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Are your Systems ready for Co-Selling?

Updated: Apr 4




As referenced in our previous blog posts, engaging in co-selling and solutioning alongside your partner ecosystem has the potential to cultivate exponential growth and shared triumph, enabling companies to extend far beyond their individual boundaries. Nevertheless, navigating this terrain can prove complex, particularly when grappling with the diverse priorities, objectives, and execution hurdles stemming from disparate systems & infrastructures. Companies committed to co-selling go-to-market (GTM) strategies can indeed overcome these system-related hurdles by proactively preparing for and strategizing around these challenges.


Let’s look at some enterprise solution features needed for successful co-selling:

Partner Relationship Management:

  • Partner Portal: A centralized platform where partners can access sales and marketing resources, training materials, deal registration, and performance metrics.

  • Deal Registration: Capability for partners to register deals to ensure proper attribution and collaboration throughout the sales process.

  • Lead Distribution: Automated lead routing and distribution to ensure fair allocation of leads among partners.

  • Performance Analytics: Dashboards and reports to track partner performance, deal progress, and revenue contributions.

Unified Catalog Management:

  • Catalog Aggregation: Co-selling partners often have their own product or service catalogs, aggregating these catalogs into a unified view, allowing partners to access and browse the complete portfolio of offerings available for co-selling.

  • Standardization and Normalization: Catalog data from different partners may be structured differently or use different terminology, hence mapping product codes, standardizing pricing formats, and aligning product attributes is crucial.

  • Dynamic Pricing and Availability: Dynamic pricing and availability information ensures that partners can respond quickly to customer inquiries and secure orders in a timely manner.

Collaborative Selling Tools & Deal Management:

  • Real-time Communication: Instant messaging, chat, and video conferencing tools for real-time communication between partner teams.

  • Document Sharing: Secure document repositories for sharing sales collateral, proposals, contracts, and other relevant documents.

  • Task Management: Collaboration tools for assigning tasks, setting deadlines, and tracking progress on joint opportunities.

  • Real-time collaboration and negotiation on deal strategies and pricing.

Unified CRM Platform:

  • Account and Contact Management: Centralized database of customer accounts, contacts, and interactions across all partners involved in co-selling.

  • Opportunity Tracking: Ability to track sales opportunities from inception to closure, including partner involvement and revenue sharing.

  • Customization and Integration: Flexibility to customize fields, workflows, and reports to accommodate unique co-selling requirements and integrate with other enterprise systems.

Streamlined Fulfillment & Provisioning:

  • Order Management: A robust order management system is essential for handling orders generated through co-selling activities. It should support the creation, processing, and tracking of orders across multiple partners, ensuring visibility and accountability throughout the fulfillment and/or provisioning process.

  • Inventory Management: Systems should provide real-time visibility into inventory levels across all partners involved in co-selling. This ensures that products or services can be fulfilled promptly without delays or stockouts, minimizing customer dissatisfaction.

  • Billing and Invoicing: Co-selling arrangements often involve revenue-sharing agreements between partners, requiring sophisticated billing and invoicing capabilities. Systems should support flexible billing models, revenue recognition rules, and automated invoicing to streamline financial transactions.

  • Contract Management: Effective contract management systems are necessary for managing agreements, terms, and obligations between co-selling partners. They should facilitate the creation, negotiation, and execution of contracts while ensuring compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.

  • Security and Compliance: Given the sensitive nature of customer data and financial transactions involved in co-selling, systems should adhere to industry standards and best practices for security and compliance. This includes measures such as data encryption, access controls, audit trails, and compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Traceable Settlements:

  • Revenue Sharing Agreements: Before engaging in co-selling activities, partners need to establish revenue sharing agreements that outline how revenue generated from joint sales will be distributed among the partners. 

  • Settlement Statements and Reconciliation: Periodically, the partner responsible for invoicing and billing should be providing settlement statements to all partners, detailing the revenue generated from co-selling activities and the corresponding revenue allocations. 

  • Payments: Based on agreements and settlements statements, the Partner receiving payments from the customers reimburses all other partners for their revenue share. 

Integration Capabilities:

  • Partner System Integration: Seamless integration with partners' CRM, ERP, and PRM systems for data exchange and collaboration.

  • API Connectivity: Robust APIs for integrating with third-party applications such as marketing automation tools, collaboration platforms, and financial systems.

  • Data Synchronization: Automated data synchronization between the enterprise solution and external systems to ensure consistency and accuracy of information.

  • Single Sign-On (SSO): Single sign-on functionality to simplify user authentication and access control across integrated systems.

The array of considerations presented here may initially appear daunting and perhaps even discouraging. Whether you find yourself embarking on the co-selling expedition for the first time or encountering any of these challenges along the way, PartneRite stands prepared to offer assistance.


PartneRite's AI-powered orchestration and monetization platform transcends traditional system boundaries, seamlessly guiding the end-to-end co-selling journey with utmost precision. By harmonizing every facet of the process, from catalog alignment to deal orchestration and settlement, we eradicate uncertainty, paving the way for co-selling success.

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