In life, the best partners lavish you with love, trust, and togetherness. 

They share your values, your enthusiasm, and your endeavours. 

And, when a partnership works, both parties thrive and grow. 

This is also true in the technology reseller world. 

Value Added Resellers, Managed Service Providers, System Integrators – they all crave a vendor partnership that delivers on all those fronts. 

When one is established, it can be a match made in heaven. 

They benefit, their end user customers benefit, and, yes, the vendor benefits too. 

So, how to find that perfect partner? 

Here, Blair Ferguson, Chief of Staff at global enterprise-class contact center and IVR provider ComputerTalk explains why it pays to be picky…

“It should be about great products and solutions, high-grade service and support, and shared culture and values – we are obsessed with all of those things and, as a result, our reseller partnerships deliver big for everyone,” she says. 

“Our partner programme is a real differentiator. We don’t rely on the partner to know everything about us because contact center can get pretty complex. 

“Instead, we’re an extension of our resellers’ sales teams. We go with them into every opportunity. We go on the calls and do the demos. Time zones don’t matter. Our team will step up and provide the support until partners get to a point where they feel either comfortable, confident, or trained to be able to do some of those things on their own. Working together like that means every opportunity is maximised. 

“Also, we are very flexible. We don’t have a one-size-fits-all partner program and we don’t enforce boundaries. You don’t have to invest $10,000 to train your sales team or commit to selling a certain number of seats or delivering a certain level of return. 

“We prefer our resellers to walk before they run so we work with them at their own pace. We’ll go in and try to win a couple of deals together to establish momentum and build the funnel. 

“Every partner’s needs are different so we pride ourselves on taking an individualised approach.  

It usually starts with one or two people being identified on the partner side that will work very closely together with counterparts on our side. 

“Together, we identify how contact center conversations fit in with their install base and set about crafting that dialogue. We also provide informal sales training to help them identify opportunities. We tag team on marketing, social media campaigns, or webinars.  

“Also, when we get direct opportunities ourselves, we will bring a partner in so they can learn how we work them. Their business is our business and our business is their business. We have some partners that bring us millions of dollars and we have some that bring much less. For us, it’s about building long-term relationships; almost like a marriage. That’s when it works really well for everyone.” 

Not that it’s just about the product or the solution or the actual selling.  

Effective partnerships must comprise other things too.  

“The level of support and service we offer to our end users is truly differentiating,” says Ferguson. 

“If a reseller works with a huge national brand, they might get an excellent contact center platform but it can be a complex gated process that takes too much time and isn’t at all agile. 

“In ComputerTalk’s case, we are able to respond to issues rapidly and be very nimble. We may not have the same brand awareness as some of those giant heavyweights but our ability to really turn on a dime and provide exceptional service is what sets us apart. That provides huge benefit to our resellers and their end user customers.” 

Size and location, too, are important factors.  

“We really value the scope and scale of our partner ecosystem,” says Ferguson. 

“Even taking account of our own global expansion, we prefer to work with partners that are experts in their market and in their territory. 

“They know their buyers, they know their pricing and strategy. They own the market, they front all the relationships, they sell in their own currencies, and they process all the paperwork. That enables us to focus on being a brilliant technology vendor.” 

It seems finding that perfect match may not be so difficult after all. 

We LOVE that..! 

To learn more about how partnering with ComputerTalk can help your business succeed and grow, visit www.computer-talk.com

 



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