TABLE OF CONTENTS Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853 1890)
Discuss the meaning of partnership.
Define account ownership.
Work the relationship and infrastructure.
Understand the dangers of dealing with partners.
Partners who resell your products and services can be the best of friends or the worst of enemies. Partners are one of the most effective tools in the SE's arsenal when looking to advance an opportunity through the sales cycle.
A partnership can be loosely defined as a functional relationship between two or more entities working toward the common good. An alternate view was expressed by Howard Sorgen, former CTO of Merrill Lynch, who once defined vendor partnership as "that large sucking sound when money is transferred from my wallet into yours."
There are many different kinds of partners those who resell your products directly, those who build their products on top of yours, and those who do not directly sell, but recommend your products to prospects. There is no question that partners provide additional leverage to the sales force. Instead of just having your sales organization selling, you also benefit from having another, potentially larger, organization also selling on your behalf. For the majority of this chapter, we focus on the channel/system integrator (SI) partner because they typically provide the most opportunity for additional revenue.
| Hint: The Effective Partnership | As cynical as it may sound, very early in the partner engagement process you need to... |
