How to Keep Sales Reps and Partners Aligned

One of the most common barriers to co-selling is that reps (from both sides) don’t know who to co-sell with. At any given time, partner sales reps are changing roles, changing accounts, or leaving the company. Sales reps cannot track those changes, nor should they be expected to. Similarly, they shouldn’t be expected to co-sell with partners if they don’t have real time access to exactly who they should be co-selling with.

Providing basic account owner contact information is no different than providing your team with the target list of accounts, the salesplays, or even a computer. It is a tool that sellers need to do their jobs and one that can drastically increase their rate of success. And the reality is, if you don’t provide the information, sellers will find another way. Within teams this usually manifests through throwing co-selling out the door. They will find deals they can close on their own. What’s worse is when your partners, resellers in particular, don’t have what they need. They are motivated to sell and are not only selling your products. If they can’t get ahold of someone from your team in a timely manner (or at all), they will sell whoever’s product they can get ahold of.

So you want to make sure that you are making this information easily accessible to both your sellers and your partners. And creating access to this information has other benefits for your team in commonly occurring situations.

One example is a brand new sales rep starting and they need to get up to speed fast on their accounts. While the team can provide some context, partners that have existing customer relationships on their accounts will have way more. It’s also a great excuse for that rep to begin building relationships with their new counterparts.

Or let’s say Q1 is around the corner and territories are being reassigned. Think of all the time your reps could save by getting caught up on accounts with partners who’ve been actively working them. Less time catching up means more time selling.

Finally, hitting numbers is what get’s sellers out of bed (most of the time) so when the end of the quarter is near imagine being able to run a report of all your accounts expected to close in quarter and looking across each one to see which partners may be able to help your reps get them over the line (yes, we have that report).

The easiest and fastest way to make this information available to your partners and team is by getting CRM-connected so that you’re sharing the most current contact information with your partners. Encourage your partners to do the same so your team is also getting the most accurate data.

Then, you can have those partner details pushed back into your CRM with our managed package so your sellers can quickly and easily get in contact with the right partners on each account. This would be something your partners could also consider doing to further simplify getting the contact information they need to co-sell with you.