Blue Marble Blog
Starting a Partnership Program
Are you looking for ways to increase sales opportunities and provide more value to your clients and prospects?
Partnerships can provide your organization with an injection of new opportunities and revenue potential. Creating an alliance or partnership model doesn’t mean spending more money or hiring more resources – it’s about using what you have and creating more opportunities for your existing sales team. If you’ve been thinking about starting a partnership program but don’t know where to start, here are some things to consider:
- Value: What does your potential partner add to your value proposition? Will the partnership help your sales team close more deals or bring in additional revenue?
- Resell or Refer: Will you be able to resell the solutions or will you refer new business to the new partner? Understanding the pros and cons of each model is important.
- What are the top 3-6 requests your sales team receives that you cannot provide today? Ensure your new partnership can fill those gaps.
- Integration: What will you be able to offer clients from an integration perspective – will you build out or does it exist today?
- Working together: Can you imagine working with this group of people each day? Do they want to work with you? Working with people you feel comfortable with is important, and will lead to more successful partnerships in the long run.
- Marketing considerations: Defining who will do what is important. What is the joint marketing strategy? With so many potential opportunities, deciding who will manage webinars, email marketing campaigns, etc. helps ensure the partnership is marketed properly.
- Size of the organization: Based on the size of your company and target market, are you more comfortable working with large, medium, or small organizations? Knowing the target size of a potential partner helps determine which partnerships you should go after.
- Know your customer: What other solutions or products do they need/want? Will your new partnership be helpful to your customers and prospects?
- Set expectations: Will you both be bringing leads to the table or will it be more one-directional? It’s ok to have both, as long as it is understood prior to launch of the new partnership.
- Regular communication: Discuss what is working and what is not – you determine the cadence. Schedule monthly win/loss communications so everyone knows how and why deals are being won (or lost).
- Alignment of Sales teams: Will your sales team have a 1:1 or a regional approach? There are times when 1:1 isn’t possible, but when sales teams are similar sizes this can be very helpful to create rapport between teams.
- Incentives: Are incentives necessary or will your sales teams benefit directly from selling the partnership? Depending on the structure and partnership, the value of selling the deal might be enough.
- Referrals: Ask your partners about their partnerships - this can be a great way to find more common threads and potential new partners.
Creating new partnerships can be rewarding for both organizations. Finding the right partners for your company will have your clients thanking you too! To learn more about Partnership opportunities with Blue Marble, click here:
https://bluemarblepayroll.com/partnerships/
Are you looking for ways to increase sales opportunities and provide more value to your clients and prospects?
Partnerships can provide your organization with an injection of new opportunities and revenue potential. Creating an alliance or partnership model doesn’t mean spending more money or hiring more resources – it’s about using what you have and creating more opportunities for your existing sales team. If you’ve been thinking about starting a partnership program but don’t know where to start, here are some things to consider:
- Value: What does your potential partner add to your value proposition? Will the partnership help your sales team close more deals or bring in additional revenue?
- Resell or Refer: Will you be able to resell the solutions or will you refer new business to the new partner? Understanding the pros and cons of each model is important.
- What are the top 3-6 requests your sales team receives that you cannot provide today? Ensure your new partnership can fill those gaps.
- Integration: What will you be able to offer clients from an integration perspective – will you build out or does it exist today?
- Working together: Can you imagine working with this group of people each day? Do they want to work with you? Working with people you feel comfortable with is important, and will lead to more successful partnerships in the long run.
- Marketing considerations: Defining who will do what is important. What is the joint marketing strategy? With so many potential opportunities, deciding who will manage webinars, email marketing campaigns, etc. helps ensure the partnership is marketed properly.
- Size of the organization: Based on the size of your company and target market, are you more comfortable working with large, medium, or small organizations? Knowing the target size of a potential partner helps determine which partnerships you should go after.
- Know your customer: What other solutions or products do they need/want? Will your new partnership be helpful to your customers and prospects?
- Set expectations: Will you both be bringing leads to the table or will it be more one-directional? It’s ok to have both, as long as it is understood prior to launch of the new partnership.
- Regular communication: Discuss what is working and what is not – you determine the cadence. Schedule monthly win/loss communications so everyone knows how and why deals are being won (or lost).
- Alignment of Sales teams: Will your sales team have a 1:1 or a regional approach? There are times when 1:1 isn’t possible, but when sales teams are similar sizes this can be very helpful to create rapport between teams.
- Incentives: Are incentives necessary or will your sales teams benefit directly from selling the partnership? Depending on the structure and partnership, the value of selling the deal might be enough.
- Referrals: Ask your partners about their partnerships – this can be a great way to find more common threads and potential new partners.
Creating new partnerships can be rewarding for both organizations. Finding the right partners for your company will have your clients thanking you too! To learn more about Partnership opportunities with Blue Marble, click here:
https://bluemarblepayroll.com/partnerships/