Building and Launching Sustainable Co-Sell Programs Through Agency Channels

This was a session with the CLA where we helped the audience understand how to co-sell effectively with agencies. It's a perfect prep to watch before the Co-Selling Accelerator class.

You’ll learn how to:

1. Leverage large agency teams at your disposal Multiply your market footprint and customer base
2. Convert targets from competitive solutions to yours
3. Secure buy-in from your agency partners

Play Video

Questions I answered in this session:

Q: What are some best practices for getting agencies involved in co-selling and what would you advise to consider about the agency persona?

A: Simply speak their language and put your agenda in line with the track they are already on.

What I mean by this is that agencies [successful agencies] are first and foremost working to make their clients happy, and create repeatable systems they can use to increase the impact of their services, margins, lead generation and conversions incrementally.

So partner managers trying to get an agency to map accounts and eventually co-sell need to do it in phases:

1. Agencies know marketing so start there with a co-marketing agenda. Let's use an amazing example of the recent release of Operations Hub from HubSpot. Without knowing all of their roll-out steps and strategy, what I do know is they asked top agency-partners to product applications inside this new hub to be completed by the time they announced (they gave them 3 or 4 months to build whatever they could). The agency-partners are then mentioned during the PR and are able to market their app to all HubSpot users in return for traffic/conversions and thought leadership. That's great in itself. But, what's even better is:

> Tech company timelines a PR launch (product feature, integration...).
>> Partner manager creates a list of agencies they'd love to be involved.
>>> On those calls, the partner manager sells the co-marketing agenda, potential impact and gets the agency to commit.
>>>> After they receive commitment, the partner manager presents a way to track the ROI of the PR from this co-marketing... which is has to be mapping accounts pre and post-launch of this campaign. Speaking about attribution is the agencies language so you are putting yourself in a better position to convert them to a co-selling partner.
>>>>>> Finally, after you both load your accounts to Reveal or whatever tool you use, then you snowball into this routine:

1. You mention what you are going to do to get this campaign to the accounts you have that they do not have.
2. In return, you ask them to send the campaign out to the leads they have that you do not have.
3. When there is overlap, you ask to share URLs or company names so you can go through them and see if there isn't an easy win or a warm intro.
4. When a deal is in your pipeline early stage, but closed/won in their CRM, you make them a no-brainer offer to send to that company that will hopefully push them over the edge.
5. If the agency agrees to do that intro, you make sure they are rewarded - this could be as simple as a discount for that client for being a referral from your partner. But it may need to be commission... depending on the agency.
6. Finally, if that conversation goes smoothly, you ask the agency to set a repeating monthly event for you and their team to review company accounts and look for low hanging fruit. Quarterly if they deny monthly.

Q: How do you secure buy-in from agency partners?

A: I answered part of this in the previous question. But in short:

• Don't force it - square peg round hole so to speak - if the agency is not a sales-driven agency, don't expect them to be interested.
• Respect the fact they are very very worried about letting wolves into the hen house - putting you in touch with their clients.
• Fall into their routines using strategy they understand - marketing-first strategy, not sales first. It has to be a combination of marketing and sales, but start with marketing.

Q: Any more tips on how to effectively engage agencies in co-sell motions?

A:

• Talk about your successes co-selling as you get them under your belt with agencies like theirs in your partner newsletter.
• Look for agencies with a sales team.
• Even better - top partners of a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot because they are more likely to want to do CRM-based operations.
• And on that note, Revops agencies should be more likely to co-sell because they need to know about it to be a stronger resource for their clients.
• Start with your easy wins - those agencies you are actively co-marketing with and present that attribution conversation I mentioned.

Panelists:

Jenny Garms, Director of Business Development at Campaign Stars

“Campaign Stars helps clients maximize Account-Based Marketing (ABM) programs with a proven recipe for multi-channel highly targeted outreach, including direct mail, display ads, e-mail, microsites, inbound chat, exec and AE outreach.” - https://www.campaignstars.com/

Tyler Elwood, Accenture Alliance Lead at Adobe Inc.

“Adobe is a game-changing innovator of digital experiences. Adobe connects content and data and introduces new technologies that democratize creativity, shape the next generation of storytelling, and inspire entirely new categories of business.”

https://www.adobe.com/about-adobe.html

Alex Glenn , Founder at Partnerprograms.io

“We developed Partnerprograms to be an ecosystem in itself - with community support, training and services for both sides of the partnership equation. We have services to help you whether you are an agency in growth mode, or a tech team interested in building more agency partnerships. And for those who need software to manage sourcing/activating/enabling partners, we now have Partnerhub.app. No matter how you choose to work with us, you're promised actionable advice and huge ROI.”
https://www.partnerhub.app/

https://www.partnerprograms.io/

Moderator: Taylor Martin, Reveal

‍