Successful business relationships are built on clear and productive collaboration.
Yet time and again, opportunities for growth and possible connections are lost forever due to inefficient collaboration.
Why? Because teams, companies, and Partner Managers are used to working in silos. They lack the communication, workflows, and resources needed to win.
So, if you have ever experienced one of the following challenges, this article is for you:
Difficulty in managing multiple internal/external relationships
There’s not enough transparency across your team and with partners
Difficulty in tracking and attributing partner involvement
Keep reading to learn more about the importance of collaboration, the 3 steps to better collaborate with your partners and best practices to enhance collaboration.
Let’s dive in!
The importance of collaborating with partners
We will let the numbers speak for themselves. When partners collaborate, the following happens:
PartnerStack and Monday.com have experienced 200% growth in partner-led revenue.
Highspot has observed that partners contribute 58% of the revenue generated by their top sales reps.
75% of the $105 trillion world economy is sold through partners.
By working together, you can leverage each other's strengths, resources, and expertise to deliver more integrated solutions to your customers, making them stickier.
Partnering with other companies can also lead you to synergies that benefit both of you, such as shared marketing efforts, joint product development, or co-selling initiatives.
Collaboration among partners strengthens the ecosystem and enables each partner to achieve greater success than they could alone.
The 3 steps to better collaborate with partners in Reveal
Nowadays, you need more than just an account mapping tool. You need a platform that can help you not only build your ecosystem to generate and leverage partner data, but also help you manage, track, and measure how your deals close.
That’s why Reveal revamped their Pipeline feature and turned it into Collaborate.
Collaborate is where you can keep track of all of the accounts you're working on with your partner and key stakeholders.
It’s your one-stop shop to manage your partnership collaboration and get deals closed:
Update every collaboration in real-time, and track actions and next steps on multiple projects simultaneously
Involve and update the right stakeholders, at the right time
Attribute partners to deals accurately
If you don’t know how to track the opportunities and turn them into revenue, Collaborate is here to help.
Here are the 3 steps to Collaborate with your partners using Reveal:
Step #1: Identify opportunities to Collaborate with partners
There are two different ways to nail this step: by replicating past successes on past won deals or by helping your Sales team with stalled deals.
Replicating past successes
If you want to understand the type of prospects you should go after by recognizing patterns of past won deals with partners in Reveal, here’s what you have to do:
Go to your 1:1 account mapping, and identify common customers with your partner. Make sure that you filter and toggle columns to identify patterns of success. Some filters you can use for that are country and number of employees.
Now look at your prospects that are customers of your partner to replicate that success, and save it as a Saved View.
Select 10 of your top accounts, create a discussion, and assign a partner with whom you can collaborate on each account. Feel free to add internal comments to keep track of the information you want to ask from your team, and send external messages to your partner to get intel about those accounts or just to agree on an action plan.
Track your progress by looking at the comments and stage columns. You can even leverage your attribution report (in Salesforce) to compare your partner activities to ensure you attribute your partners correctly.
Top tip: Ask your partner to share more fields with you (on the top 10 accounts you selected) to get better insights. For example, products the prospects have purchased. Then share this list with your Sales team so they can access those partner insights.
Help your Sales team with stalled deals
The benefit of helping your Sales team isn’t only about generating pipeline, but empowering them to leverage partners to achieve any of their goals, and the best way to do so is by introducing them to Reveal’s Get Intro.
Whether they want to leverage it from their CRM, directly in Reveal, on Slack, or even email, now your Sales team has the power to ask for intel, influence, and/or intros from your partner to close deals faster.
You can also build comment and email templates so your teams can include all relevant information when collaborating with partners.
So, if you want to proactively help your Sales team on deals they’re struggling with, here’s what you can do:
Take part in your Sales pipeline meetings to identify the accounts they’re working on. Ask them for a short list of the top deals they need help with and match it with your 360° Goals filtered by Account Owner.
Search for these accounts in Reveal and identify which partners are present. Create a discussion with them. Add the account to your list, and assign a partner to the discussion if relevant.
Add insights from your Sales team as internal comments. In the external comments, ask your partner for intel, influence, or intros. Conduct a pipeline review with your partners, work your way down the list, and add the next steps to the external comments section.
Update the stage column to reflect the progress of the deal. Share the intel, deal stage, and progress made in your next meeting with your Sales team.
Step #2: Track your progress on your deals using Collaborate
Once your deal has been added to Collaborate, you can discuss with your partners and team members the next steps you have to take to progress your collaboration and follow up on the deal's progress.
Here’s how to keep track of your progress by leveraging Collaborate:
Open the inbox messaging and ask for intel/intro/context etc.
Once your partner has given you some intel, accepted your intro request, or declined to help, make sure you update the stage of your collaboration. This way, your attribution report and your tracking process will be easier to handle.
If you have an open deal, make sure to connect it to your collaboration. When you give credit to the collaboration, the linked opportunity will be automatically included.
Progress the stages as the collaboration progresses. Once a deal is closed, change to “Attributed” and add an Attribution date.
Step #3: Track partner attribution and measure your efforts
We know that measuring your impact has always been a hassle, either because you’re manually keeping track of your partner collaborations, or because your team is not really interested in tracking partner results.
That’s about to change. Now with Reveal’s Measure feature, you can:
Track partner attribution
Balance out your Partnership programs according to their performance
Measure the overall impact of partnerships on the business
With Measure, you can easily compare the deals you attributed to your partner and the deals your partner attributed to you. Plus, you can filter by partner, date, type of attribution, opening stage, and type of collaboration.
If your Collaborate stages are up to date, your Measure dashboards will be accurate.
Top tip: Create webhooks on Collaborate that automatically populate your CRM whenever a collaboration is created or updated. Pushing this data back into your CRM will help you:
Build your own intro request workflows to map your existing processes
Retrieve your work from Reveal directly into Salesforce
Keep these best practices in mind when collaborating with your partner:
You need a give-first mentality: When making requests for help, remember that it’s a two-way street. If you’re seeking assistance or support from your partner, be prepared to offer something valuable in return. It’s not always about providing direct customer intros.
Make it about them: Successful collaboration starts with establishing trust and making it crystal clear that you have your partners’ best interests at heart. You have to understand their goals, challenges, and aspirations.
Make it scalable: Have QBRs with your partners to align strategies, identify opportunities, and track progress. During these QBRs, leverage account mapping to ensure you’re maximizing opportunities and addressing any potential roadblocks.
Enable your partners: Empower your partners with the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to effectively collaborate. From training programs to templates, equip them with everything necessary to become your nearbound champions.
Always be transparent: Clearly communicate your desired outcomes, define roles and responsibilities, and set realistic expectations for each stage of your customer’s journey.
Give context: Whenever you’re asking for intel, influence, or intros, give your partner some context so they can understand your request, and act accordingly. Share with them:
Who you want to talk to: Identify the specific person or group you intend to communicate with.
When you are looking to talk to them: Specify the timing or urgency of your communication. For example, are you reaching out for immediate assistance, scheduling a future meeting, or providing an update?
Your partner’s relevance: Highlight why the person you’re addressing is important in this context. What role do they play and how are they connected to the subject matter?
How you’re relevant to what they sold: Explain why your message is pertinent to what they have previously engaged with or sold.
Tracking growth
Collaborating with partners is essential for unlocking new opportunities and driving mutual growth.
By leveraging each other's strengths and resources, companies can expand their networks, enhance product offerings, and create synergies that benefit both parties.
Whether replicating past successes, reviewing sales pipelines, or identifying upsell opportunities, Reveal’s Collaborate provides a centralized platform for driving collaboration and revenue.
With a focus on transparency, scalability, and enablement, Reveal empowers teams to build stronger partnerships and achieve their shared goals effectively.
