Are Your Strategic Partnerships Your Passive Sales Force?

Dave Kurlan is a top-rated keynote speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and expert on all things sales and selling.

Today, more than ever before, strategic partnerships, both formal and informal, are an important element of conducting business.  They exist at all levels, including these 10:

1. Insurance agencies electing to provide a particular insurance carrier’s policies,
2. Marketing firms and their choice of printers, photographers and trade show booth fabricators,
3. VAR’s determining which hardware and software to integrate for their customers,
4. A CEO’s inner circle of advisors and resources,
5. The directors of a company’s board and their commitment to making introductions,
6. The business networking group to which a salesperson belongs,
7. A payroll company’s partnership with a benefits provider,
8. The attorneys, accountants, and insurance agents who work together to help clients,
9. The distributors that resell a manufacturer’s products and
10. The referrals and introductions which happy customers make for their sales reps.

There are so many more examples.

Who are your formal and informal strategic partners?

Whom do you recommend?  Who recommends you?

While many of you are using LinkedIn to accomplish some of the above, it just isn’t the same as having real-life, real-world business relationships!  Get off the computer, on the phone and make this happen!

One of the most challenging areas of generating revenue is finding new business.  Shouldn’t one of your priorities be to establish alliances who can lead to fulfilling, profitable two-way partnerships with as many people and companies as possible?

At both Objective Management Group and Kurlan & Associates, one of my roles is to identify strategic partners.  Not necessarily the biggest.  Not necessarily the most well-known.  Not necessarily the one with whom everyone else wants to partner.

Instead, we want to make sure that a strategic partner is a company who:

• Has people we know and trust,
• Cares as much as we do about our clients and their challenges and
• Can provide the ideal, complimentary solution in a related area – one that extends beyond our core competency of sales force development.

Let me introduce you to a few of the companies with whom we are proud to partner:

• Everyone needs powerful, but easy-to-use pipeline management which emphasizes sales process, requires a minimal number of clicks and data entry, and has powerful out-of-the-box reporting and dashboards.  Our strategic CRM Partner understands this and has designed the best application that I have ever customized and used.  Please meet the Project Manager at Membrain, Henrik Oquist.  Contact Henrik .
• Everyone needs marketing and lead generation help.  Whether the exposure and leads come from inbound, internal, outbound, print, internet, email, social sites, events, PR, collateral, or advertising, one thing remains constant.  There must be alignment between sales and marketing, a gap which increases in size in accordance with the size of most companies.  Our strategic Marketing Partner understands the importance of marketing and sales being aligned, and the role which they work to creatively support to drive sales and revenue.  Please meet the Founder and CEO of PENTA Communications, Inc., Deborah Penta.  Contact Deborah.
• And everyone needs to make the most of their prospecting time.  Few salespeople, especially selling executives, have the time to get on the phone and dial the names on their lists.  That’s where our strategic calling partner comes in.  They handle the dialing and you and/or your salespeople simply complete the conversations – a week’s worth in an hour!

Over the coming weeks and months I’ll introduce you to some more people whom you should know.  What will you do to strengthen the mutual quality of your formal and informal strategic partnerships?  Can they be your passive sales force?

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