Gone are the days of cold calling, annoying people on LinkedIn, and spending hours trying to find the right contact to talk to at a prospective company.

I mean, unless you’re into torturing yourself, then more power to you.

Instead, sales teams these days leverage something called co-selling.

Simply put, co-selling is a partnership strategy between you and a company that is selling a non-competing product in the same market as you. 

Think along the lines of a pepperoni dealer and a pizza sauce supplier.

You both need to sell into pizza shops, right? 

This is co-selling, and it’s f*ckin’ awesome.

Let’s dive into how strategic sales partnerships can help you unlock revenue faster and secure key accounts. 

Speed Up Prospecting

According to Gartner, it takes an average of 18 calls to actually connect with a buyer. Yikes. Sound familiar? 

Working with a strategic sales partner in a co-selling relationship can help with that. By working with a co-seller, you can share information like: 

• How to get in touch with the key contact at a prospective company.

• Research from Hubspot tells us that more than 37% of salespeople list getting in touch with prospects as a major challenge. Removing this barrier is a huge win for your sales teams. 

• A potential shared client’s non-negotiables.

• Knowing this key information allows you to prepare what to do and, more importantly, what NOT to do in your first meeting. 

• What the client has in their current tech stack and where your solution can fit in

• For example, if you sell a social media scheduling platform and your prospect uses a project management tool like Asana, you can determine how to position your product and what integrations you can create for your prospect. 

Working with a co-selling partner can also give you access to warm introductions to prospects. According to Referral 42, referral leads have a 30% higher conversion rate than leads from any other channel.

With so much competition in today’s market, getting an edge via a referral can be the difference between a chicken dinner and a can of ravioli.  

Increased Collaboration to Close Deals 

There’s an African proverb that says: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Microsoft realized this in 2017 when it launched its co-sell partner program. Since then, Microsoft has generated $8 billion in partner revenue!

These partners work with Microsoft’s sales team to grow their businesses and close more deals. Their process is similar to most co-selling relationships and looks something like this:

• Step 1: Identify qualified leads
• Step 2: Share and accept the lead
• Step 3: Both Microsoft and its partner work together to pitch and sell to the customer
• Step 4: The contract is signed, and the champagne bottle is popped.

Take this use case, for example. 

Through Azure Marketplace, FlashGrid has landed deals in the six figures with companies such as Tiffany & Co!

That would be nice, huh?

Here at Partnered, our customer Branch has been able to land 100+ deals by co-selling using a similar strategy as Microsoft.

If it hasn’t clicked for you yet, co-selling is pretty much the greatest thing ever.

Adding Maximum Value for the Customer and Optimizing Revenue Potential

By combining forces with a strategic partner, you can give customers all they need in one place.

Rather than letting them search far and wide to piece together solutions for their business, you and your partners can bring a more comprehensive and holistic solution to the table for them, leading to greater revenue potential.

Bentley Systems and Microsoft are great examples of this. 

They offer a cloud strategy that encompasses private and public clouds and on-premise deployments. As Scott Guthrie, EVP Cloud & Enterprise of Microsoft, states, “We have seen how this highly effective approach is driving greater efficiencies for these organizations and helping their business become even more successful.“ 

Working together, leveraging Bentley’s proven industry solutions for infrastructure professionals and Microsoft’s enterprise platforms, their co-sell revenue increases while they empower their customers to be more successful.

It’s what we in the business like to call a “win-win” for everyone.

Conclusion:

As we have demonstrated above, co-selling via strategic sales partnerships can speed up the sales process and help your organizations unlock increased revenue opportunities. 

It also allows you to provide maximum value to your customers and give them a holistic, comprehensive suite of solutions to help them meet their goals.

Whether your company has reached maturity and you are struggling to fill the pipeline, or you are a new kid on the block looking to scale your business, co-selling via strategic partnerships can help you get there. So what are you waiting for? 

Get started with Partnered today!

Using a network like Partnered is the simplest and most effective way to allow your sales team to reap the rewards of a strategic alliance partnership. Partnered is a fully automated platform that crunches partner data and pushes key insights into the laps of your sales team, allowing your team to save time prospecting and use powerful insights to close more deals.

If you’d like to check out how Partnered can help you and your team boost sales and close more deals, get started for free today!