There are many different ways to grow the sales number of a company. Make your sales team bigger or more effective. But, this comes with all the challenges of hiring, developing and managing an ever larger sales organisation. Companies may try increasing their product range or increase the size of deals by increasing their focus on enterprise clients. Each solution comes with its own challenges.
For many businesses, their growth strategy lies not in building a larger sales team, but developing a channel sales model. So, instead of hiring more sales reps, they focus on finding partners to sell their product for them.
However, whilst this appears an attractive proposition, it brings its own challenges such as finding partners you trust, helping them sell a solution they are unfamiliar with and hardest of all developing the internal structures to support your partners succeed.
This is why we think you will love this interview with Amy Guarino, VP of Global Alliances at Ironclad, Ex COO of Kyndi, and VP Global Sales Channels at Marketo.
We talk to Amy about the following things:
- When is the right time for a company to think about a sales channel strategy.
- How to identify implementation partners or channel sales partners.
- Explain how to support them to see success from the partnership early.
- Discuss how internal processes need to change to support a 3rd party you have no direct control over.
Key Take-Aways:
- When is the best time for an organisation to use alliances & partnerships to accelerate sales
- How to start an implementation partner program
- How to identify which strategic partnerships will prove most likely to succeed.
About Amy Guarino:
Amy Guarino has spent her career helping tech companies build alliances and partnership to drive multi-billion dollar growth.
During her career, she has worked for Marketo, and helped them scale from <$1M in revenue to ~ $300M. Worked as COO for Kyndi, and acts as an advisor for numerous tech scale ups.
In her current role at Ironclad, she is leading the development of their global alliances to grow a network of implementation partners and strategic alliances to enter new markets.
Amy’s Dream App:
Amy would love a piece of software that would help two or more organisations to share insights and collaborate in a joint sales process to increase the chance of them winning the business.
Amy’s Recommended Business Book:
Getting to the AHA! – discover your positioning DNA and dominate your Competition – Andy Cunningham
Amy’s Current Box set of Choice:
