What are the best practices for using account mapping to identify new partnership opportunities?

Using account mapping in partnerships requires thorough research to understand each partner's strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning. It's essential to align mutual goals, values, and target audiences. Regular communication fosters collaboration, allowing for the identification of gaps in offerings that can be addressed collaboratively. Prioritizing partnerships based on strategic fit, potential ROI, and alignment with business objectives is crucial. By initiating joint initiatives or co-marketing efforts, trust is built over time. Continuous evaluation and adaptation of strategies ensure that partnerships evolve to maximize mutual benefits and opportunities.

Research to understand their business goals, values, and challenges. This knowledge will guide your mapping process. Work closely with your internal teams, especially sales, marketing, and customer success. Their insights can provide a comprehensive view of existing relationships and uncover untapped opportunities. Clearly outline your ideal customer profiles. This helps in narrowing down potential partners whose offerings align with your target audience, ensuring a more fruitful partnership. Leverage Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools and automation platforms to streamline the account mapping process. Remember, successful partnerships are built on trust, shared values, and a clear understanding of mutual benefits.

Best practices for account mapping to identify new partnership opportunities involve clearly defining objectives, segmenting the target market, and identifying ideal customer profiles. 1. Utilize existing data and research to analyze potential partners, engaging cross-functional stakeholders for insights. 2. Build relationships with key decision-makers, monitor industry trends, and evaluate the competitive landscape. 3. Regularly review and adapt your strategy, leveraging technology tools such as CRMs and analytics platforms for enhanced insights. These practices ensure a comprehensive approach to uncovering and capitalizing on strategic partnerships in a dynamic business environment.

Effective account mapping involves thorough research and defining clear objectives for new partnerships with a 360 degree understanding on partner ecosystem. It includes identifying key decision-makers, utilizing visual tools, and maintaining up-to-date information. Cross-functional collaboration and evaluation of current partnerships help prioritize opportunities. Leveraging sales intelligence tools, attending networking events, and ensuring legal compliance contribute to a systematic and strategic approach. Regularly measuring outcomes and adjusting strategies based on KPIs ensures ongoing success.

Define your objectives very concretely: what do you expect from this partnership? What brand or product benefits will it support or demonstrate? Is it to establish a product, a service or a campaign baseline? To generate engagement or leads? Your partner must bring you what you don't have in terms of brand equity or owned leverage. List what you want from him (for example: an account on TikTok to reach a segment of customers/prospects, a strong foothold in a region where your brand is in decline, an e-shop, a newsletter, etc.). From there, you can focus on certain types of partner (another brand, ambassadors or influencers, retailers, associations or NGOs, etc.). List the rewards you can offer, if it's a one-to-one partnership.

In my experience there are partners of various sizes, the ones too big are often too inflexible unless you can pair with their solution and sell them together. The ones too small, have little to no organizational skills to manage your partnership program. With partners, the lesser and more potent ones you acquire the better as you will need to spend significant amount of time grooming them. The trick is to identify the sweet spot. Prioritize them by intent, how likely or is in their interest to have our solution floated to their customers. You can use a simple matrix to identify and curate the most promising ones.

I recommend using one of the software tools available for account mapping that seamlessly integrates with multiple CRM platforms. This tool enables continuous mapping capabilities. Whenever a sales rep adds a new contact or opportunity in the CRM, the software promptly notifies if the prospect is already a client of a partner organization, and vice versa. This efficient information sharing improves collaboration, greatly increasing your success rate, higher win rates, and faster sales cycles.

Getting to know your partners intimately in a business context is an invaluable process. The ultimate aim is to become their trusted advisor. Reflecting on my own experiences in sales, I cultivated relationships with new partners who were initially unfamiliar with forming partnerships. The crux of this approach is earning their trust and fostering genuine relationships. Such deep engagement can lead to upselling opportunities and a comprehensive understanding of your partner’s key customers, complementary businesses, and supply chain collaborators. This knowledge allows you to construct a detailed ecosystem surrounding your partner and their industry, which is a testament to the power of building strong, authentic partnerships.

Engaging and nurturing your partners is as good as maintaining your staff on sales. Periodic updates, meetings, client testimonials and case studies should be shared frequently to keep your solution top of mind. In my experience we used to run short-term tiered commissions that created a little more buzz than usual to kick things off, it motivates the partners to get the deal closed. With that performance recorded, we share the success of our partners to prospective partners and the cycle continues.