Channel Sales Playbook: Secrets to Onboarding Partners Who Actually Sell

Part 3 of 4: The First 30 Days - Mastering the Art of Partner Success

• Part 1 - Channel Sales Playbook: Understanding the Basics

• Part 2 - Channel Sales Playbook: People & Commitment to Success

• 📌 You are here >  Part 3 - Channel Sales Playbook:  Secrets to Onboarding Partners Who Actually Sell

• Part 4 - Channel Sales Playbook:  Learnings from Successfully Scaling a Partner Business

"Share of wallet" is a term that refers to how much of a customer's overall expenditures in a particular category are captured by a particular business. With partners, the best way to think about your success is “Share of mind”. When your partners wake up in the morning, are they thinking about - and excited to sell - your product or someone else's? 

The First 30 days

One of the key things we learned from building Yelp’s partner team was that if a partner didn’t see success quickly, there was a good chance the partnership would likely not be successful in the long term. The first 30 days of a new partnership is absolutely critical.

When you consider a standard direct sale, the agreement has a contract value that the client pays in exchange for a product or service. However, with partnerships, in many cases, there is no cash exchanging hands in the agreements. Both parties agree to terms, but both need to take action to make the partnership successful for everyone.

For partners, the status quo is much easier to maintain than adding a new vendor to resell. If they don’t get that “first win” fast, it’s possible they’ll put you in the “too hard” bucket and go back to their day-to-day life reselling vendors that they’re more comfortable with.

Hold back sending and signing an agreement until true alignment and expectations have been created.

Incentives 

Does your partnership agreement provide a real opportunity to drive behavioral change within your partner's company? Find out how the partner makes money and what product they sell that drives the most revenue for their business. Understand what their margins are for the products they sell, and beat that.

Many partner agreements don’t have commission at all. The partner charges a consulting fee for installation or maintenance of the product. Other partner agreements provide a commission for the first 12 months of the contract. 

What’s important to remember is that resellers can be selling up to a dozen different products, so don’t anchor your organization to whatever the market is doing. If you want to make the Channel work, drive the incentives.  

When you bring on a new partner, you need to drive behavioral change in their organization

Go down the ladder

When executives sign partner agreements, it’s exciting, but who’s actually speaking to the customers about your product? It’s likely not the executives who signed the contract.

You need to understand the incentives of the sellers within your partner’s organization, and make a strong effort to meet them. At a minimum, you should be meeting with front-line sales leadership before a partnership is finalized. 

In Enterprise sales, you need to move up the ladder to secure an agreement. With partners reselling your product, you need to move down the ladder and build relationships with the sales organization. 

Set up a kickoff call, training session, and recurring weekly calls with a team of sellers from your partner’s organization. If there are hundreds of sellers in your partner’s organization, start by focusing on 5 of their reps. Make a few of them super successful, and use their success to get other sellers interested in selling your product and presenting that success to their leadership as a sign of what kind of revenue stream your product can create for their business.

Co-selling

Big shout out to Emery Rosansky from First Round Capital, who introduced me to the concept of formalized co-selling. This drove an incredible ROI for our business unit, and gave us a way to incentivize the sellers within our partner’s organization.

We launched a co-selling initiative that paid our partner’s sales reps to add our sales reps to demos. The partner’s reps got paid no matter the outcome of the call. This pushed our partner’s sales reps to bring up our product more frequently with prospects, and, by co-selling with our internal sales reps, everyone was “learning by doing” from each interaction. Co-selling had both short-term and long-term wins, due to the natural training aspect of Yelp reps joining calls, dealing with objections live, and showing how to close business.  

Client List

Understand how many clients the partner has and get a sample of 10-20 of them to prioritize as the low hanging fruit for the first 30 days of the partnership. Review this list for opportunities before signing a partner agreement. 

This is harder than it seems, as trust has likely not been built up yet; The partner could think your team will simply try to take their clients from them by calling down the list they provide you.

Make the partner feel comfortable by calling out the elephant in the room to start. Provide value through the resources you have, and thoroughly explain the process of getting their first few wins on the board in the first 30 days, along with how exactly that will be achieved by working together. 

Shout out to Crossbeam and Reveal who are tackling this challenge and making it easier for companies to partner and work together. 

Logos

There are resellers out there that want to collect logos to add to their website while not actually doing any selling. If your company has a brand name or recognition within your vertical, this is something you will absolutely run into. 

Partners will sell you on how they’ll become your biggest resellers. In reality, they won’t do much. They want the clout of being recognized as a partner by you. They’ll use that logo on their website to sell their own services. Don’t get tricked and rush through the process. Qualify the partner, and set yourself up for success before letting them sign your partner agreement. 

In the next post, we’ll discuss how to scale your internal channel team.

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