Channel Sales Playbook: Learnings from Successfully Scaling a Partner Business
Part 4 of 4: Navigating the Evolution - Reflections from scaling from $10M to $40M in ARR
Part 2 - Channel Sales Playbook: People & Commitment to Success
Part 3 - Channel Sales Playbook: Secrets to Onboarding Partners Who Actually Sell
📌 You are here > Part 4 - Channel Sales Playbook: Learnings from Successfully Scaling a Partner Business
Imagine a thriving team of sales reps, buzzing with activity. Some are laser-focused on hunting for exciting new partner prospects, while others nurture existing partnerships to help them blossom. This isn't a dream – it's the reality we built at Yelp. But getting here wasn't a straight shot. We started with a hybrid model, where everyone did everything.
Sales Rep Specialization
When we started the department, we operated as hybrid reps. This meant a single rep was responsible for bringing on partners and making them successful. We got to the point where our best reps were too busy with existing partners, and no longer hunting for new partners.
As a solution, we created specialized positions:
Partner Account Executives: Exclusively focused on hunting for new partners
Partner Sales Consultants: Exclusively focused on working with existing partners to help them grow and resell our product
Partner Sales Directors: A hybrid position giving our most experienced partner reps a few large partners to work with, while also making them responsible for bringing on new business
As with any reorg, not everything was smooth when we moved to specialized reps, but in hindsight, I wouldn’t change anything about this initial approach. By starting the business unit with hybrid reps, we were able to truly discover the holes in making a partner successful, from beginning to end.
Creating your Internal Playbook
Start documenting everything immediately and don’t assume people will just figure it out. From your sales motion to the definition of each internal role, and who is in charge of what. Open a Google doc and just start writing. All of it will change, but to scale your organization, you need to have a playbook that internal employees can pick up, read, and follow as they ramp up in your organization.
Here’s a more detailed post on building your sales playbook.
Partner and Internal Rep Training
We hired a dedicated trainer when we hit 20 internal reps, and looking back, I would have hired this individual earlier. I still remember the first thing I told Beth Heller when we hired her to take on enablement: “I need you to destroy everything I’ve built around training.” To this day, we still have a good laugh about that comment, but I meant it.
The training role within a partner department is for internal reps to teach them how to qualify and sell a partner, but it can also double as a training tool for partners to help their sales team get up to speed on your product, and teach their reps about the basics of your product, handling objections, etc.
We found it very effective for partner trainers to come in and do a larger presentation to our partner’s sales orgs, and then have our internal reps conduct more specialized 1:1 training and co-selling meetings to drive the learning and wins.
Marketing
Part of the value-add of joining a partner program is the marketing you do for your partners. The goal of marketing isn’t just for you to drive more partners into your program, but also to help existing partners continue winning!
Events. We set up events for partners in their region, where they could invite prospects and existing clients.
Directories. We set up a website where partners can be connected with prospects looking for partners to help them not only with our product, but also with other services related to the end client’s needs
Premier Status. We created a status based on a recurring revenue threshold. Be wary to not introduce this too early in your program. You need to know what the stretch goals are in order to make premier an exclusive group, otherwise, everyone becomes premier too quickly and nobody is happy.
Product
To find “revenue unlocks,” listen to partners, but also look internally. Document the repetitive activity done through email and spreadsheets, and begin to create a tech stack around that.
In hindsight, the initiatives that drove the most revenue were centered around giving partners more transparency, while removing ourselves from the operational bottlenecks with their clients.
There are a lot of different ways to prioritize product development. We landed on putting a revenue number next to each product request. The challenge with this model of prioritization was basic improvements like billing infrastructure, as it was a cost vs a revenue unlock, but ultimately going through the process of assigning a revenue number to each request created a healthy debate amongst leadership.
Revenue/Business Operations
As you scale, revenue and business operations should handle all compensation payments to partners and internal reps, account assignment, territory creation, and CRM management.
The biggest RevOps learning I can relay from building the Channel team is to have one source of truth for all your data. The tech stack in most companies is now consolidating, but there are still many different tools and software across departments.
We put Band-Aids over multiple systems as we were building the department, and that’s fine. Tech debt exists, but if there is any confusion around the source of truth for your data, it can create a domino effect. From understanding your business, to forecasting, to sales rep compensation, always have one source of truth.
If you’re looking to dive deeper into building Channel teams, I recommend downloading this guide from OpenView
Helping to build Yelp’s partner team from scratch was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. Always stay focused on your north star, listen to your partners, and work to make them successful!
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