In May this year our CEO, Cassandra Gholston, 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 new opportunities this creates for co-selling. During this talk she identified five new co-selling leadership opportunities and roles that people in the room could step up for regardless of their level within their companies.
It’s now time to explain these shifting power dynamics and share these five new co-selling roles and opportunities with everyone in the technology, telecom, media, and distribution ecosystems.
First, it’s important to understand what’s causing this power dynamic shift and making co-selling transformation a top strategic imperative in 2024. The first reason is that B2B buyers have fundamentally changed. Instead of going to Google, reading marketing materials, and talking with sales reps, the modern B2B buyer turns to people they trust for advice on which products they should consider and which companies they should work with (Maria Chien, Forrester Research, 2024). This completely upends how companies shortlist and evaluate solutions.
Buyers today also are speaking up more about HOW they want to buy – they may not want to buy directly from a new vendor and will instead want to purchase through one of their existing resellers, an existing vendor, or through a cloud marketplace.
Sell with the person that has the best existing relationship
This change in how companies evaluate and buy solutions shifts power from vendors to partners. And this change in B2B buying behavior shifts power from marketing and sales teams – to whoever has the best relationship with each buyer.
The second big driver for co-selling transformation is that deals are so much more complex today than they were ten years ago. Every deal has lots of different vendors and service providers influencing it – – making it really hard for any sales rep going it alone to get deals over the line.
Sellers try to figure out who has influence within their accounts
Sales reps try to work with partners on their deals – doing everything they can to reach out to partners to figure out WHO at each partner might be involved, or who might have a relationship, or influence within their accounts.
Sales reps lack the right tools
But direct and channel sales teams don’t have the right tools to do this. Your CRM systems and sales tools are there to help you track sensitive information and collaborate with people INSIDE your company. They’re not designed to let sales reps collaborate with people OUTSIDE your company. So instead, sales reps email around spreadsheets and spend a lot of time doing manual account mapping – – doing the best they can.
We call this Random Acts of Co-Selling – – it’s manual, not secure, lacks attribution, and it’s impossible to scale. Random acts of co-selling can’t scale across hundreds, thousands and millions of accounts. It can’t scale across thousands of sales reps. And it can’t scale across a large partner ecosystem.
Co-selling can drive significant net new pipeline
That’s why so many companies are now realizing that they need a new sales transformation initiative around co-selling – so they can support the modern buyer and empower their sales teams to collaborate with partners throughout these complex sales cycles.
We’re working with and helping the largest enterprise companies, with the biggest partner ecosystems, develop their co-selling transformation strategies and scale up net new sales pipeline mid-year. This is not only possible, but already happening at the largest hardware, software, telecom, and distribution companies.
Now – before I go further, I want to pause and share our simple definition of co-selling. The term “co-sell” gets used a lot to describe cloud marketplace transactions.
I’m here to tell you that co-selling is not just something you do with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle. Co-selling is something your direct sales and channel sales teams should be doing with ALL types of partners. Co-selling is the act of bringing together salespeople across partners so they can uncover more sales opportunities and accelerate existing sales processes together.
Co-selling is a verb.
Direct sales reps co-sell.
Channel sales reps co-sell.
The good news for every sales, partner and revenue leader reading this, is that your best partners hold the keys to sales success – and co-selling IS the new sales playbook.
Once-in-a-decade career opportunity
The women at the conference in Palm Springs weren’t scared of hard things – and understood that this co-selling transformation moment presents a once-in-a-decade career opportunity for partner, channel, marketing and sales leaders ready to lead this change and grab the best new roles in this new co-selling model.
In the next article, Cassandra shares details about the 5 new co-selling leadership opportunities and explains how you can lead your companies into this new model no matter what level you’re at.