Go Beyond Random Acts of Co-Sell

Does your sales team co-sell with partners? If so, to what degree, and with how many partners? 

Some companies like Microsoft and SAP Concur have very sophisticated co-selling motions with their top partners. Others are just starting their partner-first journeys. Then there are companies like Lumen, HPE, LastPass, and LightEdge that are disrupting their markets with co-sell first programs and heavy investments in co-sell automation platforms. Competitors are noticing the success of these co-sell investments and programs and now trying to catch up.

I’ve always known that going-to-market with an authentically aligned partner is way better than selling alone. I started talking with companies about co-selling long before I officially joined Partner Tap as Chief Product Officer. I’ve seen 1:1 co-selling success first hand at Salesforce, where I was one of the original product managers and an original member of the AppExchange team. And I’ve championed it in the startup world as an investor, board member, and adviser to B2B SaaS startups.

Today, we’re seeing co-selling move into the mainstream. Co-sell has become a top priority for many enterprise sales, channel, and partner teams this year. Within five years I predict co-selling will cross the chasm and become the de facto sales motion for enterprise companies. But the reality today is that most companies are still in the very early stages of co-selling.

Co-sell realities today: one-offs, manual, and not trackable

Most companies I talk with say they co-sell with partners, but when I drill into it, I find what they are really doing is one-off, random acts of co-selling. Here’s what that typically looks like: 

• It’s optional: some sales reps do occasionally sell with partners, most don’t. 
• They have favorites: some reps work with a handful of favorite partners that they’ve known for years.
• It’s not secure: sales reps email around spreadsheets of their accounts to their favorite partners to see if they have any overlapping accounts after territories change.
• It’s manual: when sales reps want a partner’s help on a deal, and one of their favorite partners isn’t a good fit, they call their partner manager asking for help figuring out who might be able to help.
• It’s hard to track: all co-selling activity happens over email and phone conversations, so there’s no way to track or measure the impact these co-selling activities have on pipeline, win rates, or revenue.

Co-sell requirements for growth: intentionality and automation 

The fastest growing companies today are selling with their partners, co-selling intentionally, and leveraging automation. Without intention and automation, you cannot scale your co-selling program and you will miss out on opportunities to drive growth. 

Intentional steps lead to more revenue 

Being intentional about co-selling means the focus with partners is on intentional acts that will drive revenue. This requires that sales reps are incentivized and encouraged to co-sell, and critically, that there is buy-in at all the right levels and areas of leadership. Making a commitment to co-sell and getting partners on board is only the first step. There is a lot more that goes into making a co-selling program successful. 

The next critical step is to invest in an ecosystem platform and enterprise co-sell solution that automates all the manual, tedious, and time consuming steps of co-selling: account mapping, connecting reps with partners, tracking co-selling activities, and tracking partner pipeline as deals move through the sales process.

Finally, culture can chew up and spit out the best intentions and programs. So start changing culture immediately by shining a light on your sales reps that are already working with partners, and stop celebrating the lone-ranger sales rep as a hero.

Automate account mapping

Automated account mapping is the foundation of any co-sell program. Account mapping does three things: (1) uncovers new co-sell opportunities that would not be possible to discover manually; (2) helps you instantly identify and prioritize a subset of accounts to target with a specific partner; (3) lets you use planning time with your partners to build strategic account plans, instead of manually combing through accounts to target. 

Account mapping should not be the core activity at annual and quarterly partner planning meetings. Discussions around each company’s goals, designing hyper-targeted BDR campaigns, and building joint strategies to penetrate new accounts and markets together, should be. 

Connect reps with partners

Regardless of how you’ve arrived at your list of target accounts to co-sell into, the next step typically elicits a flurry of questions:

• Who is the current account owner?
• What is their contact info?
• How do I determine a partner or seller’s interest in a deal?
• How do I track who I’ve reached out to?
• How do I track who’s responded?
• How can I do this quicker?

And you’ve probably already guessed, the answer is through automation. Building “next step” workflow automations is the key to speeding up sellers and partners ability to opt-in to co-sell on accounts, track where deals need to get reassigned, and scale your ability to take advantage of new opportunities that were surfaced during account mapping. 

Track co-selling activities and impact

Most co-selling activities today happen over phone or via email, which makes it nearly impossible to track. Who is involved in each deal? Who is co-selling with who? When, how and to what degree? This gets exponentially more complex in enterprise sales cycles with multiple partners involved. Figuring out influence and attribution across all the parties involved becomes wishful guesswork.

This is another area where new automation tools can help. PartnerTap’s new Co-Sell Automation product can kick-off sales rep and partner introductions at scale. And we know there’s a dance required to get partners and sales reps to work together. You need to let them know about someone that could help them on a deal, let them opt-in to work with the other person, and only then actually send the introduction email connecting your sales rep and partner on their shared account. This is exactly what we automate, eliminating the tedious game of phone tag that every channel manager knows so well. Co-Sell Automation can also track co-sell activity back in your CRM and auto-register deals in your PRM. 

Track partner pipeline

Once your sales reps are co-selling with partners you need a way to track the progress of these deals as they move through the sales process. Emailing around pipeline spreadsheets doesn’t scale, and isn’t secure. Real-time pipeline sharing with your co-sell partners lets your direct sales reps and channel sales reps see each partner deal right inside PartnerTap so they can see when something changes on the partner side of the deal. 

Thirteen key technology requirements for enterprise co-sell success

As you’ve seen, there is a LOT that goes into scaling up an ecosystem-wide co-sell program for enterprise sales teams and thousands of partners. Technology and automation are just one piece of this overall strategy.  But co-sell technology is critical and it’s important you select the right technology to operationalize your co-sell strategy. 

Here are the thirteen key technology requirements for your enterprise co-sell program to be successful:

1. Digital clean rooms where you can securely share sensitive account and opportunity data with partners
2. Enterprise sharing controls that give companies full control over what data is shared with each partner under which circumstance
3. Automated account mapping to identify ALL the potential opportunities with each partner
4. Sources new pipeline by instantly identifying all the new logo accounts and expansion opportunities with your best partners
5. Keeps sales reps and partner reps aligned on their mutual accounts so they always know who to work with, even when reps change roles and territories are re-organized
6. Automated workflows that trigger all the “what’s next” activities to let partners and sales reps opt-in to co-selling on specific accounts and opportunities
7. Automates alerts about new co-sell deals, opt-in invitations, and nudges for unresponsive reps
8. Digital deal rooms where sales reps and partners can connect, collaborate, and co-sell on their shared accounts and opportunities
9. Inside CRM co-sell module that gives sales, marketing, customer success, and support teams full visibility to the partners engaged at each account right inside the CRM system where they already work
10. Attribution tracking for all co-sell accounts, opt ins, introductions, and collaboration activity happening between reps and partners
11. Auto-register deals in PRM that are sourced by account mapping or pre-opportunity co-sell activities
12. Attribution reports that show the pipeline and revenue sourced or accelerated by co-selling by each partner and sales rep
13. Ecosystem-scalability so you can scale up co-sell motions across thousands of sales reps and thousands of partners 

If your executives would like to learn about co-sell program best practices we’re happy to share the strategies and best practices we’ve learned from working with Fortune 500 companies who have developed innovative co-selling programs, leveraged co-sell technology to disrupt their markets, and set themselves on a course for faster growth.