When closing more deals, most sales reps focus on getting more leads or improving their cold calling strategies. You might be missing out on another opportunity–leveraging service partners to solve objections and close more deals.
Over the past several years, as the sales partnership manager at Close, I’ve helped turn our service partners, who are teams we work with, into win-win partnerships for us, our customers, and our service partners.
One of the biggest misalignments between sales and partnerships is failing to leverage service partners to close deals, create sticky customers, and influence expansion revenue. I’ll share a few of the strategies I use to do that so you can create your structured plan.
What is a Service Partner?
A few examples:
- A service partner can set up automation within Close or integrate other tools with Close for a fee.
- A service partner can offer a specialized, done-for-you sales process and operations setup within Close. They set up this prescriptive sales process and train sales managers and teams to leverage the setup.
- A service partner might support Close customers in other languages that we don't. We have German partners who offer a Close setup/training in German for a fee.
- A service partner could service a specific sales process for a niche market. Our best partner, Sam Queen, sets up sales processes and training for education/coaching service companies.
- A service partner could build an entire business around creating a tech stack that supports starting your revenue engine and only uses specific tools to do that--Close being one of them.
How to Encourage Partner Involvement in Deals
How can you help your sales team remember to leverage a service partner in sales conversations? As a partnerships manager, you should communicate regularly with your sales team. Most importantly, you should consistently reiterate to your sales team when to consider looping in a service partner on a deal.
A simple way to do this is to focus on objections they face to close deals. If a lead requests a service your success team does not offer, your sales team should immediately consider service partners that can deliver the service your customer or lead needs.
Overcoming objections is painful, but they become an opportunity when you have a solution to help them solve their problem. Service partners should live in the minds of sales reps when they face an objection that their internal success or support team cannot provide for them.
Remember, the goal is to create a win-win; your customer gets a solution to their problem, you get to look good (and solve an objection), and your service partner hopefully gets a new customer.
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Example of Sales Leveraging Service Partners
Here’s what this can look like in action:
Of course, your sales rep should advocate using your platform as an expert and make expert recommendations. Still, when someone asks for a specific solution, it's either an opportunity to find a partner who can deliver it or refer them to a partner who already does.
I’m sure you are thinking, that's great and all, but how do I get my sales reps to have that kind of intimate knowledge about partners? Here are some guidelines on that:
Build Awareness
If you want to encourage sales to recommend service partners, your first step is to make sure they know who your partners are and what they do. Here’s a few tips on how to make this work:
- Sales and Partnership Teams Must Communicate: A partner manager should schedule a bi-weekly or monthly call to align sales and partnerships. Initially, you should create awareness among your best service partners for your sales team. Make them aware of what they do and how they can help them Close deals. As these calls mature, these calls should be used to share success stories leveraging service partners (these stories lead to great content as well), talk about current challenges or objections sales reps are facing on high priority deals to see if a partner could help. Make sure to create an awareness of any new partners.
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- Async Brainstorming: As a partnerships manager, make yourself available to your sales team to brainstorm partner recommendations for a specific objection your success and support team cannot service. Slack or whatever tool you use for this is best. Sales reps should reach out to partnership managers as a lever to pull in closing deals by leveraging service partners.
- Document: Make it easy for sales reps by creating a distilled menu of partners you trust and recommend for specific challenges and objections. This list should not be overwhelming; it should be small and prescriptive. This document should include who the partner is, what they do when to recommend, and how to contact them. Reiterate using that document on every sale <> partnerships call you to have.
Implement Education and Training
Successfully leveraging service partners to close deals requires reps to deeply understand what each of your partners does. This won’t happen overnight, but can be accomplished by:
- Schedule Introductions and Training: If you have a service partner that has successfully supported 10 or more of your customers, you have testimonials to back that success, and this partner solves a problem that your success and support teams cannot, schedule an introduction and training with your sales team. Get some Facetime between your partner and sales team to learn about what they offer, and do some Q&A that gets the relationship warm enough so reps feel comfortable looping them in on deals.
- Create Menus and Async Training: We all know a meeting with every partner (especially at scale) is unrealistic, so it's important to ask your partner to produce a menu of what they offer as part of their service and when to recommend their services, along with a pricing range, and a Loom video running a 5-10 minute overview of their offer and examples of success implementations. These can be hosted on an internal document/wiki for service partners that your sales team can refer to when facing an objection.
- Put it on Your Service Partners to Educate Your Sales Team: If you believe that you have a service partner that can benefit your sales team or a segment of your sales team, give them the option of reaching out to your sales team via email to educate them on their services and run optional webinars to educate them. If they can truly help reps close deals, create sticky customers, and influence revenue, sales reps will buy in.
Get Buy-In From Sales Reps (and Sales Managers)
This one is actually pretty simple. If you can get a sales rep to see the value of a partner service once by helping them close a deal and acquiring a sticky, happy customer, that sales rep will become a service partner evangelist.
Keep in mind, if your success or support team can solve a challenge or objection for a lead, then you should leverage those teams; that's why they are there.
However, there are numerous scenarios where your success and support team might not be equipped to solve. When these teams cannot solve what the lead is asking for, it's a no-brainer to refer to service partners that can solve that problem.
Service Partners and Sales is a Win-Win-Win For Customers and Revenue
What do you do next?
Create a top 5 or top 10 list of your best service partners and ask yourself, is my sales team familiar with these partners? If the answer is no, you know how to start. 😎
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