You hop off a joint call with a prospect, knowing you and your partner killed it. Reps were in sync and the potential customer was nodding along, asking great questions.
So you do your part, carefully crafting a follow-up email so it goes out right away post-call. Satisfied with the structure, you hit send.
Two seconds later, your partner’s email comes in: “Hi team, great call today. Wanted to send a quick recap of our meeting and next steps…” Cue facepalm. And cue anxiety, because this is a big sign to the customer that you and your partner don’t have your ducks in a row.
Unfortunately, toe-stepping is pretty common in co-sell deals, often because teams haven’t agreed on clear rules of engagement. And winging it doesn’t tend to work out so well. As Amber Post, a Customer Success Manager at PartnerStack, puts it, “The magic isn’t in the tactic, it’s in doing the alignment work before the customer ever sees it.”
To help you figure out what to include in your co-sell rules of engagement, we talked to Post, who sees co-sell deals up close in her work at PartnerStack. Below, we share what she says you need in a co-sell sales cycle and the gotchas she sees teams run into.
What’s typically in co-sell rules of engagement
The way you run co-sell deals will differ from how another company runs its co-sell motion. And your process might even differ from deal to deal. As a baseline, though, most co-sell rules of engagement cover:
1. A partner-fit evaluation (if you’re approaching them)
If you’re looking at your account mapping tool and see that two of your partners are going after the same prospect you are, which one do you choose?
You probably already have a gut feeling that one is a better fit than the other, but there’s no harm in taking a second to think about whether:
- You truly have a better together story. If it feels like a stretch, it probably is. Now, this mostly applies to tech partners (who are each selling software and potentially have an integration). But one services company might be better at implementing your product for a certain vertical or have more experience with specific features, making a joint proposal an easier pitch.
- Their referrals stick around. “This is the one I look at most as a CSM. It’s not just how many deals a partner brings in, it’s whether those customers stay… A partner that brings you three lifetime customers is orders of magnitude more valuable than a partner that brings you 50 single-contract customers,” Post points out. If they’ve got a track record of great referrals (and, even better, co-sell deal outcomes), they’re probably a good choice this go-round, too.
- They show the right signals. Post looks for partners who ask about the customer’s problem before the commission, bring you in early and know what your product does (and doesn’t do). They’re also comfortable saying no. “If a partner will tell you ‘this one isn’t a good fit for you,’ you can trust them on the ones they say yes to,” she says. Warning signs include partners who steer every conversation back to payouts, register deals with no real activity behind them or go quiet after the intro.
Related: What to know about bad channel partners — and how to handle them.
2. Refined deal registration and partner credit
Once you know you’re working with a partner, make sure they understand your deal registration (deal reg) rules, which should already be in place.
“If you’re figuring out deal reg rules in the middle of a deal, you’re already too late, because now every decision feels personal,” says Post.
Run through these bullets to verify that they’re in your deal reg guidelines and then review them with your partner:
- What counts as a registration. Seems obvious, but you need “a named contact, a real opportunity and some proof the partner has actually engaged with them. That keeps partners from registering a whole territory just to claim it,” Post explains.
- How long a deal reg lasts. Put an expiration date on it — 60 or 90 days — with the option to extend if there’s activity. “It’s especially important to take into account your own sales team’s time-to-close metrics when you decide the expiry window,” Post suggests. That way, “deals don’t sit locked forever with nobody working them.”
- How fast you respond. “If partners register a deal and wait two weeks to hear back, they lose faith in the process fast,” Post says. “Commit to a turnaround time and stick to it.”
- What the partner gets. If you run a fully joint deal, does it matter whether you brought it to the partner or they brought it to you? What does “fully joint” mean in your team’s language? Play out all possible scenarios when you’re putting your deal reg rules in place and make sure they’re enforceable (i.e., you’ve outlined each one of the scenarios and how that changes partner credit).
- Where you’re tracking the deal. Most often, this is in a PRM. Ideally, your PRM integrates with your CRM, so partners can see where the deal stands as it moves through each stage. “If deal reg lives in someone’s inbox or a spreadsheet, it will fall apart the first time there’s a dispute,” Post points out.
- How conflicts get settled. What happens if you’re doing a fully joint deal and the prospect decides they only want to work with the partner? What happens if you can’t agree on joint pricing? What if Partner B says they have a relationship with a VP after you started working with Partner A? Again, walk through as many possible conflicts as you can and write the answers down so that “it’s the rule making the decision, not someone’s mood that day,” Post advises.
Tip from Post:
If you’re already working with Partner A, honor that. “Swapping them out because someone shiny came along is the fastest way to lose a partner’s trust, and other partners will hear about it,” she says.
If another partner could meaningfully influence your co-sell, ask the partner you’re currently working with if they’d be OK with you bringing them in. “Most partners will say yes if it helps the deal, especially when you ask instead of just doing it,” she says. From there, she suggests giving Partner B a clear, defined role, like making the exec intro, and rewarding them for that piece through an influence or referral payout, while Partner A stays the lead and keeps the sourced credit.
3. A shared discovery plan
“The biggest thing is doing your homework together before you ever get in front of the prospect,” Post says. “If the vendor rep and the partner rep walk into discovery with two separate question lists, the customer feels it right away. It turns into an interrogation instead of a conversation.”
She recommends hopping on a quick 15-minute pre-call sync between your team and the partner’s, where each side clarifies what they need to learn. Then, you can sort it into two buckets: “what you absolutely need to know on this call, and what can wait or be picked up async later,” she says.
Often, she adds, “both teams want to understand the same core things: what problem is the prospect trying to solve, who’s involved in the decision and what their timeline looks like.” It can’t hurt to confirm, though.
During the sync, it’s a good idea to start sharing any research you’ve done and ask your partner to do the same. If they already work with the prospect, they will likely have some fantastic context:
- How long they’ve worked with the customer
- What’s gone well and what’s frustrated them
- Who the real champion is (vs. who just has the title)
- When their renewals or budget cycles land
According to Post, “That’s gold, and a lot of teams never ask for it because they’re focused on their own pipeline.”
Tip from Post:
Share an agenda with the partner before the pre-sync call. A quick outline of what the joint call will cover is enough: intros, the customer’s goals, discovery questions, product walkthrough and next steps.
Then, on the pre-sync, let the partner choose what they want to own and where they need support. They might want to lead intros and discovery because they know the customer best, or own the whole conversation with you just there as backup. “Either way, the partner gets to decide,” Post says.
“What I love about this is that it takes the guesswork out completely,” she adds. “It also shows the partner you trust them with their own customer, which goes a long way toward them bringing you the next deal.”
Don’t want to build that agenda from scratch? Post’s Co-sell Partner Brief Generator skill turns it into a one-page brief for your team and your partner.
4. Agreed-upon ownership for customer calls
Before the customer call, settle who’s leading which parts of the conversation. When the partner already knows the prospect, they’re usually the right person to run the call. “Let them lead and frame the conversation, because the customer already trusts them,” Post says.
Your team can step in on product or technical questions. Just come prepared. “Please don’t make the customer repeat themselves!” she adds. “If the partner already knows their tech stack or their pain points, share that internally first in that pre-call sync so the call can go deeper than the surface.”
Related: What great partner enablement looks like in co-sell.
5. Streamlined comms
You won’t always get all the answers you need from a customer on that first call. “For anything you don’t get to on the call, keep a shared doc and follow up in one joint email afterward, not two separate ones,” says Post.
Combine the questions if you can, and send them along with any other materials. “One thread tends to land better with the prospect. Always keep things simple where you can,” she says. Decide who is sending it upfront so you don’t end up with two recap emails in the same thread.
After the call, it’s a good idea to tentatively outline who will handle what for the rest of the deal. Obviously, this will be in flux, but a Slack channel or another real-time messaging platform can help you hash out deal-related details together before an egg-on-your-face situation.
What people tend to overlook in co-sell deals
Going into a joint call with a prospect cold is an obvious recipe for disaster. But there are some not-so-obvious things that could impact your co-sell success, including:
Going through the motions
If your company does a lot of co-sell deals, especially with one or two partners, it’s easy to feel like these steps are second nature. But when you start skipping steps because “you know they’re good for it,” or “things will right themselves,” you might be in for a rude awakening. Post has seen what that looks like: “two reps reaching out to the same customer in the same week, or a deal getting registered late because someone assumed it was handled.”
“I think long-term partnerships are where some of the sneakiest friction shows up, because everyone stops looking at the process,” she says. “It’s human nature. When things are going well, nobody wants to be the person who says, ‘Hey, should we maybe audit what we’re doing?’”
But a smooth stretch is actually the best time to step back and check how you’re working together. When your next deal with a long-term partner comes up, take the first 10 minutes of your pre-sync to review your “normal process” in detail.
Failing to have the “money talk” early on
If you’re doing co-sell right, your team and your partner’s team are back-channeling, reading the prospect’s 10-K, getting in really deep. That’s great, but at some point, you’re going to have to talk money with your partner.
Often, that conversation happens late. “The vendor and partner teams get deep into a deal before anyone talks about who’s getting paid what, or whether the deal even qualifies,” Post says. “Then it closes and there’s a disagreement over attribution or commission, and all of a sudden a great win feels like a fight.”
No one wants a celebration to turn into a dispute. Her advice: “Payouts, eligibility and how the deal is tracked should be crystal clear before anyone talks to the customer.”
Related: How to create a commission structure that partners can’t resist.
Fumbling pricing and packaging
“Most co-sell opps look like two separate pitches stapled together,” Post explains. “The vendor sells the technology, the partner sells their services and the prospect is left doing the math on how it all fits into what they need.”
The teams that stand out do the opposite, she says. “They go to the customer with a single offer built around the result: ‘here’s what you’ll have up and running in 60 days, here’s who’s doing what and here’s one number for all of it.’”
In practice, Post says this kind of offer can look like:
- The partner bundling implementation or onboarding into the deal, so the customer knows they’ll get value from the tool.
- You offering partner-exclusive terms such as an extended trial or a starter package available only through that partner.
“It takes away a ton of buying friction, because the customer isn’t evaluating two parties anymore; they’re buying one solution instead,” she says. “And it gives the partner a real reason to lead with you over a competitor.”
You might even take your “one solution” a step further by showing what it looks like in an end-to-end workflow demo.
“Instead of doing two back-to-back product demos, the strongest teams do a workflow demo,” Post says. “They take the customer’s actual day-to-day process, usually something they learned in discovery, and walk through it showing where the partner fits and where the vendor fits.”
This shifts the conversation, she explains. “It stops being ‘look at our features’ and becomes ‘this is what your Tuesday looks like after we’re both in.’ Customers get it so much faster, and it proves the two teams actually know how to work together, which is half of what they’re buying.”
Discounting the partner experience
A partner should never find out that you closed a deal from your CRO posting about it on LinkedIn or in your PRM dashboard. Especially if they are in a full-on co-sell with you, they should hear about progress from you, not after the fact.
Post sees a common pattern: “The partner opens the door, the vendor gets excited and suddenly the vendor is running the whole deal directly.”
“Even if it wasn’t intentional, something like that is quick to kill trust, and that partner is way less likely to bring you their next opportunity,” she adds.
If you both agree after discovery, or even later in the deal, that the partner’s role in the deal will be smaller, don’t let them drop out of the picture. “If the partner brought you in, keep them in the loop all the way through, even if their role gets smaller,” Post says.
You might also like: The future of co-sell doesn't start in a PRM, it starts where your partners work.
Treating closed-won as the finish line
Post sees many teams treating co-sell as a way to win new customers, then letting the partnership go quiet once a deal closes. “But some of the biggest opportunities in co-selling are with the customers you already share,” she says.
“Think about it: the partner is often talking to that customer way more than the vendor is. That’s expansion and renewal intel you just can’t get from a usage dashboard, and it’s super valuable at renewal time.”
It works the other way, too. If a shared customer is at risk, tell your partner early. “[It] gives you a second voice the customer already trusts,” Post says. “I’ve seen partners save accounts the vendor was sure they’d lost, just because the customer was willing to be honest with them.”
As she puts it, “Closing the deal shouldn’t be the end of the co-sell. Honestly, it’s where the most valuable part starts.”
If the partnership has gone quiet, try Post’s Partner Re-Engagement Drip Campaign skill from the PartnerStack Skills Marketplace.
Letting rules of engagement get stale
When you write out your rules of engagement for the first time, there’s no way you can get them perfectly right — you don’t know every way a co-sell deal could go sideways, how your offerings will change or how your team will evolve.
Even a solid co-sell agreement can drift out of date. “The two most common things I see are that the original people who built the agreement leave (on both sides), or that the vendor launches a new product line, and nobody updates anything,” Post says. “Everyone is still running on ‘how we’ve always done it,’ except half the team was never actually told how it’s done.”
She recommends treating your rules of engagement like a living document. “Do a quick check-in every quarter if you can, and always revisit it when there’s a big change, like new people or products.”
Another good time to adjust your rules of engagement is when something goes wrong. “Any time a deal gets a little messy, don’t just fix it and move on: it’s better to identify what step got skipped and whether the process needs an update in the moment,” she explains.
“The goal isn’t more process so much as it’s making sure the process still matches how you actually work today.”
Rules of engagement aren’t red tape
Co-sell rules of engagement are more of an insurance policy: a way to make wins feel like wins for everyone — your team, your partner’s team and the customer.
So, write them down, review them every quarter (or more often, if you can) and keep them visible to you and your partners.
If you don’t already have one, a PRM like PartnerStack is a natural place to share information, support partner enablement and facilitate deal registration (with CRM updates), so partners know how to approach a co-sell deal and exactly where they stand.
Book a demo to see how PartnerStack can make your co-sell process more efficient.
