A New Face At The Sales Table

To more effectively communicate credibility and leadership, sales will begin allowing marketing to join the sales conversation. Until now, marketing’s purpose was to support sales with marketing materials and lead generation campaigns. Now they’re joining sales to lead discussions about solutions and maintaing thought leadership conversations over social media.

Marketing also introduces a different way of engaging with customers. Rather than talking to and selling to customers, marketing provides the ability to listen and lead open-ended conversations about problems and solutions. Now, instead of just developing leads, marketing is engaging directly with customers to understand their needs and develop solutions.

Sales and marketing have the opportunity to learn from each other, enabling marketing to learn the art of closing, and sales to learn how to actively listen and connect better with customers. 

Developing New Products And Solutions With The Customer

As we begin to work closer to develop unique solutions for our customers, we can build products that address similar challenges by other customers. For example, if we’re working with a retailer to develop a big data analytics program to capture and use customer information, that same product can be introduced and tweaked for another retail customer.

This represents a new “pull” in partner marketing, where customers are pulled into the product development cycle to create a solution that is unique to them and their peers. The best part of this approach is that the solution we develop together is “battle tested” in a real-world environment. And the successes from our joint development can be shared over blogs, case studies and white papers, creating that credibility and thought leadership that other customers are seeking. 

Leveling The Playing Field With Changing Business And Revenue Models

To accomplish all of this, tech partners face a potential 18-month transition in a market with a six-month sales cycle. However, these changes in the tech world offer a stark choice for the partner community – evolve or die.

System integrators will have to learn how to resell technologies while outsourcers will have to add new sell “through” and sell “with” business models to their sales strategy. To compete in the cloud-computing arena, for example, partner companies will have to embrace another company’s cloud solution or create their own. Some VARs have the capability to set up their own cloud solutions, but aren’t the best at selling one.

More importantly, partners will have to make this transition while minimizing revenue interruptions for up to 18 months. Margins will also become more unpredictable as a range of different products and services are introduced.

This change creates an opportunity for smaller and more agile companies to make the transition faster than their larger competitors. Meanwhile, larger companies will turn to acquisitions of firms that offer complementary services.

Ultimately, customers stand to gain the most from this push to pull partner marketing shift as partners shift gears from making the best point solutions to creating the most compelling solutions. Those partner companies that succeed will emerge as trusted advisors, presenting new opportunities and new sources of revenue. 

Michelle De Hertogh is senior director of strategic partner marketing at EMC Corp.