Updated: Mar 30
This article was guest written by Shohei Narron, Technology Partner Manager at Google Cloud
Read more about this series in this introduction article.
I had the pleasure of interviewing five partnership leaders to understand their approach to account mapping, as well as best practices and pitfalls. I’ll be posting one conversation per week for the next five weeks in the hopes of elevating partnerships in the minds of sales organizations, if not to just make everyone’s lives a little easier.
Carina Shahin
Partner Account Manager, Sendoso
Background and Context: “I’m responsible for around 40 partners ranging from tech partners, integration partners, and some agencies. We have built strong co-selling and account mapping relationships
with these partners and use Crossbeam for that. My focus is to help educate our partners on the Sendoso platform, facilitate intros so we can create co-branded content as well as account map with our existing pipeline.”
On AE Engagement:“Our team likes to leverage partners throughout the sales cycle so I created automated reports within Crossbeam for them. They can now see which accounts overlap within our partner ecosystem without having to running reports and find overlaps themselves.”
Plant the Seeds: “Getting in front of and aligning with your sales team and your partner’s sales team is key to building success within partnerships. This could be joining your sales organization’s monthly calls, having quarterly lunch and learns with partners, and happy hours involving your partner’s team as well.”
Are You Tracking Everything?: “Make sure you’re casting a wide net to capture partner involvement. For example, do your leads have a place to indicate that a partner sent them to your demo request? If not, you’re missing out on a lot of leads that could’ve been attributed to your partnership activities, and nobody is aware of them.”
Partner Portals: “We built our partner portal about a year into our partner program. This is a place that is constantly updated with content and product updates and where partners can submit leads and track the progress of them in real time.”
