Co-sell is not for everyone

Co-sell is for the brave—those energized by the challenge.

Xiaofei Zhang, Rasheité Calhoun, Sam Yarborough, and Stephanie Pennell, experts in B2B ecosystems and trailblazers in co-sell, shared why so many companies get co-sell wrong.

Companies see enterprise companies co-selling and think it’s a one-size-fits-all pursuit.

It’s not. Your co-sell strategy should be determined by your organization’s go-to-market engine.

Co-sell acts as an overlay to existing strategies and goals.

Rasheité Calhoun, Director of Channel Partnerships at Axios HQ, explained what she calls her grassroots approach to co-sell.

Here’s how it works:

1. Choose a partner company.
2. Find 1-2 reps at your partner company. Convince them you can get them to president’s club.
3. Choose 1-2 reps at your company.
4. Connect these reps and enable the go-to-market and selling.
5. When you get your first win, ask your champion partner reps to introduce you to 2 more partner reps.

And Sam Yarborough, VP of Salesforce Ecosystem Evangelist at Invisory, added,

“Data is so important here.”

Long-term co-sell success starts with proactive data capture, not just partner leads.

Data like:

• How many contacts do we have at that partner?
• How are they producing?
• What is our pipeline of leads coming in through partners?
• What does the aggregate dashboard of all partners look like?
• What do our specific partner dashboards look like?

Rasheité Calhoun pointed out, 

“We often think about data reporting internally, but it’s important to leverage that data in how you move with your partners.”

Xiaofei Zhang, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at ActiveCampaign, shared a perfect example.

"Our GTM is PLG so instead of layering cosell in 1-1 account mapping, we layer it into the up-market segment with ecosystem-led (or collaborative growth) opportunities."

Listen to the full session here.

Email templates to drive nearbound results

Multi-threading is common in sales. But most sellers don’t know they can use partners to run a very similar play.

It’s called nearbound surround and the idea is that you can lean into partners for intel, intros, and influence across your sales journey.

We teamed up with Will Allred and the Lavender.ai team to build templates you can use right now.

Here’s one:

Listen to the full session to hear how Jared and Will approach these emails and click here to get the templates.

The knights of the nearbound roundtable

Once upon a time, in a land called Camelot, a partner pro named Arthur unleashed incredible growth by leveraging his ecosystem.

Now he and his roundtable spread nearbound mindset across foreign lands.

Thanks for the meme, Jacob Vandenbark!

Share these nearbound sales templates

Send this to a seller who wants to surround her buyers with trusted voices.