Selling partnered offerings

This article focuses on a type of partnering that has become common in IT and telecoms, and which is bound to spread to other industries. It is the practice of forming "coalitions" of companies to develop and deliver solutions that contain product elements from each partner in the coalition. The article draws on findings in a Gartner presentation given at The Business Forum @ Exchange 2004, hosted by Progress Software.

Coalitions differ from traditional bidding consortiums in that there is no fixed and pre-determined "prime contractor". The coalition sells its solutions into various markets, with many or all coalition members taking the initiative to approach the customer.

Partnered offerings from coalitions deliver the greatest customer benefit when there is centralisation of communications and accountability: crucially, however, customers want to be able to decide which of the partners should perform this role. A small proportion of customers don't want centralisation at all – they would rather have the ability to decide who to go to when they have a problem or a new requirement. So there must be flexibility within the coalition in how to approach, manage and support customers.

Customers evaluate the relationship between the partners in a coalition according to a number of factors, including how the partners interact with each other, their track record together and whether or not the partners are "strategic" to one another. Customers do not, however, pay so much heed to factors that partners have traditionally considered to be important, such as whether or not partners have co-located resources or have made financial commitments to each other.

To communicate the true value of a partnered offering in terms that customers themselves value is one of the greatest challenges facing these new types of partnerships. In order to attract and sustain customer attention, the messages must be clear, differentiated and market-focused. It is no longer good enough just to rely on the separate value propositions of the various partners. The coalition must find a way to articulate the business benefits of investing in its own partnered solutions, as opposed to (say) a solution from just one company, or partnered offerings from other coalitions.

Getting the messages right and consistent

Every coalition must have a leader. Coalition leaders are likely to be providers of broad, horizontal solutions, with a good track record and solid market share. They are nascent "orchestrators" – organisations that are developing the core competence of pulling together groupings of companies to deliver complex solutions and services for the new ICT economy. To read more about the role of orchestrators, click here.

The coalition leader should be:

• driving the solution and business case for the partnered offerings
• identifying and enabling the coalition participants
• providing sales and marketing support

Whether or not every coalition has such a leader, these tasks will have to be done. The coalition needs to be able to differentiate its partnered offerings in a market where partnerships are becoming more commonplace and "everything looks the same". According to the Gartner presentation, there are three key guiding principles for developing clear messages:

1. Focus on who the coalition is selling to, and into which vertical markets
2. Understand the customer value in those market segments
3. Build a coalition and develop offerings that support the market focus and customer value

By definition the salesforce for partnered offerings will be diverse and distributed. Each partner in the coalition will have a track record of successful selling of its own solutions and services, but no one will have sold the new partnered offerings. Each partner will have a different experience of selling; will have different contacts within potential customer organisations; will have different levels of understanding of customer value in the coalition target market segments. And coalition partners may well be based in different parts of the world, or come from various cultural backgrounds.

If the messages developed by the coalition are to reach the marketplace in a consistent, clear and undistorted form, it will be vital to equip the salesforce with concise, unambiguous and well-written sales support material. Otherwise all the good work of establishing market focus, understanding customer value and developing the right coalition and offerings will be undermined.

Without such material, each coalition partner will try to adapt its existing sales support documentation to embrace the new partnered offerings. Inconsistencies will arise in the way the offerings are presented to the market, as each partner emphasises those aspects of the solutions and services that are closest to its own experience, and salespeople try to sell the partnered offerings in the same way that they have previously sold their own company's products.

Selling partnered offerings is no longer about selling the competences of the individual coalition partners. Customers are expecting more, and are beginning to compare solutions provided by different consortia. In such a highly competitive arena, it is extremely important that each partner company's salesforce is able to articulate the value and customer benefits of the partnered offerings consistently to the consortium's target market segments.

Partnering Points on selling partnered offerings

• Begin by deciding how the sales support material is to be produced. Will you rely on the resources of the coalition "leader", or will it be a joint effort? If the latter, who will coordinate the production and distribution of the material? What "branding" or image will the material convey?
• Identify the format the material is to take. Traditionally salespeople are loaded with too much information, and there is an even greater danger of this happening where several companies' products and services are involved. Ensure that salespeople are provided with exactly what they need to be successful, and no more!
• Seriously consider using an external company to produce the material for you. In a coalition there is a great danger that the views of the dominant partner will prevail, and the messages will look like a thinly disguised version of the coalition leader's own sales support material. You will find that using an outside agency ensures objectivity, and that the material is produced faster and is more effective.
• Decide how the various salesforces are to be equipped with the new material. Will you be launching it separately to each of the partner companies, or will you arrange for all participant salesforces to come together for the launch?
• Are there any important conferences, exhibitions or other events in your target markets that you need to have the sales support material ready for? If so, start planning now how you will develop and distribute the material in time.
• Above all, communicate what you are doing and the reasons for it extensively within the coalition, so that when the new sales support material is delivered the salesforces are expecting it and are prepared to use it.

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