Co-Selling Strategy with Partners

A co-selling routine for your top partners (or just partners on the consulting or implementation track)

This strategy is meant for extracting referrals from your partners regularly. The premise is - get your partners to show up to a monthly call with leads for you, and even look forward to the call.

1. Grab a list of agency partners you’d like to work more closely with

2. Create a calendar event in your open calendar for 1 hour long, titled something like “Partner Co-Selling Standup”

3. List out all of the off-pricing and off-partner page incentives you can bring in on those calls to make them super

4. Compose an email introducing the new co-selling standup and include:

   1. Mention the agenda:

      1. Review co-selling op’s

      2. Formalize a strategy to convert op’s

      3. Review sales strategy and tactics working for you

      4. Co-marketing op’s

      5. Product roadmap

   2. Add a list of some of the ways you can help them win that business:

      1. Discounts on your solution

      2. Creating case studies about their use case you share with your audience

      3. Drawing on personal relationships within their target audience

      4. Fast-tracking their directory listing on your site

   3. Add bullet points for the types of accounts you can co-sell with them:

      1. Closed-lost leads

      2. Shared accounts/clients

      3. Recently won business

      4. Wish list of accounts

   4. Mention being flexible and wanting to “help you win new business”

5. Copy the agenda and add it to the new calendar event so the agency remembers when opening that meeting.

6. When you start the meeting:

   1. Remind them of the goals,

   2. Ask them open-ended questions about “What’s your biggest pain point now?”

   3. Make it all about them.

7. As the first meeting is successful (they found a lot of value), you leave the meeting asking them to show up to the next one with some of that pipeline. But, don't push for it on the first call.

A strategy for converting top agencies

*This is great for anyone who is handed a cold list of partners to reach out to, or anyone looking to clean out there list. It simply requires:

1. That you have a list of agencies you have emailed, but did not respond.

2. Have a pipeline stage that is for stale leads (prospects who are non-responsive), or simply a small list of leads in nurturing stages that sales will allow you to refer to agencies.

Here's what to do:

1. Export the prospective agencies into a sheet

2. Open each of their websites and see if you can find what vertical/industry they are targeting for services, add a new column with "Target Clients" then fill that out per agency.

3. Then, try to deduce (based on case studies and testimonials) what the size of their average client is - smb, mid-market, enterprise. Add a new column for "Target size"

4. Finally, and this is the important part, add the main tools the agency uses or is partnered with - check builtwith.com and their footer. Add final columns for "uses these tools:" and "partners with:"

5. Then, go to sales and ask them to give you a list of leads that seem to be non-responsive with permission to try and warm them back up.

6. Look at each of the verticals of the companies on the list, plus their size, and try to play matchmaker - which companies should which agencies want to work with. Add the company URL to a new column "Vertical-based Prospect 1".

7. Then, check out that prospects tools using their domain and builtwith (or Wappalyzer), and add a new column for "Tools used prospect 1:"

8. Do this until each company is matched with at least a few of your partner prospects - the goal is to have at least 3 user prospects matched with each agency prospect.

Now that you have your list, we need to reach back out to the agencies who were non-responsive:

1. Compose an email to each agency one at a time with the subject "Pipeline Referrals"

2. The body will be something like:
   
   “Hello first_name,
   
   As you are probably aware, we are big fans of your agency and have been for some time. Our previous offers have fallen flat, but I may have something we both can benefit from today:
   
   Based on you using ___ tools, targeting ___ vertical with ____ services, I believe the list below of prospects in our pipeline would be a great fit for your services given their recent need for a tool like ours.
   
   We have not closed them so please let us introduce you and hopefully after you win the deal they will look closer into the relationship.
   
   If you are open to it, please find a time in my calendar so we can form a proper intro and reason/offer (other than your agency being one we admire) for the intro right now.
   
   Sincerely,
   
   Partner manager Joe”
   
   (paste the list of company names/urls below along with your calendar link)
   
   

3. Send that out and I assure you agencies will reply with gratitude for thinking of them.

This tactic not-only works on Chris, but it forces your team to really look at your agencies and align with their sales goals - not just blasting nonsense to everyone on your list.

The full strategy can be learned here on this podcast: