What Great Partner Enablement Looks Like in Co-Sell

A co-sell partner shouldn’t have to come to you with the same basic questions every time they work on a deal.

“Who is the ideal customer? How should we position the partnership? Who owns the next step? Where do I find the sales materials? How do I register the deal?”

If partners are asking these questions in the middle of a deal, your enablement came too late.

Great co-sell partner enablement gives partners the information, resources and guidance they need before they have to ask for it. And because co-selling asks partners to work alongside your sales team, that enablement needs to go beyond product training.

We spoke with Sarah Cole, Lead Customer Success Manager at PartnerStack, about what effective co-sell enablement looks like and the materials companies should give partners to help them sell together.

What is co-sell partner enablement?

Co-sell partner enablement is the process of giving partners the information, resources, training and guidance they need to sell alongside your team. They need to understand who your ideal customers are, how to position the joint solution, how the partnership works and what to do when they identify an opportunity.

A co-sell partner may need answers to questions like:

• Who should I sell this to?
• What problem does the joint solution solve?
• What happens after I identify an opportunity?

That's what separates co-sell enablement from simply giving partners product training or a folder of sales collateral. The goal is to give partners enough context and practical resources to participate confidently throughout the co-sell process.

For Cole, effective enablement starts with understanding what partners need to know, then making that information easy to find before a deal is underway.

You might also like: Partner enablement tips to drive revenue and strengthen your ecosystem.

What makes a co-sell enablement resource useful?

A resource doesn’t become useful because of its length. In fact, adding more information can make it harder for a partner to find what they need.

Cole puts the standard simply:

“A good enablement resource clearly states who it’s for and what they stand to gain from using or reading it. The resource is clear, concise, up-to-date and easily found by the partner, either in a clear resource folder structure or emailed as part of partner onboarding.”

With that in mind, here are four things partner teams need to get right:

Ask partners where they are stuck

Start with the questions partners actually have. What comes up during onboarding? What information do they repeatedly request? Where do they hesitate before approaching a customer?

Keep it clear and concise

Partners don't need every detail at once. Give them the information they need to take the next step, then provide deeper resources for partners who want more context.

Keep it current

Outdated pricing, messaging, product information or processes can create more problems than having no resource at all.

If your co-sell motion changes, your enablement should change with it.

Make it easy to find

A resource that nobody can find is not very useful. Organize resources in a clear partner portal or resource structure, and use onboarding emails or other communications to surface the materials partners need at the right time.

A partner relationship management (PRM) tool can make enablement easier to manage and easier for partners to use. PRM tools like PartnerStack give you a self-serve portal where you can organize resources by partner type and send onboarding sequences that surface the right materials at the right time.

And don’t mistake polish for usefulness. As Cole puts it: “Avoid AI slop in your resources at all costs. Partners will stop reading.”

The five resources co-sell partners need

There isn't one universal enablement library for every partner program. But there are several resources that can give co-sell partners the foundation they need to start selling with you.

1. An ICP guide

Co-sell success starts with understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP). Before partners can identify a co-sell opportunity, they need to know what a good opportunity looks like.

Your ICP describes the customers who get the most value from your product. For co-sell partners, a good ICP guide answers practical questions like:

• What industries do your best customers come from?
• What problems are they trying to solve? 
• Who’s involved in the buying decisions?
• How large are their companies?

A partner should be able to look at its existing customer base and recognize where there may be a fit.

For partners operating in specific industries, consider creating vertical-specific versions. The core ICP can stay consistent while the examples, pain points and use cases reflect the partner's market.

Teamwork’s partner onboarding offers a useful model. After new partners join, Teamwork sends an email explaining who its ideal customers are — and that customers in that audience are four times more likely to convert. Partners learn both who to target and why it matters.

Related: Why you need to understand your customer journey to run an affiliate program.

2. An onboarding FAQ

Partners will have questions before they ever bring you an opportunity. 

An onboarding FAQ can answer the basics upfront, so partners know early on:

• How the partnership works
• What each company brings to the relationship
• Who to contact
• How deal registration works
• What happens after they submit an opportunity
• Where to find sales and marketing resources

The FAQ shouldn’t try to replace every other resource. Its job is to answer the questions partners are most likely to have early in the relationship and point them toward deeper resources when needed.

3. Rules of engagement

Co-selling gets complicated when nobody knows who owns what. Your rules of engagement should make responsibilities clear before an opportunity is active.

That might include:

• Partner roles: What the partner owns and where they support your sales team
• Sales ownership: Who leads the customer relationship at different stages
• Account mapping: How both sides identify shared accounts and potential opportunities
• Deal registration: When and how partners register opportunities
• Communication: Who communicates with the customer and how teams coordinate
• Attribution: How contributions are recognized when multiple teams or partners influence a deal

These rules are especially important in multi-partner co-selling, where several companies may have relationships with the same customer.

You might also like: Account mapping: Your roadmap to new customer acquisition.

4. Sales and marketing collateral

Partners need materials they can actually use with customers. Keep a searchable library stocked with:

• Pitch decks and one-pagers partners can co-brand
• ROI calculators based on your pricing
• Customer stories and battle cards, refreshed whenever your product changes

But collateral shouldn’t just sit in a resource library. Cole recommends using email to bring the right resources back to partners at the right time, especially after onboarding.

Teamwork, for example, emails partners the day after they join with examples of content that other successful partners have created, plus links to resources that help them create their own.

5. Training that teaches partners how to sell

Product knowledge is only the first step. Partners also need to know how to position your solution in real customer conversations, so give them multiple ways to learn and practice.

You might create live training sessions, webinars, recorded sessions, Q&As, scenario-based training and short guides for common customer situations. Many companies deliver this training through a learning management system (LMS) or a PRM with one built in, but live sessions work too. 

Ongoing training also helps keep partners up to date as your product and customers’ needs change.

Give partners resources before they need them

As partners start identifying accounts and working opportunities, they need tools to collaborate effectively. Because co-selling means working deals together, give them shared tools: dashboards that show where each opportunity stands, templates for planning accounts together and clear terms for how partners are compensated.

This gives both sides clarity on who owns what, how the opportunity is progressing and how revenue will be attributed. 

It also helps to think about enablement across the whole partner journey. In practice, that looks like this: 

• During onboarding: Give partners the information they need to understand your company, the partnership, the value proposition, the ICP and basic processes.
• Before partners look for opportunities: Give them account-mapping and qualification guidance.
• When an opportunity emerges: Make deal-registration instructions, rules of engagement and relevant sales resources easy to access.
• During the active deal: Provide the collateral, messaging, training and support they need for the customer conversation.
• After the deal: Use what you learned to improve the resources for the next partner.

Let partner behavior tell you what to improve

Resource downloads are a useful signal, but they're not the end goal. The better question is what partners do after they consume your enablement.

Do they:

• Identify relevant accounts?
• Register opportunities?
• Bring your sales team into customer conversations?
• Progress opportunities through the pipeline?
• Close co-sell deals?

These actions can help you understand whether your enablement is actually helping partners move forward.

There's also a simpler signal: the questions partners keep asking. As Cole puts it, “If partners repeatedly ask how to register a deal, where to find a particular resource or how to position your product with a certain customer, don't just answer the question one partner at a time.”

Instead, use those questions to improve your resources. That way, every answer makes the program a little easier for the next partner.

Make every enablement resource count

More resources don't mean better enablement. If partners have to dig through dozens of documents to find a simple answer, your library has become another obstacle.

Keep resources clear, current and easy to find. Then let partner questions, engagement and pipeline activity show you what to improve.

When partners know who to target, how to sell together, where to find what they need and what to do next, your enablement is doing its job.

PartnerStack gives co-sell partners a self-serve portal for resources, onboarding and deal registration, so everything they need is in one place. Book a demo to see how it works.