through alliances, partnerships, and channels. For this reason, if you are planning on capitalising on channel marketing, you have to know how to engage your partners so that they drive the most revenue at all times.
Sharing Data before Building Trust
When you have a partnership agreement that has been signed, it can take a while to build trust between the new companies. Your company won’t email over a list of all of your customers to a new partner. On top of this, your partner probably won’t give you access to their systems either. You can’t expect to really drive revenue if you do not find a way to share and map all of your accounts.
This is why sales reps are known for emailing endless lists of customers to any other rep who may be able to secure them a new deal. With 95% of Microsoft’s commercial revenue flowing through the partner ecosystem, it’s safe to say that channel sales are now more effective than ever, but at the same time, it all rests on good communication.
Emailing lists of clients isn’t secure and in this instance, it is not the answer. If you want to scale your partnership, then you need to map the accounts as this will help you to see how each side can help one another. Both sides of the partnership need to have a safe and secure way to share relevant and selective information with their partners. By having a neutral platform, you can then give each side the chance to control what they want to share with one another.
Partner teams should also have a controlled way to share this data. Any sales representative needs to have a secure way so that they can share their target accounts in their chosen territories. This needs to be done with partners who can help them to sell into the chosen accounts. Of course, the maturity of an organisation can make all the difference in revenue. 25% of mature companies get 25% of their revenue from partnerships. With smaller companies, this is only 14%. This alone shows how important it is for bigger companies to get channel marketing right, but sharing data can be a speedbump along the way.
Sharing data with partners is a universal challenge, but it’s not one that cannot be overcome.
Co-Selling without the Right Data Access
There are so many companies out there that have invested in teams of people so that they can manually map and connect partners with representatives. Sometimes this is just one part of a role and there may well be teams of people who do nothing but this all day. This is time-consuming, tedious and more importantly, never ends.
It can be very difficult for you to keep everyone up to date, including your partners and sales reps as everyone changes roles and the territories are also realigned as well. Even if you do have the right sales representative and the right partner connected via email, it’s unrealistic for them to build the relationships they need to really make sales. At the end of the day, corporate emails are designed for communicating officially. The best way to truly share insight would be to explore other channels.
Co-selling cannot just be wished into happening. Connecting sales representatives to their peers is called the last mile, and it can easily drive a substantial amount of revenue for either side. It does require a lot of investment though, mainly in technology, data and security. You have to make sure that you are adopting the best practices so that your sales reps can connect directly with one another.
Sales representatives need to be able to see which partners have an existing relationship at each of their accounts. This will help them to see who owns which account and it will stop people from reaching out to the wrong reps all the time.
Sales reps also need to have a solid way to connect to their peers across their partners. This will help them to build the trusting relationships they need to co-sell properly. Corporate emails do tend to work well with official communications, but they do not provide the best way to build rapport with various other reps. Sales teams need to have a much better text-based platform so that they can communicate efficiently.
Sales managers also want to make sure that chat-based communications are saved into the CRM. This means that future owners can then get the full history on the account and it also means that they can benefit from the insight.
Lastly, technology is important. Having one-off solutions for every partner isn’t scalable and it will make it much harder for any account executives to be as effective as they could be. Enterprises need to have an approach and a solution that can scale across various partners while giving reps control is the way to go.