5 Ways Partner GTM Deliver Superior Vendor ROI

Each of my four start ups and most recently SAP capitalized on their partner go to market (GTM) for appreciable customer gain and revenue growth.

Why?

Simple answer. It’s all about the easiest, quickest and largest path to revenue recognition. But, are partners strictly an adjunct workforce to your direct sales teams?

No.

Partners and partner ecosystems offer far more value to most leading enterprises and their vendor suppliers. This value point was central to the recent Workspan Partner event at NetApp. Great event, thanks to Chip Rodgers for invite and awesome to see many former SAP colleagues like Amit Sinha and long, long, long-time colleague Joe Tolod after all these years. Workspan reinforced my view of partner value in many client GTM environments including their role in:

1. Customer Success
2. Customer Relationships using CRM Collaboration and Demand Generation
3. Vendor Revenue Acceleration
4. Competitive Differentiation
5. Product Evolution

Let’s take a quick tour across these five areas including examples.

1. Customer success isn’t just selling software or service, it’s all about the product being successfully deployed and useful. Former MobileIron colleague and co-founder Ajay Mishra spent much of his time calling partners and customers to ensure they were happy. I collaborated with Ajay often to provide partners hands-on, critical GTM content and training. Customers depend on several different types of partners including Telcos like Vodafone, VARs including Avant, and System Integrators including CapGemeni. Tagging a few best people and examples here and at the end of this post from recent experiences.

2. Building partner relationships is akin to a collaborative dance. Vendors are mistaken if they believe a partner will solely engage for their valuable customers just on a single financial transaction. There is a palpable partner pulse to customer relationships. Partners want vendors to bring continued value to the table through CRM assets, prospects and sales scripting. APS Marketing customer examples of working with Active Worldwide team of Brian Beal and Mike Thomas helping VoIP security innovator RedShift Networks build solid partner programs with Cisco and Gigamon as examples.

3. Vendors know full-time sales head count are expensive. Yes, dedicated sales teams are awesome, but the venture community expects very high revenue multiples from startup sales teams. Many successful VP sales candidates find those expectations difficult to maintain after crossing the $50m chasm. Partners like Avant are among the best in actively collaborating on vendor revenue programs especially with new research programs from Ken Presti and SD-WAN.

4. Competitive differentiation is my favorite partner fuel. It’s not unusual to see a partner selling multiple vendor “flavors” of a hot technology like SD-WAN or Firewalls. Early Fortinet UTM firewalls were sold by the same partner teams representing Cisco and Checkpoint. Same “crowd” selling approach goes with early MobileIron and VMWare/Airwatch mobility. Customers expect options and vendors need to fill in the knowledge gaps with meaningful business, ROI and technology content on why their solution is better. I still have great memories of presenting MobileIron’s GTM and ROI calculator to the EMEA AT&T sales teams in the UK and sharing specific customer stories for differentiation.

5. The best products continue to evolve. New APS Marketing customer Everything But the Plant is applying eCommerce best practices to advance customer’s products within the multi billion cannabis market. Similarly, my SD-WAN client is capturing partner and customer hearts and mind share through a G2 Crowd program focusing on customer success. Feedback from suppliers, partners and customers all goes into making new products better and more competitive.

I’m sure there are more than 5 roads to partner success. What are your top GTM partner avenues and why? I’ll append to this blog or start a new one with more input.