Autumn Carter

It all comes down to preparation. Before I coordinate any joint call with a partner and an end customer, I first schedule a partner + sales team interlock to get very clear on both organization’s goals and expectations for the conversation with the end prospect. Before and after that interlock, I recommend: - Aligning with the AE on a “best case scenario” next step to come out of the interlock partner meeting (i.e. a direct email intro to the partner’s contact within the client account, or scheduling a joint in-person meeting with the client). Share this best case scenario with the partner on the call, and ask for their honest feedback and/or reservations for taking that step. - Having a quick meeting with your sales team directly post interlock to discuss their feedback, understand their willingness to continue engaging with the partner, and most importantly determine who will handle the specific next steps. These quick post-partner call syncs go a LONG way to drive continuous trust between your partner team and sales team! When it’s time for your AE to meet directly with a prospect, if the partner is also involved in the client meeting, it can also make sense to set an additional prep call for a dry run! Ensure both orgs’ talk tracks are clear, and that the meeting has ample time for all parties to facilitate meaningful discussion with the customer. Schedule a quick post-client call interlock with the partner to get the partner's feedback and plan next steps. If the partner facilitates but does NOT join the call between your AE and the end customer, write up a quick overview of what the call entailed and share the next steps with the partner directly.

The best way to find out what partners need is to ask what would be most helpful as they bring your product to clients. To start - make it easy for your consulting partners by creating a co-brandable version of a pitch deck your sales team is using! It can also be worth your time to compile value proposition statements, use case examples, and customer stories for the top industries your company sells to. In addition – giving your partners the product access and enablement to be able to demo your product directly to clients goes a long way!

I always recommend creating a one-pager that gives your partners a Who-What-When of your value proposition: - Who are the personas within should they be talking to about your product? - When to introduce your product. When partners are talking to clients - what should they be listening for to know it’s a good opportunity to introduce your product? - What is the elevator pitch your partner can give to their client to briefly explain the problem your product solves? In addition, for your top or most strategic partners, it also pays to include a brief “what’s in it for me” for partner sellers to ensure the joint value proposition is clear to them.

Compensating your sales team in some way for working with partners is a great way to encourage co-selling and collaboration! There are various ways to incentivize sales alignment with partner deals: - Create a time-bound competition where the salesperson with the most associated partner deals at the end of a month or quarter wins an award and/or gift card/cash prize - Work with your incentives/compensation teams to give salespeople a percentage kickback of the revenue from deals they help a partner close or close with a partner associated If you don’t have the operational capabilities to compensate the team monetarily - or if your partner program is too new to justify the compensation – there are still plenty of ways to encourage your sales team to work with partners. - In most organizations, having partners associated can help software companies sell bigger deals, more quickly, and upsell the client more quickly. Share general stats with your sales team, and if possible, work with your analytics team to get the specific deal-level data proving how partners help your team win bigger! -Document and share detailed “Partner Win Stories” with your sales team - Ensure sales leaders truly understand the value and importance of collaborating with partners, and support their teams efforts to work with partners too

Mutual Sales Team Alignment - Your sales team must be aligned - up to the sales leadership level - on the value partners can bring and the willingness to collaborate with them. Ideally, sales leaders lead by example by engaging with partners regularly! It’s most important that your sales team understands and believes that working with partners will benefit them. Clear Partner Value Propositions - It should be easy for your AEs to learn what your partners are good at, and what situations are not the best for a particular partner. Write up simple descriptions that AEs can quickly reference and understand. Goal Alignment - For your most strategic co-selling partnerships, be sure you genuinely understand your partners goals, down to the types of services they most want to sell, dollar amounts, number of opportunities, and the partner’s best case scenario. Your partner should also understand these specific goals for you and your sales team!

Lead sharing is a great place to start a partner program. Once lead sharing has been established, and conversations begin between your partner and your sales team, you can evaluate and identify true co-selling partners by asking: - Is there a clear list of accounts your teams can collaborate on? Account mapping is key to evaluating partners - understanding where your partners are and aren't, what personas they talk to within client accounts, and the kinds of problems they're helping customers solve will help determine whether it makes sense to engage in more strategic co-selling. - Is there a clear joint value proposition with this partner? This should be a story your sales team and the partner can agree upon, and should make it clear to a customer or prospect that your products create more value together than either could drive independently! - Does the partner have the sales capacity to make co-selling make sense? While there can always be small organizations that make a big impact, the most successful co-selling partners have some sort of sales capacity (think BDR teams, client partners with quotas). The ideal co-selling partner has salespeople who can collaborate with your team at various steps of pipeline generation and development. - Is there mutual trust? The importance of trust cannot be overstated! The best co-selling partners have already created some level of trust with your sales team. To create trust: does your sales team need to see or know to trust that this partner is worth continued co-selling with? Perhaps you can create a certification program, where partners can prove their technical knowledge of your product. If possible, you can even have partners certify on a go-to-market talk track, ensuring they’re able to speak to your product as well as your own internal salespeople can. Additionally, the partner must trust your salespeople: ensure the rules of engagement are clear, so that salespeople know how to work with a partner in a way that sets them up for success as well.

- Get important info from your prospective partners in advance -- even using a tool like "Calendly" you can ask prospective partners to answer a series of questions before they can book a first conversation with your team. Their answers to these questions should help you pre-evaluate their fit for your partner program, and help you get right into the nitty gritty in the first call. - Fast-track "legal" process: depending on your organization, there can be ways to speed up partner program contracting by encouraging partners to sign a pre-signed and unedited version of your contract. - Incentivize partners to leverage self-service onboarding resources: when necessary, you can withhold access (i.e. direct account team interlocks, access to resources like partner funding) to partners until or unless they complete certain onboarding steps or meet minimum requirements

First – see my answer to “What’s the absolutely best way to coordinate those early co-selling conversations between AEs and the prospect?” above A tip for increasing mutual trust is having key partners join for the last 30 minutes at the end of your sales team’s QBRs to get really specific on where they can help your team & your clients. These partner QBR presentations can also be followed by a partner + sales team happy hour or dinner, providing an ideal opportunity to get both teams comfortable with one another and excited to collaborate! To the second part of your question, here are couple of co-selling red flags I’d keep an eye out for: - Don’t just show up with your hand out - In a situation where the partner is making an introduction to a greenfield account for your company, ensure your AE has at the very least researched the account thoroughly (for some Target accounts, maybe your partner team even contributes to the account research). Ideally, you & your sales team can also come prepared with specific use cases and case studies that you think the end client could be interested in – show these to the partner and get their feedback as to how they anticipate the client will respond. - Prevent “co-opetition” with partners - If you’re working with a services partner on an opportunity, be careful that your sales team maintains a care to detail - down to adjusting their standing desks - to avoid any faux pas such as: positioning or promoting your company’s own internal services over a partner’s in a co-sell situation, or including your partner’s competitor’s logo in a client-facing presentation. - Avoid Client Engagement Friction - I’ve seen countless situations in which a prospect goes dark on one or both parties. For example, perhaps your team is having a hard time progressing procurement conversations, but the partner continues to have regular syncs with the client. Or conversely, the partner stops hearing from the client, while your team’s conversations continue. Sometimes, the fear of deal slip or progress slowdown will make your sales team want to join a standing partner call. The best way to avoid friction is to keep honest, consistent communication with your partner. I recommend standing 15 min weekly or biweekly syncs, or even creating a joint Slack channel or group GChat to make it easy for both teams to provide quick updates. Whenever possible, try not to “ambush” the client by having a partner unexpectedly join your sales team’s call with the client, or having your sales team join a standing partner + client call. Instead - ask a specific question on behalf of your partner, or have the partner take specific questions to their own client call!

There are countless ways partners can help your sales team win - but the simplest answer is: a good partner can be an incredible advocate for your product and company in front of the customer when your salespeople are not in the room. At Dataiku, our partners have helped us win countless deals by working closely with our sales team. Some specific examples: - Creating pipeline by introducing Dataiku sellers directly to new contacts within our prospect or customer accounts - Providing intel (or even just validating what your sales team has been told by the client) especially around budget, timelines, org charts, internal account politics, and procurement - Mentioning Dataiku’s value proposition in their own executive meetings with joint clients, and coming back to our sales team to share how the client responded - Preemptively identifying a Dataiku competitor in an account that our sales team may not have been aware of, allowing our team to proactively position against that competitor and reduce risk in our opportunities - Presenting themselves as a “neutral” third party and guiding the client intentionally away from a competitive product towards our product - Pulling in their own pre-sales technical resources to help organizations evaluate the Dataiku platform effectively - Reselling Dataiku into geographies and/or industries where we might not want to commit the resources to sell the product directly