How to keep the attention of sellers at your technology services partner
- Robin Seidner
- Mar 12
- 3 min read
Whether layoffs are from lagging sales, DOGE/DEI government cuts, or the push to incorporate AI into everyday practice, it can be tough to stay top-of-mind with your technology services provider to ensure you continue to build your market share. In the case of Salesforce, a large portion of the recent layoffs affected the global partnership organization. So all those partner managers who knew your business and referred you to AEs may very well be gone.
Whether you partner with Salesforce, ServiceNow, Shopify, AWS, Google, Certinia or any other technology services partner, disruption caused by current politics and the transformation to an AI-first reality are here, at least for the near-term. Embrace the challenge and focus on the things you can control. Here are a few of those.
#1 - Revisit your go-to-market strategy
I’ll repeat what I tell partners all the time—your go-to-market strategy needs to be well defined so you can present clear messaging, brand, wins and customer successes well within your swim lanes. If you need experienced advice, I can help you with all of this.
#2 - Craft a unique story and know it well
Do you know that Salesforce’s “First Call” deck starts with how great they are (Best Place to Work, World’s #1 CRM, etc)? Don’t do that. No one cares about how great your 10, 20, 50, 100 person services firm is. Focus your story on the things that matter most—What you do better than everyone else, ROI, problem-solving, real differentiators.
#3 - Bring your “A” game to your technology services partner
Don’t show up to a meeting with a seller with your hand out. Trust me, so many other partners are doing that. If you get an opportunity to meet, make sure you’re prepared and can show and tell a seller or sellers why they should care about you as a partner and what you’ll bring to the relationship. See #4 for ideas.
#4 - Promote what you bring to the table
Understand what is the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for what you’re selling. Sellers want to know that you’re looking to address a key market that they don’t serve well currently.
Who are some key prospects you can bring to the table? Do you already have customers for the solution you want to bring to market? Sellers want to grow their business at the end of the day.
Is there a market need not being met, or being met poorly by your partner’s competitors? Can you help them win/expand customers in areas outside what businesses consider “within their wheelhouse?”
#5 - Show some emotion to differentiate your business from other partners
In our previous blog post we talked all about how to show some emotion to help differentiate your business. It’s important enough to mention again.
If your consulting practice sounds just like everyone else, you give a prospect—or a seller at your technology services partner—no compelling reason to want to work with you.
So how do you create compelling go-to-market messaging that creates an emotional response? This is another key initiative I help clients with all the time.
Instead of traditional speeds and feeds or standard language everyone uses, think about consumer messaging for a moment. The brags are often how the product will make you look younger, skinnier, happier. Since people make emotional buying decisions, that same approach can be used for your GTM messaging. Wrapping B2B go-to-market messaging in a consumer framework can truly help change how you think about your strategy. To recap from our earlier post:
Compare your service to a necessary personal service
Find the emotional connection to your service
Build trust with sellers (and help make their lives easier)
How Partner Diva can help
If all the recent layoffs have you rethinking how you’ll keep your business top-of-mind with your technology services partner, drop me a line. I help firms all the time to stand out and measure up against the thousands of other partners who may be in the same ecosystem. Go-to-Market Strategy engagement can help you grow your business. If you need help with positioning strategy and messaging, tap into my knowledge of consultant organizations, start-ups, and partner organizations with an Executive Mentorship or Executive Advisory engagement.