Earlier this year I delivered a keynote at the Women of the Channel West conference in Palm Springs about the shifting power dynamics between partners and vendors and the five new co-selling leadership opportunities this creates within companies.
If you missed it, here’s a recap of the shifting vendor and partner power dynamics that are accelerating the co-selling movement and why this is a once-in-a-decade career opportunity.
In this article I’m going to explain all five new co-selling leadership opportunities and how you can lead your companies into this new model – no matter what level you’re at.
#1 Change-agent Leadership
Co-selling transformation success starts with change-agent leadership, which is needed at every level.
The ideal change-agent executive is someone who can work across sales, partner teams, and engage with your top partners to paint the vision and north star for where you all need to grow together.
A great example of transformational leadership is from one of our customers Lumen. Lumen’s CEO, Kate Johnson is outspoken in her mission to transform the entire organization. Under Kate’s leadership, Lumen’s indirect channel leaders, Sarah Seegers and Danny Beneditti, have carried this torch with a channel-led sales transformation that moves them from engaging with partners reactively, to engaging proactively working to support partners selling into mutual and new accounts.
Change-agent leadership opportunities exist across every level. It starts with learning, then evangelizing, and educating others on your teams, in your department, and within your company about WHY you think co-selling transformation is important. Championing something that becomes an initiative is a great way to get involved in a new program, raise your internal visibility, and work with others to make a big impact on your company’s go-to-market.
#2 Design New Co-Sell Program Around the Customer
The second new leadership opportunity is a great fit for those of you working on go-to-market strategy, channel programs, or sales operations teams.
Most partner-related programs today are designed around your org chart or egos at your company. Co-selling transformation and co-selling programs need to be designed around your customers and buyers.
Your end-buyer customers need to be at the center of your co-selling program.
By partnering and co-selling, we’re coming together to make our shared end-buyer customers successful.
For those of you who like to get things right from the beginning – you have a chance to design your new co-sell program around emerging best practices and get it right from the start. (Feel free to contact our team for advice.)
#3 Co-Selling Technologist
The third new leadership opportunity is a great fit for people who love new technologies.
If you’re in a go-to-market strategy, operations, or enablement role – then you have the chance to help your company move beyond random acts of co-selling and scale your new customer-centric co-selling program across thousands of sales reps and thousands of partners with automation.
- You can be the hero who gives your PAMs and sales reps an automated account mapping solution, so they don’t have to email around spreadsheets anymore.
- You can bring in an ecosystem platform that gives everyone the detailed partner data needed to zero-in on the high-propensity-to-buy accounts and identify the best partners to work with on each account.
- You can bring in co-sell automaton solutions that make it possible to run data-driven sales plays that instantly connect your sales reps and your partners’ reps on their mutual accounts for specific sales plays.
- And you can make sure that you partners and your co-sellers get full credit for the new pipeline sourced by each sales play with detailed pipeline attribution for each sales play.
#4 Co-Selling Quarterbacks
The days of 1:1 asks, opt-ins, and introductions are over. Instead of reactively introducing sales reps and partners one by one, you can plan and run hyper-targeted co-sell plays that connect hundreds, or even thousands, of sellers for pre-opportunity conversations.
If you like data and strategy, then you’ll love the third new leadership opportunity. We call this new role a Co-Sell Quarterback. Co-sell Quarterbacks are an emerging role within companies that have built high-performing co-selling programs with PartnerTap’s co-selling platform.
As a Co-Sell Quarterback you will:
- Review all the detailed customer and prospect data mapped with each partner and zero in on the highest impact accounts for your sales reps, channel sellers, or partners to focus on.
- Work closely with your internal sales teams and partners to design a co-sell sales play that will connect your sellers on high-impact accounts for very specific conversations.
- Use PartnerTap’s co-sell workflows to action the accounts to your sales reps and partners so they can opt-in to connect and get automatically introduced for a pre-opportunity conversation about an account.
- Use PartnerTap’s pipeline attribution report to track and monitor all the net new opportunities generated by each sales play.
- Report the new pipeline, revenue, and win rates for each sales play back to the business.
- Shine a light on your best co-selling reps and partner reps for each sales play.
Co-sell Quarterbacks are a very cool new role that get to be very strategic, proactive, and drive top-of-funnel co-selling conversations at scale. Learn more about the role of Co-Sell Quarterback.
#5 Lead the Co-Sell Desk of the Future
The final new opportunity is to lead the Co-Sell Desk of the Future. Most co-sell desks today are reactive and hard to scale without more headcount.
The co-sell desk of the future gets to work PROACTIVELY designing and running automated sales plays.
It’s SCALES using automation to initiate hundreds or thousands of introductions between sales reps and partners. And it becomes an incredible GROWTH DRIVER for your company, centrally managing all the different hyper-targeted co-sell plays, and tracking all the new pipeline each one sources, like an air traffic controller.
Co-Selling Transformations are Underway
Enterprises are serious about figuring out how to scale up co-selling motions with their best partners. Whether you work for a company that already co-sells, and just needs a way to automate all the steps you already do, or you’re trying to design a whole new co-selling program, we’re here to help.