Identifying Sales Channel Partners in Your Market Ecosystem

It is hard to imagine not having a map of the world or a basic understanding of the globe. Everywhere we want to go needs to be in relation to where we are now so we can find the best way to get to where we’d like to go. We get around easier and make decisions better and faster when we understand our world.

How can we make things better if we don’t seek a good understanding of the way things are and how things work?
How can a company solve a customer’s problem if they don’t really understand the customer’s needs?

If you don’t have a proper understanding of the whole challenge, you are shooting in the dark.

In a software company /ISV identifying sales channel partners, organising a brainstorming session with the team is a typical starting point. They will usually seek to identify companies or company types to talk to within the team’s contact base network. This can start an exercise of discovery, but it’s often slow and fizzles out with little success due to the many negative responses. This open format brainstorming approach allows too much unconscious bias to creep in, as to what will or won’t work, and maybe without a full understanding of how the market works.

An alternative is to get a fuller understanding of your market, your world, or more appropriately your customer’s world.

Your customer’s world is your market ecosystem.

In building your market ecosystem, we ask that you park your end objective and seek to build a reasonably comprehensive view of the market from your customers’ point of view. Shape the challenge differently, pose different questions to draw out all the company types that your target customers interact with.

Your Market Ecosystem is a pictorial view of your market, from your customers’ and decision makers’ point of view, in the needs you solve and related needs. Your Ecosystem contains a layered view of the market, showing your decision-makers world, with influencers, trusted advisors/consultants, services companies, resellers, and all the various solution types. Your Market Ecosystem represents relationships and capabilities and not a value chain or value stream, although it does obviously bear some relationship with these models.

Your Market Ecosystem will contain your Target Customers at the center of their world with their Influencers, Trusted Advisors, Services Providers, IT and Software Resellers, and the multitude of different software solution types, from point solutions and platforms to general business applications and infrastructure solutions.
For example, if you are selling into the Banking Sector, then consider all the solutions your target decision-maker may have responsibility for and the solutions they will be interacting with:

Then consider the Resellers of these solutions:

The logos are intended to be representation of the Company Types and are selected according to the target regional market and not all the companies that exist in a selected market.

Rather than an open brainstorming session, pose questions to extract the company types in the ecosystem, such as;

• What types of specialist consulting providers, might a decision maker ask for advice?
• What solution types would your solution potentially integrate with?
• What solutions or business function does your system provide data to, or might impact decisions on the data from your system?
• What service providers or consultants might be involved in your customers getting the full value from your solution or the function it impacts?
• What greater need space does your solution fit into, and what are all the different types of consultants, service providers, resellers and solutions in the space?

Identifying the relevant partners becomes an exercise in evaluating which partner types sell to the relevant customers and decision makers and have the capabilities to sell and deliver. These are the company types you need to present a compelling partner proposition to. This Partner Type Selection process is a more elaborate topic discussed in greater detail in the following video:

Building and constantly updating Your Market Ecosystem will allow you to review how your market is changing with new technologies, new competitions and how new regional markets may differ. It brings great clarity and focus to your overall business operations and keeps you aware of the bigger picture.