Channel Sales Playbook: People & Commitment to Success
Part 2 of 4: Laying the Foundation for Success
📌 You are here 👉 Part 2 - Channel Sales Playbook: People & Commitment to Success
Part 3 - Channel Sales Playbook: Secrets to Onboarding Partners Who Actually Sell
Part 4 - Channel Sales Playbook: Learnings from Successfully Scaling a Partner Business
As companies venture into the realm of channel partnerships, the clash between internal and partner interests can emerge as a formidable hurdle. This tug-of-war often leads to the demise of channel departments across various industries.
Executive Commitment + Rules of the Road
Executive buy-in is crucial for the long term success of Channel Sales. Conflict between partners and internal sellers, when it comes to prospects, is a top reason for the failure of channel departments in many companies. If there isn’t a commitment by the executive team to make the channel business work and help partners win, the department ultimately won’t make it.
Partners can be reselling a dozen different products. When internal sales representatives consistently overshadow partners in securing deals with prospective clients, and there are no established guidelines to govern these interactions, partners may choose to focus their attention on selling other vendors.
When you add partners, it’s like you're adding sales reps to the organization. Bring them into the company as if they were truly part of your core team.
Focus on finding your ideal partner profile
Think about your ideal customer profile and who speaks to, services or sells to them often. Pick three categories and reach out to 100 companies in each category. For Yelp, that turned out to be marketing agencies with ~20 employees servicing SMBs. These were agencies that built websites, sold Google/Facebook ads, offered SEO services, etc. We were able to bundle Yelp into their existing packages, or have them sell Yelp as an upsell to their existing offerings. We did have massive outliers that brought in business, but the profile above was our bread and butter.
Ask each company in all three potential ideal partner profiles “what does an ideal partnership with us look like for you?” Allow the market to speak to you. After many conversations the right partner fit will appear.
Do the unscalable
Don’t waste time on systems or procedures. Go have as many conversations as humanly possible in the first 30 days. Using Google Sheets and a phone line, we were able to get to $1M ARR, and helped partners sell the exact same product that our employees were selling in the market.
Internal Hires
After I was hired as the first partner rep, we brought in 4 outside, experienced sellers with partner expertise. The leadership team saw my early success and thought ‘lets throw money at this and bring expensive outside hires to make this a big business, super fast.’ We ultimately let all of them go.
The big learning from that experience is that you must hire people who really know the product and direct sales process, so they can help early partners close their first deals when no process exists.
In the early stages, your partners don’t have formal onboarding, training, marketing and sales collateral, etc. It’s on the early internal channel reps to do everything. People that have sold the product directly can help the partner overcome objections during co-sell calls, while outside hires that have never sold the product will be just as stumped at the objections as the partner.
The most impactful decision I made building out Channel sales for Yelp was making the right hiring decisions. After seeing the disaster of the last round of hires, I looked inward within the company’s ranks. I needed people that were willing to jump in head first and figure things out with me.
If you’re just getting ready to launch Channel Sales, find your internal renaissance reps and give them a new department to start.
In the next post we’ll dive into key learnings from successfully and unsuccessfully onboarding channel partners during our tenure of building the channel team.
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