AE Co-selling Enablement Details

Challenges:

AEs are not working on partner deals because:

They think the partner or PM has it

They might potentially see it as a waste of time - TBD

They don’t understand the value

They try one outreach and give up

If the partner closes on it, they get paid whether they put the time in. Do they understand that it could be a land and expand?

According to 4 PMs so far, the PMs are updating SFDC with Next Steps, not AEs

What is the process to follow?

DR comes in - existing opps are checked

AE gets assigned

AE reaches out to the partner - some AEs are reaching out once and giving up

Working with Opportunities

Superhuman AE is the primary owner of opp progress, not the PM

All communication with the customer needs to include the partner (meetings, email, Slack)

Roles & Responsibilities are unclear

The Channel team sources Top Of Funnel, and the AE needs to bring it home

Who is working on what, and what are the expectations?

Internal Stakeholders

Partner Managers

Maddy

Our AEs are not doing demos on the 1st call - the PM is doing it now.

We should be able to do a high-level demo and show 2-3 things that hit the customers top 3 items

Some of the partners are already doing the discovery

CDW will email the customer and ask the big rock question, then we need to dig in more

Many CTAs from the partners are ‘Book a demo’

What support is needed? Call or quote

We need an intro to a customer so that if CDW doesn’t want to be on a call, that we can run with it. We NEED to have a call if we are going to quote.

May not always get a call with the partner for pre-discovery - we don’t want AEs to expect it

It should be rare for the partner to be a blocker

So that I can send more information that is targeted to their problems which we see helps deal closure by x.

AEs touch it once and then stop working it

Hannah

caught up in the middle of funnel activities

resller/customer/AE - no clear next steps

No one is one point

She keeps having to follow up with everyone

She works out of Matt’s dashboard on the stale opps

The AEs are doing the disco call and waiting

There are GB AEs that are on top of it, and then some not - the GB AEs tend to be a bit better than G4E. The AEs keep throwing the accountability back to the PM

She is also doing the SFDC next steps because Matt is asking

80% of the time, the partner wants to throw it over the fence

More often than not, the first call participants expect a demo. The customer doesn’t want to be decked to death. We should already know the first issue or two

Rob

is handling the next steps in SFDC.

The AEs need to treat the partner like the customer and work it like they would a direct deal

Have to co-sell because partners aren’t mature yet

Need to be on the customer calls

We tried advocacy calls - partner buddy calls, but it didn’t work. It might be a good solution if it were reworked for success

Joel

Disti partners might have inside reps that are - SHI might have 5 people, the inside reps is responsible for the quote, but their SHI AE owns the customer. Get connected with the field AE or the person who owns the account. The DR email notification only has who registered the deal, not who owns it. (in the DR we do ask for Partner Submitted and Partner Sales Rep contact - the sales reps goes into SFDC) The email includes only the submitter and not the seller.

Wonders why aren’t the partner deals getting asked about in pipeline reviews?

The same AEs that only reach out once are the same ones that don’t have next steps and touches.

He does not generally fill out the SFDC Next Steps unless it’s quarter-end and there is a push to get deals closed.

Renewals are also a huge issue. Partners bring us an account, and the renewals should be worked toward expansions. (MH - I thought we had a 90-day notice??? SHI is 4-months out.)

Amar

The larger partners may want us to just run with the deal

Scenario 1 - partner wants to work with the AE

Scenario 2 - parnter wants more value from our AE

AEs are working 100 seats and don’t get excited about the 10 seats and don’t necessarily think about the expand opp

Bring the dirrent stakeholders together - our AE has one and the partner has another

He has AEs that work great with partners. Some AE’s aren’t reading the DR

If the partner hasn’t responded, we should be able to talk to the customer. The AEs just can’t take a partner deal direct.

Need to be high-touch, not aggressive

Partner, this is what the process looks like. - Lauren might have something - also need this for partners

Is there a disincentive? Like if you don’t work the opp, it will get taken away?

There is confusion if the AEs can talk to the partner or not

Good AEs - Gordon , Jess Sheet

Sometimes our EU partners can’t give out contact details according to GDPR - just because the partner can’t share doesn’t mean they don’t want to work with us. They have to ask the customer if they can share the data.

We need to speed up the DR process

Lana

She doesn’t give them the opp to not work it

Her APAC partners are onboarding their customers - our AEs aren’t providing any value

Her partners are running it all, and the AEs are not generally adding value

She is building EMEA now

AEs are involved in the renewals as well

She asks her partner to ask AEs for help - she would like to have a process to request AE help

Demo

SA/SE

Channel Leaders - for visibility

Matt

Decoa?

Enablement team - for support on the learning solution

Flavio

Shelbi?

AEs

Kiel

Interesting - they are supposed to utilize the partner team

Tough when they were giving up points but got commission

They went all in on CDW and it did nothing - felt like it was a one-way street

Some AE’s NEED the quota relief

Shoutout - C-Learning - Dr. Jaime XX - he positioned GBcorrectly - positioning

Carahsoft - John has sat in on multiple meetings - he’s starting to pick it up - John has sent him the most meeting

He is more open than the rest -

An AE was stuck and reached out and got an email and gave up points

They have seen DRs that are lame and don’t say anything - not much meat on the bones

Gordon

Some of the deals are too small - mostly from resellers - nothing in the DR and there is no way to talk to the customer. They have to stalk the partner to get info

He did mapping with Adaptavist - they want to go after enterprise accounts. He’s looking for ones that have great relationships or just contacts

He pushes for trying to leverage existing contacts

Enterprise AE’s are getting pinged by partners to get a quote as opposed to going to the partner portal

Our reseller minimums are already low.

They don’t know when to engage a rep

We should be seen as the 2nd AI tool next to Google/MS

Amar is working on a sales play for 20% neurodiverse people because the UK requires it

Packages

Enterprise

Neuodiverse

Depts

Why they buy Grammarly

Accessibility/Inclusion/Retention

Biz case - we get stuck with whatever dept brought us in

We have a big competition with Copilot and Gemini

Copilot doubles their spend with MS - teams, transcriptions and search. IT is risk-averse, so MS is a low risk.

He is curious how Enterprise and Mid-market are different

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