When your customers or prospects ask your software company for a solution, it doesn’t usually involve a sales or marketing ask. It usually involves a product ask. Can your product integrate with software applications and/or SaaS platforms the customer has already chosen? Does your software make the other tools the customer have invested in better? Does it fit into existing process that your customer has adopted?
I see a lot of business development organizations actually talk about how they should build strong sales channels first with public cloud providers and software companies. “How many leads did we get from public cloud A?” or “How many people did SaaS company B send to the event?” There is nothing wrong with building partnerships that help your software company grow sales. The number one way to do that however is to give your customers what they are asking for. That means your product and engineering teams at your software company need to understand how your product fits into the existing technology and cloud workflows of your customers.
When your organization lets your product teams take the lead in a partnership strategy, you give your customer facing teams something real to engage on. “Did you see that our integration with AWS improves performance by 50%?” or “Did you know that the information we collect on your behalf from our new shared SaaS integration means even more security for your mission critical application at no additional cost?” These questions allow your sales teams, once the integrations are built, to have impactful conversations with prospects and customers.
So the next time a business development team suggests you should start a partnership with your sales and marketing teams, ask them how this helps your customers. You know that customers will.