Nearbound Daily #502: 6 Questions That'll Make Stakeholder Alignment Easier
Partnerships is one of the most cost-effective ways to uncover revenue potential for your company, but many partner pros lack a clear plan.
How partnerships help Sellers to sell
Your sellers will believe that partnerships will help them close deals faster when you show them.
Not a second earlier.
For two decades Sellers used Outbound and Inbound tactics to hit quota.
Now, buyers don’t want to be targeted and they’re too overwhelmed to acknowledge Inbound attempts.
Partners help Sellers tap into a customer’s network of trust to get intel, influence, and intros on a deal.
Sellers care about hitting quota, but what’s needed to do that has shifted.
As a partner pro, you can get Sellers excited to work with partners by facilitating that close.
As Simon Bouchez puts it,
Partnerships can and should be an activation lever that is directly embedded in the momentum that is already present in the Sales team for these four stages (identifying, understanding, providing, retaining).
Read the Nearbound Sales Blueprint to learn more about facilitating the close, and read Simon Bouchez’s open letter to Partnerships from Sales to learn about what’s at stake.
6 Qs to make stakeholder alignment easier
When Scott Pollack began in partnerships over 20 years ago, there was no lexicon or playbook.
He figured it out through trial and error.
He learned, in his own words, that…
Partnerships is one of the most cost-effective ways to uncover a massive amount of revenue potential for your company. But the issue is more than a lack of tactics. You need a clear and clearly communicated plan.
Becuase he and so many partner pros like him lack a clear and clearly communicated plan, he outlined 6 questions to test your partnerships plan.
If you can answer each of these 6 questions, your partnerships plan is clear.
(Pull up a notes doc and take a minute to answer these!)
- What are the problems we’re trying to solve for our customers, our partners, and ourselves?
- Why are partnerships the best “tool” to use to solve these problems?
- How will we know whether a company is worth partnering with?
- Why would other companies care to partner with us?
- What resources will we need to build our partner program?
- What outcomes can we expect that will make partnerships worth investing in?
Once each of the 6 questions is clearly answered, ask yourself—Have I clearly communicated this information with my stakeholders?
And here’s a bonus tip for sharing information with stakeholders:
Write an executive summary for every partnership, only including key points. Share that executive summary widely.
If you want to learn how to diagnose and solve your partner program’s biggest challenges from the world’s top partnership leaders, check out Scott Pollack’s Mastering Partnerships Strategy course.
Image of the Day
When everything’s a partnership, nothing’s a partnership.
Don’t waste your precious time and resources on "partnerships" that don’t bring you any ROI.
Thanks for the visual, Franz-Josef Schrepf!
Read how he distinguishes between these 4 categories here.
Clear partner plans = success
Share this with a partner pro who is working on making their partnerships strategy clear.
