What's your advice on aligning partners with our sales pitch and how to we enable them to successfully pitch to our customers?

I think the best way to do this is by treating your partners the same exact way you would your sales team members. Meaning, give them the same kind of training and materials you would give your sales team. That looks like: 1. Thoroughly documented information on how to pitch the product, complete with scripts, objection busters, and hooks that help to sell the product 2. Holding training calls that go over mock sales calls, your pitch in action, and the opportunity to answer questions live from your partners 3. Providing them with tons of sales enablement materials such as slide decks, case studies, and other helpful information. If you treat your partners like your sales team, they will sell like your sales team. It can be easy to make the case of not giving them as much information; but if you want them to be successful, you have to empower them with the right material.

Shadow! Have partners shadow your sales teams when they are pitching prospects. Then Have the partner pitch you on your own product. Then Shadow your partners when they are pitching your product to their prospects. Finally Have the partner "teach" one of your sales reps how to pitch the product. You can build all of the training, and one pagers you want, but the best way is shadowing, it keeps everyone accountable to doing the work, and you will quickly find invested partners and partners who are not invested. Another PLUS, it will decrease the 'channel conflict' with your sales teams.

One of the most important parts of aligning partners with your sales pitch is making the customer journey clear out of the gate. You are making it easier for them to successfully pitch to your customers if the swim lines are clear between what a customer should go to you, the vendor for, and what they should go to a consulting partner for. For example, the second that you start offering competing services to your consulting partners you are creating a point of confusion for customers which will in turn make the pitch process more challenging for everyone involved.

It takes months for your own sales reps to get ramped and effectively sell your own product. They spend most of their working hours training to be as successful as possible in doing just that. It is unreasonable to think that a new partner can do it effectively in a short period (considering that they are busy selling/learning their own product/service). I usually only get the more experienced team members involved with partner co-selling. Prior to that, pairing reps to share intel and learn each others business in micro 1on1 sessions is a great way to start having reps understand 1 partner at a time.

Training partners on your products / services is extremely important, but remember, nobody knows how to sell your products and services like your sales teams. I believe the most effective way is to provide enablement materials to partners. The goal is to get them comfortable with speaking to your offering and opening the door to a conversation with you. Enablement materials can be in the form of sales decks, one pagers, email templates, case studies or key metrics to share. Another enablement tool is recorded sales pitches with prospects, if you have permission to share on all sides. Once you feel like your partner is comfortable speaking to your offering, the next important step is how to hand off a referral. This is a great time to introduce your partner as the subject matter experts. Here your partner will be able to take over and go a little deeper as you have already set them up for success.

It's important to set the expectation that you are not a solely a channel for these partners - ultimately tech partners should be focused on having a compelling story on the product side. That's the mechanism by which access to your customers can be made available and it's on them to create the technology and the story to help drive new business for themselves.

The most effective way I have used to ensure partners align with your sales pitch is to provide training. The training does not have to be long or live. However the training should be run by someone from your team who can effectively emulate how pitches should be made. Providing enablement materials (ie 1 pagers, decks, email templates, talk tracks, case studies, and key value metrics) that can be used during these conversations is also helpful. Be sure to refresh these resources regularly. Conduct joint pitches with partners if your team has the resources. Provide easily accessible support (another repeating tool in the toolkit) and open lines of communication for feedback. Track failed pitches as well as the reason for the nos. Use these to improve the pitches and/or product.