10x’ing Your Sales Team Without Any New Payroll or Comp Plan

Sure, that title is clickbait-worthy, but you made it this far, so what is the real story?

A common mental model: If we only had a larger sales team, we could grow revenues at a pace that is faster than the growth in costs. But salespeople cost us more than any other type of labor, and their comp plans are usually tied to invoices, so we pay them first before anyone else. It can be challenging to afford to grow your sales team, especially before you even know who will make their quota.

You can grow your path to market in a complementary way. Develop channel partners and then recruit their sellers to sell for you. Easy concept, harder to execute.

A channel partner is a firm who sells to the same customers and buying influences as you and gets a benefit when you sell your consulting services to their client. 

Many such channel partners have established programs for companies like yours, and they have agreements about the rules of the road and about mutual financial and related incentives. They often have large direct sales teams, whom you can recruit to become your allies in the field.

The benefits to your firm include introductions to key client senior executives; multiplication of the number of sellers who know your message and differentiators; an opportunity to develop a joint marketing and sales pitch and mutual contracting vehicles, if you are successful in bringing deals to closure. 

All of this without a new payroll expense on your P&L, with this caveat–this is not free. (And you knew it…)

What’s the catch?

1.Your channel partners and their sellers aren’t going to be attracted to how you make money; they care first and foremost about how their customers receive value and how their organization is compensated for that value delivered. If you help them make money on their terms, then you might get their attention.

2. You need to know how their sellers’ comp plans work. If you try to pitch a complementary consulting service for a product they sell where they get small or no comp, scratch that and start over.

3. Don’t arrive with your hat in hand. You need to bring them deals, not the other way around. There is no faster way to be shown the door than to ask, “So, when will you introduce my company to your customers?”

4. You need to show success locally before making a pitch to the senior sales and alliances leadership. The channel partner’s alliance organization will start with an assessment of your company’s value to their company first. You need to make them money on some closed deals before you will be taken seriously as a new channel partner. For them, taking on any new partner also requires an expenditure of labor, time and opportunity cost on their side, so you had better be at least much more attractive than the worst existing partner they have, and you should be aiming higher than that anyways.

5. You might not be paying any direct payroll right away, but you WILL be expected to put some real effort into being a great partner. You should not try to become a partner with every company in the market; look at this like more like a sniper rifle instead of a shotgun tactic. Eventually, you will need to put a relationship manager in your organization that is directly and solely aligned with each successful partner relationship.

At Corios, our primary channel partners are the big dogs in the cloud data analytics market.

• We started with our partnership with our largest partner about 7 years ago.
• For that relationship, we are measured on annual recurring revenue we drive on closed customer deals, on the volume of deals, and on the number of tech-certified consultants we have on staff. These are metrics-driven objectives, and it is not easy or simple to achieve the performance expected of partners at each tier of their partnership program—it takes real effort and focus.
• We’ve climbed three tiers on the partnership status since we started. At each step, the mutual engagement has grown stronger.
• Along the way we’ve also launched our software accelerators in the partner’s marketplace. The last element is potentially the most strategic, as there is a mutual win for clients, the channel partner, and Corios to position marketplace-approved offers, like ours.

None of those achievements have been easy, but the payoffs are significant. Our tech partners have thousands of sellers around the world, and Corios needs to work hard to differentiate and provide compelling value. 

We need to actively recruit them, understand how they win, how their customers win, earn their trust, and make it easy to do business with us.

Bottom line is you can effectively multiply your allies in the field and grow your path to market without only relying on your direct sales force. It isn’t easier, and it’s not a replacement for building your own direct sellers. It works for us and helps us establish a differentiation from our competitors.