John (00:01)
Well, hello, Toni. Welcome to our second episode of season three of Level Two Partnerships, Elevate Your Game. Super looking forward to this one. We’re going to talk today about something I call decision influence. This is a skill that we spend a lot of time teaching salespeople. I’m not sure we spend as much time talking about it and working on it.

Toni (00:03)
Well, hello.

John (00:29)
with partner people as maybe we should. you’ve kind of done both. So when I say decision influence, what does that make you think of? How does that resonate? Do you think, yeah, partner people need to do that? Or are you like, eh, I’m not sure?

Toni (00:47)
Now, I think people can potentially limit themselves. That’s what I think it’s an opportunity that channel managers, partner account managers, alliances managers have that you don’t always know is there. So there are times when you can think, well, I’m much more about service. You know, I am there to assist upon to smooth interactions, make life easier.

John (01:14)
Right.

Toni (01:17)
Yes, we can work together better. However, if you’re good at your job, and sometimes even if you’re not that experienced, you are being let into rooms and spaces where you’ve got the opportunity to influence if only you would notice. So yeah, I think it’s definitely a skill that we could help people working with partners to develop and enjoy using.

John (01:33)
Right, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, look, think, you know, if we’re honest with ourselves as channel people, our partners are making tons of decisions that actually impact our partnership that sometimes aren’t even directly related to our partnership. Right. So they might be making a decision like, hey, I have a, we’re hearing from our customers that they want us to

provide a solution that looks like this or does this or whatever. And they’re making a decision way, when they first learned about that, they’re making a decision, are we going to build that? Are we going to buy that? Or are we going to partner to deliver that? Right? And so they haven’t even thought about you, but they’re making a decision that ultimately could impact your partnership or could be a new partnership for you with that. Right. They’re making decisions around

Toni (02:24)
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No.

John (02:43)
What markets to go after? Like, where are we going to focus? And we all know that the way we partner is by picking common customer profiles. That’s where we’re most strong is when we can go after a customer together. Well, if they’re making decisions about what customer markets they’re going to go after and you’re not a part of that discussion, they may very well choose stuff that’s not a good match for you. Right? So I think there’s a ton of decisions that partners are making

Toni (03:05)
Yeah.

Yeah.

John (03:13)
that impact, and of course there’s the obvious ones that do impact our partnerships like, hey, which partnership, I’ve got five different partnerships, which ones am I gonna invest in? Or, hey, where am I gonna allocate my resources across those partnerships? Or, hey, Microsoft brought this opportunity to me, do we wanna do it? There’s that kind of stuff, that’s obvious, but I think there’s a whole layer of decisions as well that we’re missing that as.

Toni (03:32)
Yeah. Yeah.

John (03:41)
partner account managers, alliance managers, channel managers, we need to start to pay attention to, which is why I think this is such an important topic for those kind of people.

Toni (03:51)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that I found was it can even be things like if it’s, you know, owner managed, they might be looking for an exit that you might not know about. Or they are part of a group of investors, and they’re hearing, actually, there’s money to be had over there.

John (04:05)
Yep, yep.

Toni (04:19)
And they’re thinking about, how do they shape their business? something that used to work, it still works really well is if you’re able to broker a partner to partner relationship. So if you’ve got sight on what are some of the things that that organization is looking to achieve, like you say, where they’re going, do we build it by partner? Well, you could help them probably in each of those areas, but they might not think to ask you. So absolutely being across that.

John (04:19)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.

Toni (04:48)
is really valuable.

John (04:48)
Yeah. Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about kind of some best practices around doing that, right? So number one is paying attention, right? I mean, right? I’ve got to get my head up out of the sand of just the transactional business that I have with this partner and start to look at their business and where they’re going and start listening for those kinds of clues. When I find what I think is a decision that the partner’s making,

Toni (04:58)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

John (05:17)
This is one of the most important things in this part is to make sure that I think about that decision from the partner’s perspective. Let me tell you, give you an example of where I think we make this mistake all the time. I’m vendor A, I bring a market opportunity to my partner and say, hey, we think that there’s a really good opportunity in this customer segment for us to sell our collaborative product together, you blah, blah.

Do you want to invest? And we think the partner thinks about that decision as a yes-no decision. Do I want to invest with partner, vendor A on this opportunity? When in reality, what’s happening in the partner’s business is that vendor B has also brought an opportunity to the table and said, hey, we think that there’s this thing that we could do together and

Toni (05:56)
Mm.

John (06:14)
You know, it would take this much investment. Do you want to invest? And vendor C has brought something. And by the way, division X of the company has said, hey, we think we should build this other thing. And so really the decision the partner is making isn’t yes, no for vendor A. It’s am I going to choose, am I going to invest in vendor A, vendor B, vendor C or

Toni (06:17)
Mm.

Mm.

Mm.

John (06:43)
my own division X, right? Like that’s how the partners are thinking. You said it yourself, right? They’re thinking about how am going to grow my business? Where am I going to go? What am I going to do? And we limit ourselves by thinking the partner only thinks about what we brought to the table. Instead of we’re inserting something into a much bigger set of decisions that they’re making. So the first thing we got to do is think about this from their perspective. How are they looking at this? Right?

Toni (06:47)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hmm.

You

John (07:12)
Because if we get that wrong, we get everything else wrong.

Toni (07:16)
Yeah, absolutely. I think having that view of, like you say, competing offerings, who else is in that account that’s speaking to your partner? How is that partner structured? Yeah, how is what you have to offer likely to impact on different parts of their business? And certainly, there are partners that I work with who were like, well,

Not interested in that, but I am interested in this because I can hang professional services off it. it is that looking outside of the four walls of what you’ve been asked to promote or sell or put forward or ask the partner to invest in to what the broader impact is on their business is really, really important.

John (07:51)
That’s right.

Yeah, I’ve actually had a scenario where I had a partner essentially comparing the market opportunity investment that I brought to them. Their alternative was to do an internal spiff to their salespeople on their existing products. And so what I was actually competing against was like, wasn’t even my, it wasn’t even in a realm of like what we do. was.

Wait, I’m competing against whether they want to make an investment in paying more money to get their salespeople to sell something they already have or invest in doing something new with me. Like, that’s a different scenario to try and manage.

Toni (08:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, and there’s something you said, though, which I really liked is what’s the alternative? It’s a good question to ask, isn’t it? So I’m putting this and say, what’s the alternative? What are the partner’s alternatives to doing this? Is it something that I can from a competitor? Or is it something that I wouldn’t even imagine they would be thinking about? So yeah, I like that.

John (08:58)
That’s right.

That’s right. Yeah. And that takes a whole different kind of questioning with the partner, right? It means asking much smarter questions, more kind of higher level business questions. Like you said, of, okay, how does this fit into your investment strategy? you know, like, how are you guys going to look at this kind of stuff? Are you going to, what are you going to compare it to? What are you going to, what are your alternatives? All of that. And then that gives you insight into the next important thing, which is based on that,

Toni (09:12)
Yeah.

Yeah.

John (09:36)
who’s actually making the decision. Because we’re so convinced when we bring the market opportunity to our counterpart at the partner or whatever, that that’s who’s making the decision. And it’s almost never that person, right? They might be part of the decision, but you know, who else is involved? Who else at that company is actually, but we can’t even figure that out if we don’t know what the decision is that they’re actually evaluating.

Toni (09:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and there’s some questions in there as well, isn’t there? You know, which could even be what’s the best way to present this to you? Who else needs to see it? How can I help you to get the information that you need? Because yeah, we can end up thinking, well, here you are. Off you go. Yes or no. And it just doesn’t work like that.

John (10:13)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Or even, let’s say I give this to you and you say yes, then what happens? Like, let’s say you actually want to do this. What do you then have to do internally to actually make that happen? Who else do you have to talk to? Who else do you have to go get funding from somewhere? Like, where would that money come from? Right? There are all those classic sales decision questions, but they apply in these partnerships because it’s just a decision. It’s the same thing.

Toni (10:33)
Yes.

Yeah.

John (10:54)
It’s just a different topic that we’re talking about.

Toni (10:58)
Yeah, and it’s just that point that you’ve made there about what if it’s a yes, and I’ve got some direct experience of this recently on a project I’m working on. And the client said, yes, yes, I’d love to do this. However, there’s a whole contractual piece that needs to happen. Can I be on the approved surprise list? How does that

John (11:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yep.

Toni (11:21)
Am I allowed to, how does that work? Am I, you know, is my organization structured in the right way that they can do business with me? And so, yeah, even if you get a yes, if you’re not across the things that have to happen to turn that yes into making it happen, then you know, you’ve, you’ve not got the right insight, which means that you can’t influence.

John (11:34)
That’s right. Yeah.

That’s right. Look, Toni, this is we’ve talked in many, many episodes about the fact that this role we’re talking about, channel manager, partner account manager, whatever the title is, is one of the most complex, difficult roles that you can have because you have to be good at so many different things. And this is one of them, right? This is classic sales, you know, like direct sales kind of analysis.

Toni (12:04)
Hmm.

Yeah.

John (12:12)
You gotta be good at this if you’re a channel manager or a partner manager because these are the kinds of decisions that impact your partnership. And if you wanna move your partnership to something better than it is today, you gotta get good at this. It’s a hard job.

Toni (12:19)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I reckon that the people you have on in real life are going to talk to how they have made that happen in their organisations.

John (12:38)
I can’t wait for that. know we’ve got some people in our listening audience that are really good at this. And so I’m hoping they will volunteer to come in and talk a little bit about this. And if you’re somebody out there who struggles with this, who has tried some things and maybe had some difficult times, we’d love to have you on In Real Life as well, because people want to hear about that. They learn from understanding what works and what doesn’t work. So we’d love to have you on. Love to hear how well you, how do you figure out what the real decision is? How do you figure out?

Who’s actually involved in a decision? How do you figure out how much influence they have? How do you insert yourself into that influence? And to your point that I love that term alternatives. What are the alternatives and who likes which alternative, right? How are their competitive kind of preferences playing out? So yeah, I can’t wait for to hear from the in real life folks about this one as well. So thanks again, Toni. Love having these conversations with you.

Toni (13:23)
Yeah.

Thanks, John. Brilliant. Walking the partnership path together.

John (13:39)
That’s right, I like it.

Toni (13:41)
Thank