This is the first installment in our three-part series on scaling revenue-generating partnerships.
Strategic partnerships can help source and accelerate sales deals, and also create a lock-in effect for joint customers that reduces long-term churn. But scaling a revenue-generating partnership program is not easy. It requires a strong foundation of security, data, access, and trust.
Companies that are focused on building and scaling revenue-generating partnerships face two fundamental challenges:
- Sharing data before you have built up trust with each partner
- Sales teams can’t co-sell without the right data, access, insights, and technology
Universal challenge #1: sharing data before you build up trust with new partners
Once partnership agreements are signed it takes a while to build trust between the two companies. Your company won’t automatically email over a list of all your enterprise customers to a new partner. And your partners aren’t going to give you access to their CRM systems.
But you can’t expect to drive revenue if you don’t find a way to share and map accounts with each other. That’s why sales reps are notorious for emailing lists of customers and prospects to any partner sales rep that might be able to help them get into a new deal.
Emailing around lists of accounts isn’t secure and isn’t the answer. To successfully scale a revenue-generating partnership you need to map accounts to see where each side can help the other.
Sharing data securely
Each side of the partnership needs a safe and secure way to share select information with strategic partners. This requires a neutral digital platform that lets each side of the partnership control what information they share with each partner.
Partner teams need a controlled way to share selective data with each partner. And sales reps need a secure way to share target accounts in their territories with partners that can help them sell into these accounts.
The ability to share account data securely with partners is a universal challenge.
Is this an issue that you are dealing with in your company? If so, make sure to check back next week for information about the second universal challenge to scaling revenue-generating partnerships. The following week we will post the final installment explaining the solution to these two universal challenges.
The second universal challenge can be found here.
Find the solutions to both challenges here.