How System Integrators can drive pipeline from Tech Vendor sales teams
In professional services businesses you have two customers.
The actual customer, and the vendor whose technology you are implementing, integrating or supporting.
Whilst it is important to market and sell directly, one of your biggest routes to market will be building trusted relationships with vendor sales teams.
They know which customers are coming to market, they know the types of projects that you are well suited for, and when you reach true ‘partnership’ they will bring you in early in the sales cycle giving you time to learn the customer’s business and mould the project appropriately.
As with all sales - having empathy for your customers situation is an essential starting point.
So have a really good think about what the AE at one of your vendors is focused on:
Selling their licences
Selling them quickly
Selling as big or as long a deal as possible
A successful project - no red accounts that soak up their selling time
On the flip side think about what they don’t want
Strategy projects that delay the selling of licences
Large projects that put their customer off buying the licences
Someone that disagrees with their timeline or estimates!
But these last three things are probably what the customer really needs to be successful.
So how should you and your sellers navigate this tricky challenge?
Ask and listen - speak with vendor AEs and ask them what is important to them. What is their quota, how big is their territory? How are they approaching it? Can your sellers help by providing additional prospecting into their non-priority accounts? Do they have other preferred partners they work with? What do they do well or badly?
Understand the vendor’s partner programmes - to avoid AEs using favouritism vendors will often try to assign opportunities out centrally. It therefore pays for your sellers to be close to the vendor AEs and have them introduce your sellers to clients as early in the process as possible - as once they are involved they can’t be removed.
Prioritise - your sellers can’t support every AE across every segment, across every geography, and across every vendor that you work with. Based on what you learned above prioritise teams and AEs and lean in to be the best partner they have ever worked with. The reality is, once one of your sellers has four or five vendor AEs feeding them opportunities they’ll start to be spread to thin anyway.
Be present - I remember meeting an RVP at Workday in Stockholm. We had a very pleasant meeting, but at the end he said “the reality is, at the end of this meeting you’ll get back on the Arlanda Express, head back to the airport and we won’t see you for a month. I need partners that are here every week.” This comes back to prioritisation - pick vendor teams you can be in front of consistently.
Build real customer content - not boring case studies but live demos, videos, sandbox environments. Give the vendor AEs things they can share with their customer. We had a video demo of Virgin America (the no-more airline) and a social intranet we’d built for them. That video got shared around the tech vendor and used in their own meetings driving the question “Who built this?”
Build visual assets - if you have accelerators that help in your projects bring them to life - connectors, templates, frameworks, graphics. Anything that helps a vendor AE to show their customer how the implementation can be accelerated and de-risked.
Organise real-life events - focused on specific topics, industry, role, or use case. Get your sellers to promote to the vendor AEs - “Thought your customers might find this of use” They are always keen to get in front of their own customers or have something valuable to share with them.
Give the vendor AEs resources they can’t get internally - in many tech companies Solution Consultants or demo resources are thin on the ground. If you can provide custom demos or POCs to the standard (or beyond) of their own team, you can help the AE to go further faster.
Trust them (and hope they don’t abuse it) - if you want to be trusted, you have to trust. So have your sellers share their proposals, their timelines, their org chart mapping. At best their vendor AE partners will open up their plans and align with you, maybe correcting your planned close date or advising of another executive that needs to be included. At worst they share your content where they shouldn’t and you use this to reset the partnership at a higher level.
Be a connector - if you work alongside multiple tech vendors or your seller has been at your company longer than the vendor AE, they are likely more connected than the vendor AE is. Make introductions that might be valuable. I worked for a partner of Google, Workday and Salesforce and organised lunches and dinners for the AEs at each of those companies that were focused on specific industries. It positioned us a a connector which other partners weren’t able or willing to do.
Demonstrate that strategy increases deal size and predictability - A small strategy project of a few weeks can help the customer to align their internal teams on the scope and scale of the project. This often flushes out any red flags to the licencing deal as well and bringing in other departments into scope.
Promote examples where the vendor has brought you in earlier, it has allowed you to position and execute the strategic work without any delay to the original licence deal, but had expanded and de-risked it.
Help them get their deal done - constantly ask, how can I be helpful, when are you forecasting your licences for, when do you need the customer to agree on modules and volumes? Demonstrate that their deal is as important as your deal. Do this at a leadership and AE level.
These are just some ideas, but they all come back to empathy.
Your tech vendor doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking about how they can make your day better.
They are focused on their own business, their own opportunities, their own quarter - help the with that and they’ll help you achieve your goals in the process.
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Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.