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In a growth business, it’s never to early to plan for what’s next.  Every year financial goals get higher and technology, delivery models and entire markets can change beneath your feet.  Our executive team and board at Azaleos have done a great job thus far of staying ahead.  However, 2011 will bring a new focus- building the business through key, strategic partnerships.  I was chosen to lead this effort and started August 1.  In the few free minutes I’ve got tonight, I thought I’d share some of what I’m learning so far.  I look at the job as having three critical functions:

• Understanding how the partner’s products/services work with ours, and why we’re more relevant together than separate
• Identifying what kind of customer craves the mutual offering, developing the positioning and approach strategy, crafting the service delivery model
• Field sales execution:  nailing down field messaging, developing collateral, training Azaleos and partner teams, working leads and managing pipeline

Like any other new job, the first week was a bit overwhelming.   I have 10 partner relationships to build and manage, each of which has a different niche/message, way of selling, sales alignment (verticals vs. territories) and organizational structure.  The good news is that our model fits unbelievably well with most of them and partnering with us is very strategic for each of them long-term.  On the flip side, some of these partners have reps that don’t get paid to sell or promote Azaleos services.  You can imagine the challenge of getting them to bring an unknown company into their deal first of all, then not get paid on it.  So there are some challenges here, but overall I feel really positive about the opportunity to build pipeline for ourselves and our partners. 

It seems like every partner wants to do a broad targeting and outreach effort.  As a marketer, I get excited about that kind of thing and am right there with them.  However, our outgoing marketing efforts for the fall season haven’t kicked off yet.  So the leads we work with our partners will come from one of three sources.  Each source has its own caveats and it’s important to understand the risk/reward sides before jumping right in.

Source 1:  Installed Base/Existing Clients

• Whether it’s our installed base or theirs, the stakes are high for bringing partners in.  If you bring the wrong partner into an existing customer, you could lose your credibility and trusted advisor status with that customer.  Same with the partner.  So if you choose to go this route, your sales reps MUST know the partner’s technology or service offering.  Also be sure that you’ve contacted and qualified the existing customer for a specific need BEFORE you tell the partner about them.  Lastly, make sure your relationship with the partner rep and your understanding of the end-user experience is strong.  Lining up partners with your installed base can be great or it can be devastating.  Be sure you know what you’re doing.

Source 2:  Existing Pipeline

• Think this one through.  Like I noted above, nobody wants to introduce an unpredictable entity into their sales cycle that could either slow it down or destroy it.  The key thing here is that you and your partner rep understand each other’s message and value props- and how/where to deliver them.  Also think about the end-user experience: if the customer is interested, how will the delivery work?  Are you going in as an extension of the partner’s sales team?  You’ll be doing that in any white-label scenarios.  Remember who you are, who they are and what this looks/feels like for the customer.

Source 3:  Their Database Or Our Database

• The idea here is to pull contacts that we can target and work together with the partner’s reps.  This may be a vertical-specific exercise, so your reps may have to bone up on pitching to banking or healthcare entities for example.  Also think about the impact to your own business- once you start pulling lists and doing targeted calldowns, Inside Sales is involved.  Outside sales is involved.  The Partner Channel guy and the partner’s rep is involved, all hoping to get paid on that prospect.  So not only does this approach have to scale, it has to WORK.  If we have a hot prospect that we pull from our database and get it to 40% in the cycle, we don’t want a partner’s unprepared rep trashing that and vice-versa.  Devastating to 3 people on our team (the rep, Inside Sales and yours truly).  This works the same way for the partner’s database as well.  Be sure you’re trained up and in sync with your partner so you don’t disrupt either of your businesses. 

There’s a great opportunity here for both Azaleos and our partners, but there will likely be some fumbling around until we get it perfect.  The most important thing to realize here is that none of it works without a SINCERE effort from the sales team.  Reps need to truly understand their partners and deliver more value to the customer together than they would separately.

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