If you’re in technology presales and selling with or through the channel, the single most critical thing you need to focus on is not:
- Being on every discovery call
- Attending every internal meeting
- Whether SEs get to go to Club
- Becoming a manager
- Standing in for Tech Support
- Acing every demo
- Ripping on the competition
- Any other activity that isn’t this one thing:
Spending every possible second of your life enabling your partners to succeed.
Whether it’s technical training, training on messaging and positioning, helping them with packaging and programs, architecture and design, lab builds, or being their advocate on product feedback or client escalations, do it.
And do it proactively.
Don’t wait for your AEs, your CAMs, your TAMs, your (insert acronym here!), be the CIO/CTO of your territory and own the hell out of it.
Several of our best partners at Zerto are effectively on autopilot, bringing in deals with very minimal involvement on our part, because of us taking this approach early on.
This in turn has meant “free growth” which lets us hire more SEs, thus enabling more partners, who themselves go on autopilot, in a virtuous cycle.
Invest in the channel! You’ll be glad you did.
Sean M Masters 