Partner-led sales

As independent operations, partners cannot have the same level of access to people, information, and internal systems that your own sales team enjoys. The success of your partners hugely depends on how responsive you are to partner needs. You could:

• Provide real-time updates on the company’s future plans, provide opportunities to discuss challenges and ideas, answer questions, and receive feedback
• Regularly communicate the “sell value” to partners and motivate them to market the company’s products over competitors
• Request frequent sales-specific status updates, interact and monitor “selling-health”
• Support them with exception handling, decision making and product expertise. Managing this across a large number of partners is a challenge
• Streamline the availability of the latest product information to partners

How Qontext Helps

Qontext gives you two models to work with partners:

(a) In case of large number of small partners (teams with few people): By setting up a separate group for each partner with their members as guests

(b) In case of large partners: By setting up an inter-company collaboration community that also includes your channel sales team

Here are examples of many things you could do:

• Create a standard-format Wiki page for regular sale-specific updates, meeting notes, and action items to a group. The pages can be made read-only or editable by specific individuals. Use the Comment feature to discuss the notes and capture them chronologically.
• Post all product related information – sell sheets, product slicks, reseller kits, promotional flyers, and demo CD files on to a closed internal group and forward to partners as needed.
• Use featured content to announce partner meetings and agenda items. Use wiki pages to effectively disseminate meeting notes and action items to the group. The pages can be made read-only or editable by specific individuals.