How to Co-Sell with Your Ecosystem Partners

How Co-sell Partnerships Help You

How is Co-selling different from Reselling?

Co-selling is entirely different from reselling. In traditional reselling models, partners resell your company’s offerings. Thus, you have minimal or no participation in the sales cycle that your reseller partner leads. However, in a co-selling model, each partner has its own set of solutions or services to sell to the customer that comes together as a whole solution for joint customers. Therefore, active collaboration and an aligned sales process are required between the ecosystem partners’ sales teams in a co-sell motion.

Fig 1: Difference between Reselling and Co-selling – In a resell model, partners resell your company’s offerings, while in a co-sell model, each partner has its own set of solutions or services to sell to a shared set of customers.

Understanding The Co-Sell Motion

As you set on a journey of co-selling with your ecosystem partners, it’s crucial to start by understanding the “what” and “how” behind the process. In this section, we take you through the collaborative actions needed to create an end-to-end strategy for co-selling with your partners and succeed together.

Partner Co-Selling

Partner co-selling is a massive opportunity as companies co-selling with ecosystem partners are estimated to be generating over $300 billion in revenue. Using co-sell to grow your business and foster long-term relationships through partner-aligned goals has never been more critical. Co-selling can roughly be broken into three major processes:

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Recommended Watch: [On-Demand Webinar] Co-Selling With Partners Has Evolved, And How!

Figure 2: Types of Co-Selling Activities – Co-selling can roughly be broken into three major processes: Co-Sell Joint Account Plans Management, Co-Sell Marketing and Leads Management, and Co-Sell Referrals and Opportunity Management.

Co-selling with partners is not as straightforward as traditional reselling models, where a partner simply sells your solution. When partners are co-selling together, a partner’s contribution level can vary from one deal to another.

For example, on one deal, a partner could be the source of the deal, bring the right resources to the table to build confidence with the buying team, have significant executive relationships to help influence a buying decision, and be a substantial part of the overall solution that you both will deliver to that customer. In this situation, you’ll want to recognize the considerable contribution that your partner has brought to your ability to close that revenue.

But in another deal (even with the same partner), you may have already known about the deal; your sales team has been working the deal, that partner may not have a significant contribution to the overall solution and has not been intimately involved in closing the deal. However, at a critical moment, they may have given the customer an endorsement of your capabilities or helped validate your ability to deliver on the customer’s requirements. This also is considered a “co-selling” activity but is not as valuable as the example above. Again, you’ll want to recognize and credit that partner with the appropriate level of contribution they made to bring in that revenue.

How to Pick the Right Co-sell Partners?

Before you jump into partner co-selling, it’s critical to think through which partners you want to work with and how you want to go to market together. Some key factors to consider include:

Once you are clear on these factors, you’re ready to start focusing on a set of partners to build your broader go-to-market with the right highly competitive solutions with the right reach, influence, innovations, and capabilities to be unstoppable in your market!

Types of Co-sell Activities

Co-selling with your partners can help you drive reliable, long-term partnerships and increased channel sales revenue.

_{The Ultimate Co-sell Guide | WorkSpan}

How To Drive Your Co-Sell Partnerships

Now that you’ve identified the target customers & partners for co-selling, you are all set to drive your partnerships. There are three significant steps involved in co-sell processes – Joint Account Plans Management, Marketing and Leads Management, and Co-Sell Referrals and Opportunity Management. We’ll take you through each one-by-one.

1. Joint Account Plans Management

In Joint Accounts Plan Management, you and your partner organization’s partner managers work together to map accounts that they will jointly prospect to develop co-sell opportunities. These opportunities become referrals on either side to jointly co-sell. We discuss the steps involved in this process below:

Suggested Video: Pioneering a Strategic Co-Sell Program.

2. Co-marketing and Leads Management

If you are structuring a plan to work on co-marketing plans with your ecosystem partners and manage the leads involved, here are the significant steps involved:

3. Referrals and Opportunity Management

In this final step of the co-sell process, each stage has a set of tasks that need to be performed by your team or by your co-sell partners. We explain each of these to you one by one:

1. Identify Opportunities
2. Accept Referrals
3. Engage with Referrals
4. Close Deal (Partial Deal Win/Loss)
5. Close Deal (Complete Win/Loss)
6. Collect Incentives
7. Discuss Discontinued Referrals

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Fig 3: 7-Step Process to Drive Co-sell Partnerships: Execution of co-sell partnerships is a seven-step process starting with identifying opportunities, accepting referrals, engaging with referrals, closing the deal (partially and wholly), collecting incentives to finally discussing the disposition of discontinued referrals.

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Step 1. Identify Opportunities

In Joint Accounts Plan Management, you and your partner organization’s partner managers work together to map accounts that they will jointly prospect to develop co-sell opportunities. These opportunities become referrals on either side to jointly co-sell. We discuss the steps involved in this process below:

Make sure that you go into this stage with a clear operational policy. Violation of policies creates friction and confusion, potential channel conflict between direct selling and co-selling. Your co-sell program policy should be transparent and define:

• What are your standards for an ideal co-sell referral opportunity?
• How will your co-sell partnership performance be tracked?
• What measures do you have in place to drive partnership success?
• Who drives or owns the partner co-sell motion?
• When will you share the identified leads with your partner?
• How will your team collaborate with your partners on the marketing or sales cycle for an identified lead?

This phase is the right time to get clarity on these crucial factors with your ecosystem partners:

• Shared Customers
  Defining and executing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on each stage ensures that deals move through the lifecycle with speed and consistency.
• Shared Pipeline
  Compare accounts in your pipeline with partner’s accounts in the pipeline
• The Pipeline of Interest
  Share accounts in your pipeline that partner may be interested in joining your opportunity. Your partner can share their accounts that you may be interested in joining their opportunity.
• Target Market
  Plan demand generation activity to generate leads
• Leads of Interest
  Share recent leads in your marketing automation system that partners may be interested in joining or leading. Partners can share their leads that you may be interested in joining or leading.

Management Tip → Run a weekly report to review identified candidates in every region for every partner. Spot under-performers early to pay attention to their productivity.‍

Step 2. Accept Referrals

To understand this step, you first need to understand what a referral is. A referral is an opportunity in one company that is being tagged for co-sell with a partner company. A referral is more valuable than a lead as it is an opportunity that is qualified and developed by the source partner.

In this step, you take the referrals identified in the previous step and run them through a marketing and channel sales qualification step. Your partner is expected to do the same.

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Step 3. Engage with Referrals

In this step, you or your field sales team member engage with referrals. Connect your channel salesperson with the partner’s salesperson. Start with an introduction (this could be by email, phone, text, Slack, or your partnering management solution), and then proactively schedule a meeting between your salesperson and partner’s salesperson. Expect your counterpart partner manager to attend. In the meeting, play the role of connector – be prepared on details and brief both salespersons. Exude trust and confidence – your trust and confidence in your partner will carry over to both sales teams. (Have a pre-defined briefing document or structured alignment process to run this meeting.)

Once the sales teams have engaged, monitor their connection for activity. If no activity happens, identify the problem and take corrective action. After the opportunity starts developing, watch out for unanswered questions from the partner to your team or your team to the partner – track action items with partner & volunteer guidance. Your sales team doesn’t know as much about the partner as you do – you may be able to speak for your partner and unblock your sales team. (With a partner management platform like WorkSpan, you have a single place to see all partner deal engagement.)

Management Tip → Run a weekly report to review identified candidates in every region for every partner. Spot under-performers early to pay attention to their productivity.

After the sales team has engaged and accepted it as a co-sell opportunity, inform your partner. Follow the process to register the opportunity in your partner’s systems and your system. Watch out for questions or proof of performance questions that may be asked in the deal registration review. Ensure to track the deadline for registering deal information in your or your partner’s systems.

Management Tip → Run a monthly report or dashboard to track partner-sourced and partner-influenced revenue. Share reports with sales leadership to report on partner contributed revenue.

Step 4. Close Deal (Partial Deal Win/Loss)

This stage comes when one of the partners has registered a win, but the other partner has not – either because the deal is not yet closed for them or because they lost the deal.

This is a stage that’s unique to co-selling. In reselling relationships, your reseller partners are selling your product. You both win, and your partner takes a cut of the revenue. But in co-selling, you are each selling your product or service combined into an overall solution. Each partner that’s co-selling together can either win or lose. For example, the customer may choose your software but decide they want to implement it independently, reduce the scope of the services, or award the services to a different partner.

It is crucial for organizations to form new additional partnerships in industry ecosystems within their industry or across others that deliver value, foster innovation, and anticipate threats and opportunities.

_{Jeff Hojlo, IDC}

Step 5. Close Deal (Complete Win/Loss)

After the sales team has closed a deal, inform both partner teams, sales teams, sales management & your management. Remember that collecting the right incentives increases profitability for your company. This requires multiple interactions with co-sell partners. So, do not move opportunities to this stage until all work is completed.

Management Tip → Run a monthly report or dashboard to track partner incentives that are claimed and paid. Spot missed incentives. Share report with finance leadership to report on partner contributed profitability.

Step 6. Collect Incentives

Your partner or your company may be offering incentives over and beyond deal commissions and rebates. These could be reimbursement of POCs and trial costs, consumption incentives, and more. For smooth channel management, ensure that these incentives are applied. In addition, watch out for activity questions or proof of performance questions that may be asked in claim review.

Suggested Video: Watch Bronwyn Hastings (SVP of Worldwide Channel Sales and Ecosystem at Citrix) and Amit Sinha (President and CCO at WorkSpan) talk about Stimulating Growth Through a Highly Agile Partner Ecosystem Model.

Step 7. Discuss Discontinued Referrals

Once all partnering post-pipeline work has been completed, move the opportunity to the “done” stage. As you work with your partners, there will be leads and opportunities that you decide to no longer work with your partners, or they choose to no longer work with you. Your channel sales team may continue to work on these opportunities alone or with another partner. Mark these leads and opportunities as discontinued in your working environment, but still record them to track your contributions and work. Read More: How to Drive More Revenue with Your Ecosystem Partners

Fig 4: Co-Sell Referrals and Opportunity Management: This business process comprises six key steps between you and your partners.

How To Measure Partner Co-Selling

Co-selling with partners is quite different from traditional partner reselling. So, it’s not surprising that the way you think about measuring co-sell activities and results will be different as well. While every business may have different requirements, here are some examples of factors that we hear from customers that are important to track and measure while co-selling with partners:

Co-selling has tremendous value by giving your sales team outsized influence on enterprise deals. But some companies that have a culture of direct selling can be skeptical of co-selling with partners, and an attach rate KPI can help transform those organizations from direct-only to true partner co-sell leaders.

Best Practices To Drive Your Co-Sell Motions

Suggested Read: ​​Accenture Research: Building High Impact Partner Ecosystems

Fig 5: Best Practices to Drive Your Co-sell Motions: Seven best practices that are pervasive across ecosystem leaders to drive co-sell partnerships.

Ecosystem Business Management (EBM) Platforms

To maximize your co-sell revenue and scale up your partner activities, you must ensure active partner collaboration – only possible with modern partner ecosystem technology. Partnering has changed dramatically from reselling to co-selling, and the time is now that the technology reflects and supports the new market requirements.

As Jay McBain, Principal Analyst at Forrester, said in a recent blog, “ecosystems don’t run on spreadsheets!” To scale a co-selling business, an ecosystem platform is required. Trying to run a business on spreadsheets is not scalable, data is always incorrect and out of date, reporting is manual and prone to error. Finally, it’s time-consuming with unsustainable operational costs.

Fig 6: Disadvantages of Managing Co-Sell Processes Manually – The manual management of co-sell partnerships is chaotic, expensive, time-consuming, and has lower revenue potential.

Conventional partner portals or PRM (partner relationship management) tools can’t handle the new co-sell motions, and your company is missing out on all the opportunities and potential revenue created by active partner co-sell collaboration and co-solutioning. PRM or partner portals don’t support co-sell opportunities with your partners. To learn more about why PRM platforms don’t support co-selling, here’s a blog for you: Why Your PRM or Partner Portal Won’t Cut It

Fig 7: CRM and PRM Platforms Don’t Support Co-Sell Motions – Conventional tools like CRM and PRM were not architectured to manage the unique requirements of modern co-sell motions.

The Need of EBM Platforms to Manage Co-sell Channel Sales

Co-selling with your top partners is the key to supercharging your revenue. However, without any digital tools to manage co-selling, your partner managers will suffer. In reality, your partner managers are running their business on spreadsheets, so partner leaders have zero visibility into what’s happening in their business. As a result, partner leadership is flying blind!

Fig 8: Pillars of Ecosystem Business Management – An EBM platform helps companies manage a full flywheel of ecosystem activities from defining and launching joint solutions, joint account planning, co-marketing, co-investing funds, and finally co-selling with your partners

A shared platform with distinctly defined business processes and data governance enhances efficiency, stimulates real-time and agile collaboration among ecosystem partners, and allows you to scale your partner co-sell pipeline with higher revenue.

How an EBM platform helps you drive your co-sell partnerships

Fig 9: How EBM Platforms Manage Co-sell Motions: Ecosystem Business Management Platforms boost revenue by collaboration across companies, quantifying, and scaling co-sell motions.

“You need software like WorkSpan that can orchestrate all the moving parts to align the stars and moons and drive value from your partnerships.”

_{Jay McBain, Principal Analyst, Channel Partnerships & Ecosystems, Forrester}

How EBM Platforms Enable Co-sell Revenue Growth

An effective EBM platform enables you to :

1. Extend your CRM for partner co-selling
2. Get the biggest bang for your technology bucks
3. Manage peer-to-peer (P2P) partner collaboration

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1. Extend your CRM for partner co-selling

Your CRM platform will always be a critical mechanism for running your company’s internal sales team and managing opportunities. But without an EBM platform, your CRM and even a PRM portal won’t let your partner teams collaborate, securely share crucial deal information, or efficiently manage a co-sell process with each other.

While your CRM and partner portal helps you track direct and resell opportunities of your product offerings, they are incapable of monitoring opportunities with co-sell partners that have multiple deal sizes, close dates, product and service catalogs, deal teams, and other information that all needs to be connected to a single co-sell opportunity.

An EBM platform extends your CRM data (like joint accounts, plans, and opportunities), connecting with your partners’ CRM or PRM data. This allows each company to keep their autonomous systems in place, including their separate SKUs, deal sizes, closed dates, and owners, but extending the power of your CRM to enable your trusted partners to seamlessly co-sell with your teams and close more business together.

Featured Case Study: ​​How Radware boosted joint opportunities with Microsoft using Workspan

2. Get the biggest bang for your technology bucks

Your top partners are responsible for driving 80 to 90 percent of your indirect revenue. Now ask your partner managers how they are managing business with those top partners? They’re not using a PRM. They’re using spreadsheets. Think about that. Your partner managers are using spreadsheets to manage 80-90% of the revenue your organization is driving. And when was the last time you saw an error in a spreadsheet formula? Not a comforting thought, right?

The reality is that PRM tools were built to support many “long tail” small transaction reseller partners. They were not designed to manage peer relationships with your top partners, share opportunities securely, collaborate on those opportunities, and work together to close business.

With an EBM platform, you grow more robust relationships with those partners that are driving 80-90% of the partner revenue for your organization, allow secure, policy-based sharing of limited CRM data, manage those relationships, and deliver on-the-spot reporting across partners, regions, solutions, industries and more. Now you’re investing your technology bucks to drive and manage the MOST productive segment of your business – co-selling with your top partners.

Fig 10: The Partner 80/20 Rule: 80% of your partner revenue is attributed to co-selling with your top partners. But your most significant investment in partnering technology today is likely on PRM – managing the long tail of small reseller partners and driving a small percentage of your partnering revenue.

3. Manage peer-to-peer (P2P) partner collaboration

PRMs were built for reselling, back in the day where you were selling your product through channel sales partners. PRMs were designed for an individual vendor to host a portal for partners, own all the data and the security rights, and everyone else must log in to upload and access information.

The concept was solely for single-use, non-collaborative, and non-peer partner relationships. But partnering has changed. And that’s especially NOT how you partner with your top producing strategic partners.

An Ecosystem Business Management platform like WorkSpan serves as a unifying network where your company and multiple partners can come together as peers and collaborate securely on joint opportunities to drive co-sell deals together!

Fig 11: How EBM Platforms Transform Your Co-selling – EBM platforms significantly affect pre-pipeline motions, partner value, program effectiveness, and reporting.

Should You Consider Building Your System to Handle Co-Selling?

The answer is clear. The top four industry analysts (IDC, Forrester, Gartner, and Accenture) covering the Partnering Technology Stack have all voiced their opinion to Buy, not Build the solution. Some key advantages of buying an EBM platform instead of building it include lower upfront cost, easy scalability, rapid deployment with less time in implementation, and most importantly – agility with frequent updates, new features, and ongoing maintenance. Read More: Manage Your Partner Co-Sell: Build vs. Buy

Fig 12: Buying an EBM Platform is Better than Building: Buying is always a better option than building an EBM platform in terms of capabilities, cost, timing, and agility.

Ensure Successful Channel Management With Co-Sell Motions!

Ever-evolving technology transformations are pushing businesses to explore new market opportunities to meet and exceed customer needs. However, with growing competition, you no longer have the time or dollars to explore, ideate, build and market innovative solutions on your own. So working with your ecosystem partners is the best strategy for rapidly offering agile solutions to your target market. It is the right time to join hands with your channel partners and adapt to the dynamic demands of the partner ecosystem.

Get ahead of the game in this rapidly evolving partner ecosystem to modernize and professionalize your co-sell partnerships! Interested in learning more about how WorkSpan can help your business drive higher win rates and revenue growth? Read more here.

Frequently Asked Questions