Winning with co-selling

The economic downturn is reflecting in the technology industry as well. The budgets are down and enterprise software deals are taking longer to close.

Amidst this, co-selling can help you drive scale, unlock new channels of growth, and accelerate existing opportunities.

The results cannot be ignored.

Microsoft

1. 25% Larger deal size
2. 25% Higher win rate
3. 2x Consumption rate

AWS

1. 80% Larger deal size
2. 27% Higher win rate
3. 40% Decrease in sales cycle

The way partners do co-selling needs to evolve

While the way partners do co-selling has matured, they still think of it as a seller-to-seller, lead-gen activity.

We work with System Integrators and Software (ISV) partners of almost all major cloud providers and we see most of them typically follow a reactive approach to co-selling.

They will build the solution, upload it on the co-sell marketplace, and then hope the business would come from the vendor. Or they might be working with a customer on a prospective customer and will request support from their Partner Development Managers or via the Partner Network.

This approach, while drives some outcomes, fails to capture the complete value of the channel. There are 1000s of vendor solutions listed on the marketplace and only a small proportion are able to properly do any joint business with their vendors.

Did you know?

40,000 ISV solutions are listed on the AWS marketplace

Evolving from reactive to proactive co-selling

Co-selling is much more than just a lead-generation activity. Companies that are succeeding with it consider it as a collaborative partnership. They strategically align with their cloud provider, build together, market together, and consequently sell together. On top of that, they have built internal systems and aligned teams internally to manage their co-selling activities i.e. co-selling is an integral part of how they do business.

Here are the five (5) best practices you can follow for maximizing the value of co-selling:

Secure executive buy-in

As we have seen, co-selling is not a tactic. It’s a way of working with your partner, which requires the support of sales, alliances, finance, operations, marketing, IT, product, and legal teams — all backed by executive buy-in.

Seeking executive buy-in is the most critical part of the process, one that can decide the fate of your program.

Here are five things you need to do to seek executive buy-in and keep the leadership aligned:

• Define opportunity
• Set expectations
• Provide a holistic impact across the organization
• Drive alignment through the leadership
• Keep them up to date

Create a ‘better together’ story

Nearly every partnership hinges on an effective “better together” story. It is essentially your messaging that illustrates why your product aligns well with your partner, and how this alignment ultimately solves end customer problems. Across all channels, your teams should be able to clearly represent the “better together” story to have a more meaningful conversation with the customer.

There are four steps or building blocks to building your better together story.

• Your value proposition
• Your partner’s value proposition
• Identifying best prospects
• Defining sales scenarios

Help everyone succeed with the joint offering

Companies that end up nailing co-selling are the ones that equip their sellers and also their partners with the right messaging and the GTM assets to help them land the right conversation with customers. Additionally, there would be concerns around compensation and incentives as you scale the program. So, it would be great to proactively address that beforehand.

What you should provide:

• Sales guidance
• Customer pitch deck
• On-demand training videos
• Email template
• Datasheet
• Competitor battlecard
• Customer story
• Proposal template
• Target list

Optimize your co-sell operations

We do not rise to the level of our goals, We fall down to the level of our systems. Co-selling can be challenging, time-consuming, and resource intensive. You need a defined system to manage your entire co-selling process, right from sharing leads to closing wins.

Best practices to optimize your co-selling system

• Understand the co-sell process and systems of your partner.
• Provide the right access and training on the systems to respective stakeholders.
• Determine how you will track and identify co-sell eligible deals within your sales pipeline.
• Integrate your co-selling platform with your CRM.
• Keep your repository of co-sell resources in one location for sellers and partners to get up to speed quickly.

Work as #One

Co-selling is ‘one plus one equals three’. Many partners we work with think that if they share an opportunity with their partner, they will steal it. We need to evolve from this mindset. In the end, all that matters to you as well your partner is creating better and faster customer outcomes. The only way to achieve that is through collaboration.

Here are some ways to drive collaboration

• Engage in joint account planning
• Define use cases, map relationships, and outline the joint GTM approach.
• Land joint engagements
• Deliver pre-sales and post-sales engagements to accelerate the customer buying and adoption journey.
• Always be available
• Proactively address your partner’s key concerns and provide regular support.

It’s time to double down

It’s clear that this is the decade of the ecosystem. Transforming from ‘winning as a lone player’ to ‘winning together’ will not be easy and will take time. However, customers are increasingly demanding end-to-end solutions and services that cannot be delivered by any one company. Building an ecosystem is not a job for tomorrow. It needs to be done today!

Are you going through this transformation? Schedule a call to discuss how you can unlock better partnership outcomes.