Beat the new-territory chaos with a new territories sales play that jumpstarts new pipeline

TLDR: Run a New Territories Sales Play with PartnerTap

Is your Q1 sales productivity tanked by territory changes? Do your reps spend the whole quarter just trying to get to know their new accounts? We’ll share how to turn Q1 from a dead quarter to your sales teams’ best quarter ever with quick wins and strong new pipeline sourced and accelerated by partners. 

Territory changes cause chaos for Sales Reps

It’s common for companies to begin the fiscal year with major re-organizations of their sales territories. Reps get a whole bunch of new accounts they don’t know anything about. They don’t know what’s important to their new target companies and have no relationships to leverage. For many, Q1 is the dead quarter. Reps follow up on anything that didn’t close in Q4, but it’s really hard to do anything meaningful on their brand-new accounts until they get the lay of the land. 

Jumpstart Sales after a territories change

You know who can help your reps get up to speed on their new accounts quickly? Partners. Especially your consulting partners who worked on the ground with these companies in the past year. They know everything about these accounts: the leaders, the politics, how they make decisions, who can get things done, who is easiest to sell to. But most sales reps have no idea which consulting partners are engaged in their new territory. And even if they called their partner team to find out, there’s no way they could know which individual consultants own the relationships at each firm. 

But now there’s a way to jumpstart Q1 sales and turn territory changes into an opportunity to develop new pipeline fast. PartnerTap instantly aligns your sales reps to the individual partners engaged on their new accounts and makes it easy for them to connect via phone or email for a get-to-know-each-other conversation. 

Systems integrators and consulting firms are going to have the closest relationships with your buyers and they don’t reorg as much. They also want to hit Q1 running and will want to help your reps get up to speed on accounts.

PartnerTap can show your reps which partners have meaningful relationships and proximity to your buyers so they can engage the best systems integrators and consulting partners to get up to speed quickly and brainstorm how to do more with this account together. 

If you’re the CRO at a company that uses PartnerTap, run a Territory Jumpstart Sales Play immediately after your new territories are rolled out. Run a contest to incentivize reps to have pre-opp discovery calls with the consultants engaged at their new accounts and develop new opportunities they can go after together. 

If you’re a CRO at a company that isn’t yet on PartnerTap’s enterprise leading co-selling platform, put pressure on your partner or channel team now. Ask them to automate account mapping with partners with PartnerTap and push all that valuable mapped partner data back into your CRM so your reps can see the partners engaged at each of their accounts. 

How to run a New Territories Sales Play with PartnerTap

This Q1 pipeline jumpstart sales play requires three things: 

1. Real-time mapped partner accounts
2. A contest and leadership board
3. A tracking campaign pipeline report. 

Here’s the playbook:

Real-time mapped partner accounts

As soon as new territories are updated in your CRM, all the updated accounts and account owners flow directly into PartnerTap. And when your partners do their sales re-orgs? Their new account owner information flows right into PartnerTap as well. With dynamic account mapping your sales reps will always have real-time visibility to the partners engaged on their accounts and be able to reach out to their counterparts to talk about their mutual accounts. 

So here’s how to run a new territories jumpstart sales play with PartnerTap:

1. On the first day of new territory assignments, have each sales rep login to PartnerTap and go to Ecosystem Reports and click on the Global Overlap report tile to see a list of their accounts with all of the partners mapped to their accounts in one list. Sales reps will only be able to see the accounts they own. An enterprise sales rep will see their ~10 accounts, SMB commercial reps might see ~1000 accounts. They can scroll across the columns to see the customer vs. prospect status of each partner on each account.
   
   
2. Use the partner selector list to narrow down the partners included in this report to just the systems integrators and consulting firm partners with the best reputation in your new territory
3. Sort by each partner column to quickly see which partners have existing customer relationships at their new accounts
4. Use filters to narrow down the list of accounts based on any criteria valuable to your sales teams: segment, industry, propensity to buy, existing products, etc.
5. Click on an account name to get to the account detail page. From here they can see the email, title and phone number for the partner reps engaged on their new accounts, and use the Invite button to invite their counterparts to connect directly on PartnerTap.

Run a contest

Now that your sales reps know who to reach out to to get up to speed it’s time for the contest. The two metrics for the contest are # calls or meetings with partners, and # new opportunities developed based on the pre-opp brainstorming conversations with these partners. 

1. Set a goal for the # of conversations your reps need to have with partners in the first three weeks of the quarter. Use # of calls or meetings set with partners as the primary goal for the contest. Reps that engage in real conversations with partners will be able to develop more opportunities earlier in the quarter.
2. Ask reps to log these calls or meetings in CRM with a title line that starts with “Partner chat with _____” and include the partner company name in call log subject line 

*Pro Tip for Sales

A best practice is to start by helping out your partners. The Help My Partner report shows a list of accounts where you can help your partner with account details and intros to accounts that you know something about or who are already your customers. This give and get strategy is a great way to build a meaningful relationship where you can instantly show value and help each other achieve your goals.

Measure new pipeline developed from the partner conversations

Now that reps are having pre-lead conversations with partners on their new accounts it’s time to step back and monitor for new pipeline created on these accounts. 

1. Create an activity report and dashboard showing the # of partner conversations happening across reps
2. Create a campaign called “Q1 SI Partner Conversations”
3. Ask reps to tag all new opportunities developed based on these pre-opp conversations to this campaign

More ways to co-sell and win

The New Territory Sales Play is just one example of how to start co-selling with partners. PartnerTap’s enterprise co-selling software lets your channel and sales teams proactively identify partners who have meaningful relationships and proximity to your buyer so you can accelerate pipeline growth and sell more efficiently in 2024.

If your partner managers or channel account managers are moving around and getting new partners in Q1, learn how to run a Partner Shuffle Co-Sell Play to jumpstart co-selling and source new pipeline.