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Rachel, what even is a partner?
When we talk "partners," we mean those folks outside of your company who you work alongside in order to secure a (typically complex and expensive) sale. Often, adopting a new technology means there is a level of risk or uncertainty, and partnerships help drive messaging that alleviates this in the mind of customers.
And, depending on where you work, there may be certain pieces of the technology implementation that your company just doesn't do; whether that's the integration of your hardware or software into a usable end product, fulfilling orders and handling the supply chain, or negotiating service and maintenance terms. There are a plethora of reasons one might be working with a partner.
But that begs the question: How do we work effectively with our much-needed partners?
As usual, I seek advice from those with lots of experience in this area. Today, I tapped Ellen Weston.
Ellen currently manages a team of enterprise sellers at Intel. She's spent her entire career in technology sales and leadership - from software to services and now in hardware.
Along her path, she's found herself in various roles with respect to the partner ecosystem: owning partner relationships, driving success and scale through partnerships, and now working with direct customers and leveraging partners to help them.
ELLEN: At Intel, we are customer-obsessed and seek always to delight our customers. We aim to influence what customers buy, we look to create preference for our technologies, and to accelerate adoption of technology, because that creates data. And that's good for us. Everything we do is through and with partners.
Here's what Ellen can tell us about accelerating your partnerships:
1. Deeply understand your partner.
Can you articulate what their priorities are? As a company, as an individual contributor, and even on a personal level?
You need to understand what their company is trying to achieve, and how what you're talking to them about fits into that.
Where are they strong? Where could they use your help?
Do you know how the individual you are working with in the partnership is paid? Often this is a key misalignment when setting mutual targets.
2. Work bottoms up AND tops down
ELLEN: You need to have success on the ground and support at the executive level to make it shine.
This is to say that while you, as a sales rep, probably own certain parts of the customer relationship, it's important that the whole chain of command is bought into your partnership strategy.
Doing the work to get the job done goes hand in hand with securing buy-in from those above who direct those partners you are working with. Truly successful large-scale efforts mean managing and messaging to executive sponsors who can help carry the deal over hurdles (because there probably will be a few of those when you are trying to make something AWESOME happen).
3. Always start with the customer first
This is good advice in any sales situation, but particularly helpful with partners.
Two situations in particular come to mind here:
Do you represent more than one partner? Things can get tricky here because you can't play favorites, probably for legal reasons but also in the best interest of your customer. This is where you really need to look at what the customer prefers, what they really need - and they always come before the partnership itself.
Is there a disagreement on what to offer a customer between you and your partner? The answer should always lie in what is going to get the best result for the customer, even if it means a loss to you (heaven forbid, knock on wood, etc.)
4. Agree on specific goals for your engagement and measure results
Once again, this is just plain good advice for anything. Ellen is full of good nuggets.
What are the crisp and measurable goals? Yes, we should want to close business - but when? How do we get it done? And what kind of comments do we want the customer to have at the end?
What steps we want to take and who owns which step should also be spelled out early. Even in joint calls, having defined roles for every meeting can mean the difference between a singing success and an awkward flop. Who's opening the call? Who's asking Sally about this issue? Who's going to record notes and actions?
If you don't know where you are going... where are you going?
5. Be careful not to ‘buy’ their partnership
Depending on your partner, they might be "coin-operated": that is to say, they ONLY care about the cash value of working with you.
ELLEN: ...But if that's the only thing, and if you're ignoring what the value of the partnership is to each side, and how you can really expand that and measure it, you end up missing out. It becomes a very shallow financial engagement, where people are nice to each other and they spend time with each other because otherwise they're going to lose the cash.
It's so important to get beyond this in a real partnership. While it's great to have sales incentives as an excuse to engage with a partner, if you mean business about working together, you must find other reasons that working together yields more powerful results.
Can you demonstrate advanced technical knowledge?
Can you bring in resources that the partner doesn't have?
Are you great at asking probing questions to build up to a sale?
Do you have relationships your partner doesn't have yet?
This is by no means an exhaustive list of how to work with your partners - it will largely depend on your company's model and how they go to market. But think of these Ellen Nuggets(TM) when you are embarking on a new partnership.
Ellen's parting advice to us all is to KISS: Keep It Simple, Sillyface. Don't overcomplicate what can be a beautifully effective scale engine when done right.