Over the past few months I’ve had many conversations with executives about their new “PartnerTap Co-sell Programs”. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but my first piece of advice has been “Don’t call it your PartnerTap Co-sell Program”. I then remind them of all the other work they’re doing to make their co-sell transformations successful. Their co-sell initiatives are way bigger than our co-sell automation technology.
Our clients are making big strategic bets on co-selling as the future of sales and go-to-market at their companies. They’re thinking big, getting their end-to-end strategies and programs in place, and leveraging our technology to disrupt their markets.
PartnerTap is an enterprise co-selling solution. We give our customers amazing technology that gives channel and sales teams the automation and partner data they need to co-sell at enterprise scale. Enterprise customers use our platform to source more pipeline, shorten sales cycles, and increase win rates. They co-sell with partners to block competitors out of their accounts. We measure success by companies gaining market share, partners making more money, and sales reps going to Presidents Club.
Successful co-sell programs can change your growth rate and help you beat Wall Street expectations. But scaling up enterprise co-selling with thousands of partners requires extra support from marketing.
In this article I’m going to share HOW marketing teams can help make enterprise co-selling wildly successful. After all, marketing is here to drive pipeline and accelerate revenue, and nothing accelerates both pipeline and sales faster than co-selling.
- Make it a new program. Co-selling isn’t just an internal initiative, it’s a whole new go-to-market motion that deserves its own program name, benefits, and public recognition. So name it, add a page about it to your website, and build a marketing plan to promote your shiny new co-sell program.
- Clear message for all stakeholders. Your co-sell message must be easy for everyone to understand. Explain WHY this is strategically important for your company and your partners. Explain everything you’re doing to invest in and support this initiative. And make sure to explain how this will help your partners make more money with you.
- Brand your co-sell program. Give it a name. Give it a logo. Leverage your new co-sell program to evolve your partner branding in the market. Seen as a less-than-perfect enterprise partner in the past? Use your co-sell program as an opportunity to turn that old brand on its head and become the best partner to make money with.
- Get your message heard internally. Make sure your co-sell message is heard and understood by all internal stakeholders. Make sure internal channel, partner, and sales teams understand that this is a top-down strategic focus, with board-level eyes on its success. Make sure sales teams have clear rules of engagement and know it is safe to bring partners into deals early and often.
- Tell the press. Make this a tier 1 corporate press release and PR push. Make sure all the channel media outlets are briefed on your new co-sell program. You are a major enterprise company with a thriving partner ecosystem – it’s their job to cover your new programs.
- Tell everyone. Go big or go home. Run a campaign to make sure partners can see and learn about your new co-sell program everywhere. Promote it on the partner section of your website. Educate partners about it on your regular partner webinars. Run LinkedIn ads to all sales reps at your top tier partners so they are reminded of your co-sell program and opportunity to make more money with you when they scan through their LinkedIn feeds.
- Make a splash in the market. Have a conference coming up? Make sure it’s mentioned in the keynote. Is your CEO on stage at a partner’s conference? Bring it up there. Empower all your executives with the talking points and beautiful slides to evangelize your co-sell program as a differentiator everywhere they go.
- Make a splash internally. Create an internal communications and launch plan for all internal stakeholders. Make sure every single channel manager, partner manager, sales rep, manager, director, VP, and chief of anything to do with revenue or customer success knows WHY and HOW co-sell is going to help your company beat out competitors and hit your revenue goals.
- Put it in writing. It’s one thing to verbally say “go co-sell with partners”, it’s quite another thing to make reps feel safe in their jobs when it comes to the steps that happen during co-selling. For example: the first step of co-selling is understanding which accounts you have in common. In the past reps have surreptitiously emailed around lists of customers and prospects to partners trying to find where they matched, where they had whitespace, and could work together. But emailing around customer accounts is highly frowned upon, which is why so many enterprises that take security very seriously have turned to PartnerTap. So, in addition to giving sales reps a secure platform to share sensitive data with partners, you need to put it in writing that it’s ok for them to share this data with their partners through a secure platform like PartnerTap.
- Expect to be surprised. By both your partners and your sales teams. The partners you think will move the fastest might get tied up by their own internal bureaucracy. Other partners will come out of the shadows, use the matched partner data to uncover amazing opportunities, and wow your sales team with their partner-friendly approach to co-selling.
Similarly, you’ll be surprised by which direct sales reps become your co-selling stars and which struggle to adapt to the new co-selling opportunity. Some reps have a natural affinity for looking at data for clues on where to focus their time, and some are just more natural at building relationships with partners, than others.
This is all the more reason to go big and take a broad, inclusive approach to your co-sell rollout. Limiting your rollout to just your top 10 partners will slow down your revenue impact. It’s a free market, we recommend doing a big bang rollout to all your top tier partners and letting those that embrace co-selling rise naturally to the top.
Want to learn more about how to accelerate your co-selling program? Check out our webinar.
