Chip Royce, Flywheel Advisors
Time to read: 5-7 minutes
The Internet enables every business to sell directly to customers.
Yet, there are many chances to discover new customers and expand product offerings through partnerships and indirect channels.
Not every company is ready to sell through 3rd parties
The company culture, skills, and processes process used in direct sales seldom translate to a successful indirect sales strategy.
Companies who succeed with partnerships and indirect channels understand:
- Partnerships don’t just happen. Your product or service is only a small part of the value you provide to a partner
- Partnerships aren’t transactional. Partnership sales are relationship-based
- Partnerships can’t run on autopilot. Partnerships require active management to grow and succeed.
How do companies succeed when building partnerships and indirect sales channels?
The best companies who are looking to build new partnerships and indirect sales channels:
- Start with creating value for the partner and their customers
- Work to build and grow relationships with all stakeholders
- Invest in people and resources. They create management systems to track, improve, and grow the partnership
The best companies ensure their business is “partner-ready”.
“Partner Ready” has three key components
- Partner-Focused Company Culture
- Right People in the Right Roles
- Processes, Systems, and Data
1) Partner-Focused Company Culture
Your company may want to find new customers outside of your direct sales channels.
That desire isn’t enough. A partner-focused mindset is integral to success.
Before anything else, you need to change your culture to focus on customers over products.
Then, you’ll need to develop a partner-focused culture. Key aspects of this include:
- Fostering a mindset of collaboration, transparency, and mutual benefit
- Aligning your organization’s values and goals with those of your partners
- Encouraging effective communication and relationship-building
Finally, your culture needs to understand that partnerships may take longer to show results and some partnerships may never be productive.
2) Right People in the Right Roles
Imagine a situation where you ask a marketing communications person, who only does direct-to-consumer messaging to build external messaging to partners. They may be able to adapt, but this task is not in their core skillset.
It is crucial to find and choose people with the right skills and mindset for partnership roles.
Team members must have:
- Strong interpersonal skills
- Ability to negotiate and build effective relationships
- Understand the nuances and dynamics of partnerships
3) Processes, Systems and Data
Systems and processes tailored to partnerships, and the specific type of deal is crucial for partnership success.
This includes:
- Creating a defined partner onboarding process
- Establishing performance metrics
- Internal tools to measure KPI’s and other success metrics
- External tools help partners see how they’re doing in real time.
- Process to govern the partnership at regular intervals, with the company’s project managers, and executive sponsors.
IS YOUR ORGANIZATION PARTNER-READY?
Partnerships can be a tremendous opportunity to reach new customers and expose new product opportunities.
Companies employ a variety of business models
- License your multi-use technology
- Find resellers for your hardware
- Build integrations and sell your SaaS platform through marketplaces
A “partner-ready” organization that values partnerships, and builds a team with the right competencies, and processes is a must.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we can help:
1) Schedule 25 minutes to chat about your businesses: new opportunities, current challenges, aspirations, pretty much anything!
2) Sign up (if you haven’t already) for this newsletter.
3) Read back issues for more insights into how to (re)ignite growth for your company.
