6 Steps to Executing a Co-Selling Strategy that Drives Revenue

Executing a strong co-selling strategy is one of the most powerful ways to stand out in today's marketplace. Throughout my career, I've worked in every area of an organization—from CEO to customer success, VP of product to COO. This has afforded me the perspective of seeing first-hand how different businesses and business units interact and how a strong co-selling strategy with your partners can drive revenue growth.  

The best co-selling strategies are a force multiplier, enabling your company to increase conversion rate, improve time to close, improve customer retention, and increase average order value. This new way of business can be tricky to navigate, though, so I'll be leading you through how to build a co-selling strategy. Let's get started.  
 
What is a co-selling strategy?  

At its core, a co-selling strategy is a collaborative approach where two or more companies join forces to sell complementary products or services. This partnership leverages each company's strengths, market access, and existing customer base to reach shared sales targets. Instead of working separately, both parties coordinate their efforts, from customer service initiatives to marketing campaigns to direct sales conversations, to create value for their customers. 

However, co-selling is much more than two sales teams talking to each other and sharing their mutual prospect data. That's part of it, but this is a woefully incomplete and short-sighted way to think about your strategy.  

Why? Consider this: When are a company's sales teams typically most sensitive to having someone else talk to their prospects? The late stages—when they're getting ready to close the deal. They simply can't risk dividing a prospect's attention or demand more from them at this crucial point.  

Who does have trusted relationships with potential accounts that you can leverage more fully? The teams who are already working those accounts. Not your partners' marketing and sales teams, but their implementation teams, account managers, and support specialists.  
It's time to think of co-selling as a larger strategic shift and initiative that goes beyond your sales teams.  
 
What's the difference between co-marketing vs. co-selling?  

I'll be focusing on co-selling in this article, but this strategy is often confused (and overlaps) with co-marketing, so let's look at the differences.  

Co-marketing involves two or more companies strategically going after a cohort of mutual prospects. They work together on joint marketing campaigns to generate awareness and demand through shared resources. This could be creating content, webinars, customer case studies, or events that showcase both brands. Co-marketing drives seller behavior; in order to accelerate into co-selling you'll need the demand generated through co-marketing.  

Co-selling is more sales-oriented, where companies directly collaborate to develop and close deals. They share data, coordinate outreach strategies, build on interest generated through co-marketing, and develop combined solutions that leverage each other's strengths, market access, and customer relationships.  

Put simply, co-marketing builds interest, while co-selling turns that interest into tailored strategies to secure future sales. One feeds into the other, but co-selling is a larger shift that touches many more parts of an organization.  
 
How to start building your co-selling strategy  

A successful co-selling initiative requires careful planning and alignment across your organization, not just within the sales team. Let's dive into the key steps to launch your co-selling efforts effectively. 
 
1. Get executive buy-in across your organization  

Securing the support of leadership across multiple internal departments is crucial. Especially in the SaaS and tech sectors, aligning with product and engineering leadership is vital because there’s a limit to how much you can achieve while co-selling without their involvement. Strong leadership buy-in ensures that the necessary resources, such as roadmap allocation and higher levels of engineering support, are available.  

This alignment can help overcome the technical and strategic challenges that often arise in partnerships, making it easier to adapt your product and services to fit your future combined selling efforts.  

Additionally, leadership support helps in fostering an organizational culture that values a partner-led approach. It's important that leaders across customer success, product, engineering, marketing, and sales are all on the same page, as this alignment will facilitate smoother communication and strategy implementation. Leadership should actively promote and facilitate collaboration between teams. 

Finally, build a set of KPIs with leadership that you can use to later measure the performance of your co-selling initiatives. This is a crucial step to build an ROI-validated partner program. When you start by defining these performance metrics, it makes it easier to justify later investments and growth in your co-selling strategy. 
 
2. Develop your joint value proposition  

Next, craft a compelling joint value proposition that resonates with your potential and current customers. Developing this value proposition requires deep insights into customer needs and preferences, which often come from direct feedback and engagement with existing customers. Listen to your customers to understand the other solutions or services they are using or need.  
Conduct joint workshops with your partner to align on key messages and competitive advantages of selling together. This step ensures that both parties are communicating a consistent message to the market.  

By identifying where your offerings and your partner’s offerings complement each other, you can create a value proposition that highlights the unique benefits of any combined solutions. This value proposition should clearly articulate how your partnership can solve problems better together than separately, appealing directly to the needs and challenges of your target market. 
 
3. Create account maps of your existing customers  

When people think of co-selling, they often think of this step—but as you see here, there's a few steps to tackle before this.  

With account mapping, you and your partner can identify where you have shared customers and opportunities. This involves analyzing both companies' customer bases to find overlaps and potential cross-sell prospects. Effective account mapping can pinpoint where the greatest opportunities for collaboration lie, allowing you to strategically target these areas with your joint value proposition.  

The success of account mapping depends on strong guidance from leadership and a clear understanding of each partner's capabilities and goals. It helps you cut through the noise and the data in this step to figure out where your partnership offers the most value for customers.  
This step is not just about identifying where opportunities exist but also planning how to approach them together, ensuring that efforts are coordinated and that both partners benefit equally from the venture. 
 
4. Begin with co-marketing  

Co-selling works best if you have already begun co-marketing. You want your sales teams to leverage the materials created when you create a join marketing plan such as “Better Together” stories and co-branded content and promotions. This paves the way and unlocks successful co-selling. Sales responds to the expectations set by customers through their interactions with your marketing, so to truly get Sales to prioritize co-selling, the demand needs to begin from the marketing pipeline. 
 
5. Advance co-selling ideas across your organization  

Building a strong co-selling strategy extends beyond just aligning your two sales teams. Of course, you should set up joint sales calls and demos when it makes sense. However, integrating different departments such as customer success, engineering, and even product development into your co-selling initiatives can significantly enhance the effectiveness and scope of your partnership.  

How you approach this step will vary based on your industry and the scope of your relationship, but get started with these co-selling ideas:  

• Offer joint educational webinars and workshops: Utilize expertise from both companies to host educational sessions that address common customer or industry challenges, showcasing how your integrated solutions solve these issues. 
• Co-develop products or features: Based on customer feedback, work together with your partner's product development and engineering teams to create new products or features that integrate both parties' technologies or services.
• Cross-train customer success teams: Organize training sessions where customer success teams from both companies can learn about each other’s products and services. This enables them to offer enhanced support and upselling opportunities to existing customers when the time is right.  
• Unify customer support: When appropriate, create a joint support protocol where customer queries related to either product can be efficiently handled by a unified team skilled in both offerings.
• Collaborate on custom integrations: Have your engineering teams collaborate on developing custom integrations for shared customers, enhancing the product’s functionality and user experience.
• Seamless and integrated data insights: Building on this, integrate data from both companies to provide customers with deeper insights or predictive analytics that neither could offer alone.
• Host VIP customer events: Organize exclusive events for top customers that include workshops, product previews, and networking opportunities with leaders from both companies.
• Set up company-wide referral incentives: Go beyond sales and implement a referral program that rewards team members across your organization for successfully referring cross-company products to existing customers. 
   
  These co-selling ideas engage many departments, creating a robust strategy that maximizes the strengths of both organizations. By thinking of co-selling at a higher level, you ensure that all aspects of the customer journey from sales to support are enhanced, leading to increased customer satisfaction and experience. 
   
  6. Measure, optimize, and scale  

With your co-selling processes in motion, the final step is to continuously measure the outcomes against your initial KPIs with leadership. Track and report on sales growth, customer engagement, market penetration, employee/customer feedback, and other important partnership metrics.  

Use a data-driven approach to fine-tune your strategies and processes. Regularly review the performance of your co-selling activities and adjust as necessary to improve results. Additionally, consider scaling the partnership by exploring new markets or additional product lines as the relationship matures. Establish feedback loops not just internally but also with your partner, ensuring that both sides can learn and evolve from your collaboration. 
 
It's time to grow faster, together

As Impartner CRO Curtis Brinkerhoff puts it, "In the modern business environment, the difference between market leaders and followers will be defined by their ability to forge robust partnerships. The era of competing solely on individual merit is giving way to a new paradigm where success is a collaborative endeavor."  

This new era invites us to rethink competition and collaboration, positioning co-selling not just as a strategy but as a critical lever for growth. By embracing co-selling and building stronger business relationships, companies can access a wealth of opportunities, expand their market influence, and drive substantial revenue growth.