SgtAE

What's it like working in partner channels?

Hey team, so I just hit my one year at my company and manager has been asking about career progression. Traditional path is to go SMB AE, but i've been working with a partner in India quite heavily recently and some big logo's are starting to surface because of our efforts. My manager is calling them out and i'm looking at recording the prospecting process between our team and theirs on how we source deals to showcase to the org.

I'm considering a partner channel sales manager role as a next step, my manager mentioned they would vouch for me and the partner definitely has my back on this stating I do good work with them and could definitely make it in that role.

Just curious to know from anyone else's experience what the role is like, and how commission structures work?

For reference i'm enterprise SDR at the moment.

🧢 Sales Management

12 comments

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SalesBeast

Politicker

Sales Director

Be careful. Partners will always promise the world and tons of deals and then almost never pan out. If you have integrated solutions and can manage leads from those pre built relationships it helps. Did partners few yrs and is rough with the wrong or no support from your team.

FinanceEngineer

Politicker

Sr Director, sales and partnerships

This is very true. Anything to get more effort into their channel, and a lower price/larger revenue piece for a sale.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

I don't know enough about channel partnerships to guide you one way or the other unfortunately. 🤷‍♀️

Wellss

Tycoon

Channel sales

My current position is in channel sales as a partner manager & I personally like it better than my last role as an AE, but you do also have to be cautious of some of the things the other comments mentioned. For example, you put a lot of faith in your partners and I've been burned so many times where they over promise and under deliver. Every partner relationship is different but once you get a good dynamic going then the sales usually start rolling in soon after. In my experience, any sort of partner sale usually takes longer just because there's more people involved, so that's something to keep in mind as well.

SgtAE

WR Officer

Yeah I can definitely see where they are coming from on that, my relationship with our partner in India works very well because we have no local presence, and our partner is heavily committed to the point where they are willing to travel anywhere in India if the meetings good enough and have done so already so they're great at accelerating deals.

Just a quick question on how targets would work. Are you just given a quota and asked to drive that number from all partners in your territory? Or is the target structure different?

bendandsnack

Politicker

Account Exec

As someone who works for a partner, I'd like to echo the overpromising and underdelivering on deals.

I'm an SDR spread between way too many AEs and all of them promise a bajillion opportunities to the main company we partner with.

The best part? Our AEs all use SDR-generated meetings as political capital to get inbound opps from that company. Then they completely drop the SDR-generated opps as outbound takes more work.

Choose wisely lol.

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

I love partnership role, didn't do in tech but. In my last org in tech, I know we had hard time getting the deals from the partners except a few but that was due to some internal challenges. Again, do what your heart tells you to All the best!

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

I hate dealing with partners and I think being a channel manager would be miserable. But that's just my 2 cents as a SaaS rep.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

I know several people who have been very successful in the channel roles, and others who transitioned back to either AE or Sales Manager roles. If you think you want to try, I'd give it a shot - you can transition to another role downroad or at another company if you choose.

I'm sorry I can't advise you on the comp structure; I'm not familiar with that. My advice is just to try something that you are interested in.

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

☕️

Ever been to Nam, young man? It's nam.

whatbeclosing

Member

Account Executive

If you can provide partners with value, value how the partner defines it, you will be successful.
However I have found that value for partners can be very different for value for your own company..
It has to be a 2 way street.

Upper_Class_SaaS

Politicker

Account Executive

Can't stand the partner ecosystem... never had a great experience with them.

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