Partnering = Business Development, not Direct Sales

As a Partner Manager, it’s tempting to run deals for the partner.

Partner sales reps are more motivated and experienced at selling their own solution/service than the vendors, and it’s no secret that many of those sales reps have less experience and formal sales training than their vendor allies. Regardless of your Partner Manager’s sales experience (see Reason #4) or training (see Reason #2), it’s natural to want to take a leading role, if not explicit ownership, of partnership sales opportunities.

Truth be told, this approach can work – to some degree. But it’s neither scalable nor profitable. Production from vendor-led, or even shoulder-to-shoulder, selling is limited by the number of deals the Partner Manager can run at one time. Further, SMB deals, by their very nature, are smaller than enterprise deals, so this approach results in a Partner Manager producing less revenue than a direct sales rep does. That’s the opposite of scale.

To make matters worse, it doesn’t move the growth needle. It doesn’t enable the partner to sell twice as much this year as they did last year, nor encourage them to invest in order to sell three times as much next year. At best, it maintains the status quo, which, in a growing market, translates to declining revenues.

Partner Managers need to work as virtual sales managers to their partners, building partner sales capabilities and capacity. They need to set direction, motivate, coach, enable, and drive results without being involved in the details of every sales opportunity. Of course, this is much more difficult in an ecosystem environment, since the Partner Manager has no real authority over the partner at all.

Train your Partner Managers to be revenue multipliers and business developers. Train them on influence without authority skills; teaching them how to establish mutual goals and then use pipeline management, deal reviews and forecasting to drive towards those mutual goals. Train them on how to drive conversations with partners about what capabilities need to be built and how much capacity will be needed to support the desired partnership revenue objectives.

Partner Managers are meant to be revenue multipliers, not revenue watchers.