Channel and sales leaders are facing a tough market in 2023. Every team is expected to hit higher targets, but with fewer resources. Quotas are going up while teams are shrinking due to hiring freezes and attrition. There’s only one way to consistently sell and win in this situation: lock arms with your best partners in every market, every region, and on every deal to sell more, faster.
Going it alone isn’t a safe strategy for 2023. When faced with such a steep climb, the best thing to do is lean into the headwinds locked arm-in-arm with your BEST partners. Last October, I spoke about this topic from the main stage at ImpartnerCON and compared selling in this market to climbing a 14,000-foot peak (watch here).
Focus on your best partners
Not every partner is equal. There are a lot of partners that take up a lot of time, but don’t really drive revenue. In 2023 you need to double down with the partners who know how to sell your products and work with your sellers.
You already know who your best partners are:
- They have strong relationships with their customers
- Their involvement makes your customers more successful
- Their sales teams are incented and encouraged to work with your company
- You’re already sharing data back and forth via spreadsheets
- You trust them
But driving revenue and hitting aggressive quotas will require more than strong relationships, alignment, and trust in 2023. To do more with less you’ll need to automate, automate, automate.
Invest in automation to scale
Emailing around spreadsheets and manually scanning through account lists to find common customers or opportunities doesn’t scale. But sales reps and partner managers have been doing this forever – because they know there’s gold buried in these lists. Maybe it’s a joint customer that could be expanded. Sometimes it’s a mutual prospect you could go after together. And the ultimate jackpot? A partner’s existing customer that would be a net new logo account for you.
Investing in new automation tools is the only way to scale up your deal sourcing, co-selling, and pipeline sharing with your best partners. I left my seven-figure enterprise sales job to start PartnerTap and build a solution that gives enterprise sellers the automation, partner data, and tools they need to sell more with partners. Here are three ways PartnerTap helps you automate and scale immediately:
1. Automate data sharing and comprehensive account mapping with your best partners
Manually scanning through spreadsheets and searching for new revenue opportunities is time-consuming and tedious. Instant account mapping against your entire CRM database is the only way to guarantee you identify every possible revenue opportunity with each partner.
- Identify new logo accounts each customer can help you get into
- Identify the best partner to help you renew and expand current customers
- Identify specific accounts you can help your partners get into
2. Automate co-selling introductions between your sellers and your best partners
When your partner needs help on a deal they can’t afford to play the sales-rep-to-partner-manager game of telephone. You know what I’m talking about. Your partner sales rep calls their partner manager, who then calls your partner manager, to ask who their seller should talk to. Then your partner manager logs into your CRM, looks up the account owner, and says they’ll make an introduction via email. The email intro is sent, then finally your partner’s seller can reach out to your sales reps to ask their question. But your seller isn’t necessarily free, so it could take a few days of phone tag before the two actually connect about the deal.
You can’t scale up revenue with your best partners until you connect your sellers directly, so they can reach out to the right person at the moment that matters (credit to Janet Schijns for the incredibly important “at the moment that matters” phrase).
3. Automate pipeline sharing with your best co-selling partners
Want to know what’s not efficient? Manually sending and staring at pipeline spreadsheets each week to make sure that every deal is properly registered and progressing. Once you’re actually in a co-sell motion with a partner you need everyone focused on deal strategy and moving things forward, not emailing around spreadsheets and manually tracking every change. Real-time pipeline sharing with trusted partners is now available for partner and sales teams that need to keep everyone in the loop as deals progress through the pipeline.
Finally, as you start automating to scale up, remember to take an ecosystem-wide approach that includes all of your best partners, so your sales team can devise the best holistic strategy for each account. Bringing together the support and resources from multiple partners for a specific account can help everyone win. You and your partners win by working together to box out competitors. And your customers win when their vendors work well together.
Invest in partner sales solutions
Your company’s CRM protects the crown jewels of your customer details and sales pipeline. Sales reps track their activities, and internal teams work together to win opportunities.
But CRMs were never designed to help sales reps collaborate and co-sell with partners. If you don’t believe me, just ask your CRM administrator or VP of IT if you can have a CRM login for one of your partners to see your accounts. You’ll be either laughed out of the room or fired for bad judgement.
So how are sales teams expected to work efficiently with partners to block out competitors and win deals faster together?
Whether you lead a channel sales team, or a direct sales team, you need to invest in a new partner sales platform that enables your reps to efficiently collaborate and co-sell with partner reps. The good news is that new partner sales solutions can be up and running quickly. PartnerTap integrates instantly with your existing CRM and connects your sellers with partner sales reps on their shared accounts. Both sides get full control over which partner companies they connect with, what data is shared, and where reps engage with each other.
ADP and SAP Concur have been using PartnerTap to co-sell for years. Reps at both companies consistently rank PartnerTap as one of their top 3 sales tools, right after Salesforce and LinkedIn Navigator. Lumen, LastPass, Avant, HPE and Genesys are also using PartnerTap to double down and sell more with their best partners in 2023.
Beat the odds and crush your sales goals
We built PartnerTap to help sales reps and companies drive more revenue with and through partners. In 2023 it’s now become the must-have partner sales solution for companies that need to hit aggressive revenue goals with fewer resources. If you’d like to learn more and hear strategies for unlocking growth in 2023, you can request a demo or contact us for a strategy discussion.