Will a Global Software Company resell your product? – Partner Fit

In my previous article, I discussed the challenges caused by poor partner qualification and evaluation, and the benefits of a structured approach that can be executed by all your team. I also shared a video with an overview slide on Tenego’s Partner Fit Evaluation approach.

We’ve had some comments on the importance of building relationships with partnerships, and that travelling to meet partners shows commitment. I agree with relationships being important and travelling both helps relationships and builds commitment, but all at the right time and stage in the process. You need to seek to build relationship with evaluated prospective partners. In this article, I want to share a success story, of sorts, with some valuable lessons.

How did a €20M pa software company /ISV partner with a €3Bn global player?

This is the story of a client company. We’ll call them SolutionCo, to protect any potentially sensitive details. This partnership looked very strong, yet it resulted in significant challenges due to inadequate operational fit assessment.

SolutionCo was a private company with circa €20M pa revenues who secured a partnership with GiantCo. GiantCo had approx €3Bn pa revenues with a strong presence in large enterprises in North America and Europe. This partnership was a potential game-changer for SolutionCo, with opportunities into many large enterprise customers.

SolutionCo got a big break with GiantCo, and on initial assessment, the fit was perfect:

-SolutionCo’s solution was the type of solution that featured on every desk within its customer companies.
-GiantCo’s user based was small and influential groups of people at the top of many large enterprises.
-SolutionCo + GiantCo combined offering would allow GiantCo to sell more throughout its substantial enterprise customers and extend their brand reach to every user.

On getting their sales team engaged:

SolutionCo had the fantastic opportunity of presenting at GiantCo’s Global Sales Kick-off with their 1,500 salespeople. Even when narrowing down the focus to particular sectors, company sizes and types, this still commanded the attention of 50 of GiantCo’s salespeople.

What happened next, nearly killed SolutionCo’s business.

SolutionCo’s was a complex sale, requiring specific domain expertise in their sales process. GiantCo’s sales process was straightforward by comparison. With 50 GiantCo’s salespeople contacting their customers and organising discovery and demo calls, the result was grossly underestimated. This wasn’t good news.

GiantCo had organised a large volume of Demo meetings requiring SolutionCo’s support. The problem was that the prospects were poorly qualified according to SolutionCo’s process.

The burden on the SolutionCo team nearly killed their company, distracting them from their current revenue-generating business.

With the challenges rectified, the relationship progressed to make a big difference to SolutionCo’s business. The problems that arose damaged the relationship with many of GiantCo’s salespeople and thus, a big opportunity blown.

With a full Partner Fit Evaluation and assessment, the opportunity would have been much different:

-The difference in sales capabilities and processes would have been identified
-The potential pace of the joint opportunity would have been determined
– An adjusted sales process would have been agreed
-Suitable ‘prospecting’ training would have been provided to an initial select group of GiantCo’s salespeople
-Then rolled-out to the full 50 salespeople, or more, when the process was proven
-GiantCo would have been made more self-sufficient to handle high volume ‘standard’ business with more complex sales requiring SolutionCo support

Partner Fit is not an overly rigorous and challenges process. It is a discussion:

-A simple structure would have solved these issues with SolutionCo and GiantCo and resulted in a much greater opportunity.
-Partner Fit is not just about assessing whether you should partner, but also how the partnership will work and how to make it work.
-Even if you know the partner company, how do you assess the best plan together if you don’t assess the partner fit and pace of the potential business together.
-Especially if you only want a small number of partners, you want to be surer that your efforts will be best placed.
-Even if you have an experienced partner management team, a structured Partner Fit process that everyone on the team understands will make your partnerships much more effective

Many sales channel professionals experience is with maybe two or three companies. What we are sharing is experience from over 100 companies of different product types, various industry sectors and regions around the world.

In my next article in the series, I will outline some of the critical points in Partner Fit Evaluation, regardless of the size of your company and the size of the partner company.

If you have any comments or questions on your partner evaluation experiences, I’d like to hear from you.