I was tasked with taking over an enterprise reseller partner relationship within a company. At the time, 70% of the projects that had been brought to our team had failed to launch. To solve this problem, I was tasked with:

• Streamlining processes to ensure a more smooth execution and launch of projects.

• Improve the success rate of project completion

• Improve the relationship with the partner to ensure long term future success between our companies.

In order to assess what solution was needed I met with internal stakeholders who had been working the partnership and our primary contact at the partner. Through my needs analysis I identified a number of key issues that had resulted in the current state of the partnership.

• Partner sales reps did not have a strong understanding of our offering and had too many options to sell.

• Partner sales reps were acting as project managers for our design team which was outside of their scope.

• Customers' expectations and our scope of services were misaligned leading to frustration and churn for our partner.

After completing the needs analysis it was clear that the root cause of the issues was stemming from an untrained sales team trying to sell too many unclear options and being tasked to perform a job function they were not equipped or compensated for. In order to address these challenges I:

• Created a new services SKU to bundle services instead of selling them a la carte in order to simplify the selling process.

• Developed a new sales handoff process to help projects kick off more smoothly and SOP for project execution to ensure consistency of service.

• Stepped into a team lead/project management role to directly oversee the designers to ensure projects are being moved forward based on our new process outline.

Once the new framework for how we would run the partnership was in place, we needed to train the partner’s sales team on the new service bundle and process. This was a multi step process that included

• Development of a sales training deck to educate partner sales reps on how to position our solution and new services bundle accurately.

• Holding meetings with area managers to answer questions and provide additional coaching to their sales teams.

After implementing these new processes and training the partner’s team members, the entire partnership transformed and became one of the most successful partnerships of the department. A few of the key improvements included:

• A complete reversal of the partnership trajectory leading to 95% of projects going live.

• Increased insight into the projects that continued to cancel to understand misaligned expectations or budget constraints.

• A shift in the partnership from being on the verge of cancellation to bringing in over $500k in revenue.