In last month’s column, we talked about Co-Sell Orchestration as the new imperative for every partner team. We explained the different co-sell segments, Co-Sell Orchestration objectives, and key processes and roles, and responsibilities.

Today, we’re excited to present the story from the POV of the Revenue Team, starting with how Co-Sell Orchestration solves B2B SaaS’s biggest problem, the core elements of a Co-Sell Orchestration Solution, and a crawl, walk, run plan to get to the promised land.

The problem

As the graphic below shows, in 2023, B2B SaaS companies will waste $20B on ineffective outbound ($11B on BDRs) and inbound (+$9B on demand generation). The ineffectual nature of this work is demonstrated by one metric: Only 3% of the $11B BDR outbound results in closed won business. 

Clearly, B2B SaaS can do better.

The solution

DBP benchmarking and Nielsen research tell us that B2B SaaS can get twice the results for half the cost, increasing yields 4x, by implementing a 3-part Co-Sell Orchestration Solution:

The solution is based on three elements:

1. Prioritizing Partners. By carefully selecting partners with significant account overlaps that are willing and able to co-sell, Revenue Teams can gain access to the ecosystem that your customers and prospects trust and foster co-sell agreements that specify how your and the partner’s revenue team will engage in partner-assisted co-selling.
2. Achieving Co-Sell Alignment. By mapping prioritized partners to Revenue Scenarios and driving Co-Sell Plays with targeted accounts, your revenue team learns when to ask for partner assistance based on overlap data matched to target accounts using tools like Reveal and Crossbeam.
3. Driving Collaboration. By leveraging collaboration tools such as Crossbeam Sales Edge in combination with shared Slack channels, your revenue teams can engage in scripted conversations with partner revenue teams to request and receive partner assistance to drive net new revenue and grow net retained revenue.

The roadmap

We won’t get there overnight. Creating scalable and predictable revenues will require a crawl, walk, run execution as noted below:

Let’s dig in to better understand the progression from Crawl, to Walk, to Run:

• Focus in the Crawl Stage: In this stage, we need to lock in Revenue Leader support for the first phase of our co-sell program. It’s critical to focus on a small number of co-sell-ready partners and align them to a core set of target accounts and revenue objectives (starting with top-of-funnel plays). In the Crawl phase, we should also limit our co-sell efforts to a select set of BDR/AEs, CSMs, and AMs who learn to collaborate in shared Slack channels, give and get partner assistance, all based on overlaps matched to target accounts. We also create an initial Playbook that captures process steps, roles, and responsibilities.
• Expand to the Walk Stage: In this stage, the co-sell program expands the number of co-sell-ready partners, a broader set of accounts and revenue objectives, and an expanded set of sales team representatives. We add in more workflow automation and expand the Playbook to include greater detail and specificity.
• Scale in the Run Stage: In this stage, our co-sell program matures to apply to recruit new partners and to become a mainstream revenue motion across the full account portfolio. Our co-sell revenue scenarios apply to both net new and existing customer accounts and our full revenue team and RevOps leverages co-sell best practices and full workflow automation tied to an expanded Playbook.

I hope you’ll come to Catalyst in Denver where we’ll be delivering a workshop on Co-Sell Orchestration and rolling out our integrated Co-Sell Orchestration solution for the first time.

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