Scottsdale, team selling is hard enough with sales people working at the same company, it is even harder with partners. At the same time prospects like buying complete and complimentary solutions, and very often companies need to partner to sell more of their solutions. There are also VAR (value added reseller), Reseller, and private label agreements where the partners are in the background and prospects sees it as your solutions and never sees the other companies. From the sounds of your offering, you are doing joint selling.
The good news is you have lots of options.
- Have you spoken with other sales people at your company who also deal with the partner and potentially the sales person. Use these conversations to determine if this a partner problem or is this an individual partner rep problem?
- Have you spoken with the partner rep? A positive question could be, "We have a lot of exciting deals together how do you recommend we work together?". In the words of Steven Covey, "Seek first to understand then to be understood". Get a better of understanding of why he is going around you. It could simply be a misunderstanding of roles when working accounts or the guy could be predatory sales partner and it doesn't matter what you do he is going to go around you to try and sell his product.
- Is there sales channel conflict? Is the partnership set up, that he only gets paid if he does certain events on the account.
- Speak with your sales manager to get his advice.
- Can you win deals without the partner making the calls with you? Can you get additional training on their products. Can you sell your product first, then bring the partner in after.
- Set up standing calls with the rep to update each other on accounts
- If he is going to go around you any way, ask him to contact certain people in the account for you.
Once you get a better understanding of the reason why the guy is going around you can put together a partner strategy. As a sales executive who is part of a sales team part of your job is internal selling and partner selling. At one point in my career I sold multi-million dollar software solutions where very ofter we would have over twenty people working on the sale. I worked just as hard on internal selling and scheduling as I did on selling the account, because the twenty people knew their areas better than me and I focused on managing the sale and working with the prospects management team.
Great topic, good partner selling.
Reader Feedback, please click the comments below to give 'Frustrated' additional information on 'Partners' and I want your feedback on my response.
Comments