Selling with Partners
Growing your B2B Sales with collaborations and partnerships
What do we mean when we talk about selling with partners? There are lots of different ways to work with other businesses to grow your business. Let’s break it down and see what might work best for you.
Why partner?
Working with other businesses can provide great ways to reach new audiences and scale your business. If you partner well, partners can extend your sales team, as well as providing operational and customer support if that is helpful for you.
A partner might help you to reach a new geographic area, or a new industry – or simply broaden your reach in your own target market.
Types of Partners and Collaboration
To keep it simple, I’m going to break this down into three key areas:
1. Collaboration
2. Referrals & Affiliates
3. Resellers
Collaboration
Collaboration might be done for a once-off activity or on an ongoing basis. Collaborations often may not involve a direct payment to the other business or to you (although they can), but might be more like agreeing to run a joint event – where you both bring your customers along. You might agree to speak at one of their events, with the agreement that you will gain access to the attendee list, for example.
Businesses on Instagram often collaborate on a joint campaign or giveaway, to cross-pollinate across accounts and hopefully gain followers and traction with each other’s audience.
Think of this as:
These folks are your friends – you are helping each other out, but are not yet in a solid commercial arrangement. You might do this to test the water before working more closely together
Referrals & Affiliates
These terms get used in different ways, but generally speaking, referrals and affiliates refer to businesses that refer customers to you. The business may receive a payment of some kind in return for the referral.
A referral might be when a business knows you do a great job in what you do and provides a direct email introduction to a customer. You may have a referral agreement in place to say that if that person goes on to buy your product, you pay the business that referred them a referral fee.
Affiliates today tend to refer to digital affiliate programs. For example, if you have a product that is sold online, you may provide people with an affiliate link. If they share that link and someone buys your product using that link, they receive a small referral fee.
Referral fees tend to be around 10%.
Think of this as:
These folks have a light, mutually beneficial business arrangement with you. They are not selling on your behalf, but their business may touch on the edges of yours, and they may come across customers that would suit your product.
Reselling
Reselling is a more concrete type of partnership, where you have other businesses that are authorised to sell on your behalf.
For example, if you sell software, you may have partners who sell your software to their customers. There are many ways you can structure reselling arrangements, but the most common is that you pay a percentage ranging from 15% - 45% of the sale price to the reseller.
The amount you pay a reseller depends on what they are doing as part of the partnership. Are they responsible for ongoing support for the customers they sell to? Are they committed to doing a level of marketing for your product? Do they have sales targets to meet?
Note that reselling is not wholesaling – if you have a physical product and are wholesaling, that is a very different setup. Wholesale means you sell the physical product to a stockist, and then it is theirs. You agree on the price you sell it to them – and they then decide at what price they will sell it to a customer.
Reselling is where you retain the contract with the end user customer.
Think of this as:
These folks have a business that complements yours well, and it helps them to build their business by selling your product. They may be so close as to be seen as an extension of your direct sales team.
How should I get started?
I recommend starting with some collaborations. Look at businesses whose products may be a good complement to yours, and meet with them to see if there are any opportunities for collaboration.
From there, you can always build into a more formal referral or affiliate structure – or even reselling if that works for your business.
So get started by reaching out to some businesses that complement your offering - and having a conversation. You never know what might come of it!
Starting out in B2B Sales and want to learn more?
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