Available Sales Skills Training is Off-Target

Putting your Partner Managers through “direct sales” training is unhelpful and even counter-productive.

Since the partner team is often part of the sales organization, it seems logical to leadership and even to enablement that Partner Managers should attend sales training alongside their direct sales counterparts. In those sessions, they’re trained on all kinds of specific direct sales skills and techniques: how to run sales engagements, how to qualify deals, how to choose sales strategies, how to negotiate discounts, how to penetrate territories, how to forecast opportunities, etc. All of these are only tangential to what Partner Managers need to be doing.

There’s rarely training specific to the core fundamentals of partnering. There’s no course on how to collaborate and envision with a partner on a long-term partnership vision; no module on how to identify and size market opportunities that align the partner’s business objectives with your business objectives; no asset on how to identify partnership competitors and then work to gain competitive mindshare within the partnership. There’s not even content that translates existing sales training on how to run deals into what Partner Managers really need, which is how to coach someone else on running a deal.

Partner Managers need to be trained on skills that are relevant to their daily role.

Build or engage with a training vendor that specializes in Partner and Channel Management skill development. Review the skills that are most critical to your Partner Management role success, and secure training that develops those skills. Focus on the skills that are unique to partnering, like building partnership strategic vision, collaborating and negotiating partnership operating rhythms, identifying and sizing partnership market opportunities, defending and building competitive mindshare, reviewing and presenting partnership business performance, and driving partnership business planning.

Remember that partnerships rarely fail due to execution issues alone. If a partnership isn’t producing, it’s almost always because the strategic, long-term foundation was never established or isn’t being maintained. So, before you spend valuable training time and money enabling your Partner Managers to go to market with partners, make sure they’ve got the foundational skills to create and drive viable partnerships to begin with.

And, whatever you do, don’t settle for the direct sales training course that’s been “customized” to use the word “partner” instead of “customer”, or the add-on module that only talks about “selling with partners”.