Selling Through Someone Else: How to Use Agile Sales Networks and Partners to Sell More

Section III

Building the Better Network—Positioning for Success and Effectiveness

When designing, building, and using the capabilities discussed in Section II, organizations must consider the existing skills and requirements of not simply their direct resources, or even the indirect resources, but of all parties engaged in the Agile Selling ecosystem. This goes beyond design and implementation to how these capabilities are governed and where they “sit” in the organization's management structure and system. Importantly, governance structures must be defined by how well they support the successful operation of the entire ecosystem, not simply a company's owned resources; therefore, tighter integration and partnerships with all the other resources or stakeholders is required. This is especially true of what we call the joint initiative (JI) model, in which two or more companies invest in a stand-alone business entity to collaboratively develop, sell, and deliver new solutions to mutual customers' problems—in a way that the individual companies' offers could not do on their own.

The JI model and others like it can be especially helpful to companies looking to penetrate two markets that are rife with complexity and uncertainty: the small- and medium-size business (SMB) market and geographic markets outside of their established, familiar territories.

The vast number of SMBs, their diverse needs, and their unique buying behaviors are all factors that combine to produce an enormously complex ...