It’s the last month of the quarter and your sales team is scrambling to close as many deals as possible to achieve your revenue goals. What does this mean for your partner business? How closely have you been managing the partner pipeline? Are all of their customer opportunities registered and updated? Are your partner forecasts accurate? These are the challenges that many companies encounter every quarter without any clear resolution to address the lack of accurate partner data.
Companies implement different strategies to avoid the infamous ‘hockey stick’ effect on sales results with limited success. There are different options that can potentially influence the timing of deal closure including:
- Incentives such as additional discounts, extended payment terms, rebates, or free offers
- Access to exclusive programs such as executive roundtables, advisory councils, conferences
- Entry to advanced training for technical teams including accreditation and demo equipment
- Participation in product roadmap briefings and free product trials
Ultimately, partners may have limited ability to influence customer decisions leveraging these options. However, a more effective approach is to engage with your partners early in the sales process to better understand the drivers for vendor due diligence and selection. It’s always important to identify customer requirements and devise a sales strategy leveraging your solutions. The qualification phase is essential to achieving initial buy-in from clients and partners can also benefit in the process by gaining key product knowledge to enhance their sales skills.
This is a great time to conduct joint sales calls and meetings with key decision makers. Leverage product demos, evaluations, solicit feedback and input on core requirements, as well as an understanding of industry regulations (ie. compliance). Together you and your partners can position ‘market endorsed’ solutions that align to requirements by addressing business challenges; partners highlight their value add through service offerings for ongoing support.
Partner engagement and collaboration becomes the cornerstone of a successful sales strategy that can yield consistent results. I’ve seen partners be receptive to this concept once it becomes repeatable as it helps build their confidence, skills, and knowledge. These sales best practices can be shared amongst the team along with highlighting wins through success stories, case studies, and press releases.
Both you and your partners want to achieve similar goals– winning business – and the quickest path to success is by working together. It’s about understanding what customers need and showing them how to overcome their business challenges through proven solutions.