Increasing competition and rapid innovation in enterprise business-technology makes channel sales strategies a must have. According to a recent research, deals close 46% faster when a partner is involved.
However, channel sales strategies continue to be challenging.
Having been on both sides of the enterprise tech sales equation – SI & ISVs – in this blog, I’ll highlight 3 practical channel sales strategies to drive sustained momentum. These have been derived from the partnership maturity model.
This blog has been written with implementation or SI / consulting executives in mind, especially those who are looking to kickstart their partnerships channel.
The Problem
It is logical to invest on return. We want to see some semblance of a revenue pipeline (or a deal) before investing in training resources and building solutions. This is especially true of implementation partners. That’s a catch-22 because returns are often proportional to investment.
However, even if we choose to invest a little first to enable the returns, it is often unclear what a systematic go-to-market / GTM should be instead of relying on gut feel or or opportunistic insider news (e.g. an unqualified client inquiry that includes a partner). That’s because such GTM efforts run out of steam as soon as the opportunistic ideas lose momentum. So we need sustainable competency building, field-sales, and marketing motions that can continue to generate new opportunities without sucking up resources.
How to achieve a healthy balance so we can reliably generate a healthy pipeline within 4-6 months?
While the partnership framework addresses this systematically, there are 3 items I wanted to call out here.
1: Segment By Qualified Pipeline as an Additional Criteria
It is natural to base our plans on the tier criteria of the partner program. These criteria generally assign points and overall tier status based on sales results, marketing, and tech skills.
We also prioritize a partnership based on partner size, significance, access, and so on.
However, for those just starting out, it’s also helpful to tag another add-on classification – qualified target pipeline. This includes a client or prospect list who are also good candidates for the partnership, where partners may also have traction, and where your current skill level will not be a major deterrent.
Typically, there will be 4 types of accounts on the list:
- Partner accounts that are new to us
- Our accounts with partner interest
- Net new accounts
- Shared accounts
While it’s logical to ask for new leads and new business from partners, in reality, accounts in category 2 and 4 are of most practical short term interest. They represent the shortest distance to light at the end of the tunnel (or funnel). Especially, if your story is still in the early chapters.
By attaching tangible personas and revenue targets, it becomes easier to create a purposeful and mutually beneficial field sales relationship. It also allows you to identify the elements inside the company that are on the critical path of your revenue growth.
2: Create a Concrete Outcomes Tracker
At the highest level, the deal tracker in the PRM or CRM systems is a good proxy for partnership activity.
But it doesn’t capture the nuances. The end result is that at the end of the quarter, most of the registered deals do not show any update for various reasons.
However, it is empirically true that for each account in these statuses, there will always be an identified path to opportunity identification, qualification (or not), and closure (win / lose).
The solution is to track opportunities and clients consistently and granularly without fearing a negative outcome. Qualifying something out or deprioritizing is critical. It is very common for ghost deals to stay on the radar because we haven’t had (or accepted the results of) an honest conversation with the client. These are extremely damaging to momentum because they keep taking up resources and time. So, more than just registering opportunities at these accounts, the enabling actions needed must be identified and executed.
For example, one of the most common challenges is not just access to the right stakeholders, but also the right material to engage them with. A typical account executive has many fires to fight on multiple fronts. And so the very first step of “connecting” languishes on. A brochure, a relevant POV, or a webinar invite often does the trick to keep things moving.
If the tracker is structured to clearly articulate these steps, then the field sales team – and also the partner enablement teams – will have something tangible to measure the progress against.
Now let’s review the receiving end of the funnel.
3: Mindshare Building – The Informed Executive
Statistics show that much of the sales enablement material (battle cards, presentations etc.) produced by you or your product partner was not accessed even once by your sales teams. This should serve as a good wake up call to do things differently.
Here are 3 sales oriented add-ons that can be very useful to break the lull of inertia:
- Connecting the Dots – Often it’s not about selling technology or services around the technology. Instead, it is helpful to highlight the solution that is being enabled for the clients – such a solution has benefits attached to it. Creating and educating on this point of view helps sales have meaningful conversations and inquiries. For example, what does good cybersecurity look like and what are clients missing? What gaps do clients experience in data engineering and AI? These are good sales enablement marketing topics too.
- Executive briefings – These are either 1-1, or 1-many sessions around your solution with not just the sales persons, but also the end clients. Believe it or not, end clients are indeed interested in points of views and learning about new options, but not so much in a hard sell. Consequently, product or solution demos can be the next step unless specifically requested.
- Buyer intent signals – If partners have buyer intent data available on the target joint accounts list (interest, events attendance, recent web visits etc.), then sharing these can be helpful.
At the end of day, our intent is to break down the inertia so that you can keep up the momentum.
Next Steps
Driving channel sales is a fine balancing act. I hope these 3 channel sales strategies can help you transition from opportunistic to planned.
On the other hand, by understanding what is keeping channel partners from stepping on the pedal, product companies can better enable them where it matters. So feel free to bring these up with your counterparts too. They will often have material you can customize (hint: content is tough and slows your momentum).