Outsourcing Revenue Growth: Using Partners to Boost Sales
The most successful B2B sales teams rarely get to the top on their own. Much as a sales leader needs their whole team behind them to achieve revenue goals, companies often benefit from developing partner networks, symbiotic relationships that can have an enormous impact on end customer sales.
Think of it this way: if your business sells eco-friendly cleaning products, it might make sense to partner with local organic co-ops in your region, or with online retailers who focus on sustainable household items. Or, in the technology space, if you develop software that improves business functionality, it makes sense to link up with another company that provides implementation services or value-added applications.
Whatever your product, it’s worth considering how outside partners can help you expand your reach and improve your sales team’s effectiveness. Whether you team up with vendors, business partners, or outside consultants, looking outside your organization can provide plenty of opportunity for growth.
Pairing an internal team with an external partner can bring challenges, of course – without the clear hierarchy and expectations of internal structures, it can be all too easy for communication to break down and goals to diverge.
In order to set your collaborative sales team up for success when incorporating partner channels, we’ve collected four of the top strategies we’ve developed over our years helping clients with this exact issue.
Best Practices for Partnering with Outside Organizations:
1. Choose Partners Whose Goals and Culture are Aligned with Yours
Just like when you hire new employees, ‘fit’ is important when considering which outside organization(s) you might want to partner with. Especially if they’re going to be connecting with customers on your behalf, the business you choose to link up with is going to be representing you as much as they’re representing themselves.
Partner relationships should be mutually beneficial, too – if they stand to gain as much as you do from the partnership, they’re more likely to hustle for sales. Communication is key to establish clear expectations on both sides and make sure you’re working toward the same mutual, measurable objectives on the path to the overall shared goal of increased revenue.
2. Designate (or Hire) Partner Managers to Maintain the Relationship
One of the more effective ways to ensure your team and your external partners remain on the same page is to designate someone to manage and maintain the relationship. Instead of hoping that everyone on your internal team is equally committed to developing and advising your partners, create a specific role – this keeps communications from falling through the cracks while making sure your partners feel cared for and attended to.
Implementing a schedule of regular check-ins will keep your collaborative team focused, helping you ensure everyone in both organizations is following the strategy you agreed upon at the outset. It will also give you a chance to assess what roadblocks your partners might be running up against and provide them with any guidance or resources they might need.
This is a partnership, after all, so you want to be prepared to help your partners understand the product and to advise them on strategy for a mutually beneficial outcome.
3. Enable Your Partners to Perform at Their Best
Develop clear, comprehensive sales and marketing materials to distribute to your partners to equip them with the knowledge they need to educate end customers about your product. This not only lends them authority with consumers but also enables them to target demographics that are more likely to benefit from your offerings.
These materials can and should go beyond the purchase point, including resources like video tutorials and customer service scripts. The added payoff of this investment is consistency: no matter how many partners you develop relationships with, they’ll all have the same understanding of your product and your sales cycle. Which maintains your brand as well as making the sales process more seamless.
4. Incentivize Partners to Hit Certain Sales Goals
Especially for enterprise companies with a significant number of outside partners, it can be useful to segment them into categories based on the number of sales they make. In a similar way to how internal teams set sales goals and reward associates for meeting them, let your partners know that if they sell ‘X’ amount in a six-month or one-year period they’ll move up into a higher level.
There should be rewards for moving into these higher levels – not necessarily better margins or other financial incentives, although those can be part of the strategy, but a deepening of the relationship. As you develop your partner channels, you should be assessing each partner’s performance on a continuous basis, and when you have new products to release or other new revenue streams, you’re going to work with the most productive partners.
The better each partner performs, the greater their chance of being selected for future opportunities – and the increased revenue that comes along with them.
The one thing all of the above strategies have in common is mutuality. Working with partners, whether they’re co-sellers or consultants or vendors, is all about finding a dynamic that benefits both parties. If you align your goals, prioritize the relationship, and enable your partners to connect with more qualified leads, you’ll both see a boost in sales revenue.
If you’re looking for help integrating partner channels into your sales strategy or expanding and leveraging the partner network you currently have, Prime 8 can help. Read more about how we’ve helped other companies here and when you’re ready, get in touch to learn more about our sales enablement consulting services.
