10 Nov Engage Partners Early in the Sales Process for Greater Success

The faster you get your product to market, the sooner your company will bring in revenue to off-set development costs.

It seems like a no-brainer, yet many companies wait until the end of the development process when bringing a new product online to engage partners and partnering sales team. This costs time in the form of getting partners trained and ready to hit the ground running; and in business, time is money.

Engage Partners Early

The time to engage partners is early, ideally during the design process or early in the development stage. The more lead time your partners have the better able they are to understand the goals and objectives you’ve set out, and become better positioned to spot opportunities. You’re also better able to target partners in the right verticals for your product, and develop a custom enablement plan if required.

One of the key pillars of a successful partnership is: engage early. Let’s look at four reasons why engaging earlier is good for your channel partner relationships.

Four Benefits of Engaging Early

1. Take advantage of opportunities
   By engaging partners early, their sales organizations are better positioned to spot opportunities, qualify deals and close sales. It’s critical; you want your partners to lead deals, not the other way around. You want your partners to bring the deals in, but that’s only possible if your partners are brought in early enough to open up those new opportunities. At the end of the day, it means losing fewer deals to the competition.
2. Increased training time
   Too little training, training at the wrong time or poorly targeted materials and resources puts your partners in the untenable position of trying to market and sell a product for which they don’t have a clear understanding or of having partners who don’t understand your customers. A solid, well-planned training program is important when it comes to enabling partners. The earlier you bring in your partners, the more time they have to train and prepare.
3. Develop relationships
   Drive partner and vendor relations by bringing people to the table early in the process. This has the advantage of leveraging additional contacts or opening new opportunities you might not otherwise have. You can drive partner collaboration with specific events, putting customers and partners in the same space together.
4. Improve close rates
   When you and your partners develop pivotal relationships early, it goes a long way towards reducing channel conflict. When you and your partners spend less time going back and forth to solve problems, remove distractions and focus on the customer, it only stands to reason that your partners will spend more time closing sales and being successful.

A successful partnership has many attributes including trust, understanding and collaboration. Attributes which, like a good wine, can only be developed by the inclusion of the best ingredients and the right amount of time.

More Info

Be sure to check out our other blogs on partner enablement to learn more about how Sales Beacon can facilitate partner enablement for your company.