PartnerTap Offers New Product to Scale Up Co-Sell Strategies

PartnerTap, the B2B SaaS company that specializes in partner data automation and offers an enterprise co-selling platform, has unveiled its new product, a co-sell automation tool. It gives channel managers a way to orchestrate all of the back-and-forth steps to connect sales reps and partners on their mapped accounts.  

This new tool promises to accelerate sales by automatically connecting sales reps with the best partner on each account, said Judy Loehr, PartnerTap’s chief product officer.

PartnerTap’s Judy Loehr

“Everyone agrees that co-selling can unlock amazing growth, but it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s not easy to scale up a co-sell motion across thousands of partners and huge enterprise sales teams,” Loehr said.

Most companies are only co-selling on their top 1,000 accounts. In other circumstances, they’re co-selling in a one-off, manual way. PartnerTap addresses both of these constraints by giving companies an ecosystem platform that automates account mapping and new co-sell workflows that automate all the emails, opt-ins and introductions between partners and sales reps. 

Automation is just one tool that PartnerTap uses to meet its primary goal, which is to help companies with large partner ecosystems identify more pipeline and sell more with their best partners. The company’s technology is a novel vehicle for that, its officials said, when so many businesses still rely on less secure and non-automated options for data sharing, account mapping and co-selling. 

PartnerTap was founded in 2016 by Cassandra Gholston, who previously worked in enterprise sales roles at ADP and SAP Concur.

The origin story for the company goes something like this: Gholston was working in software sales for a firm moving from on-premises to the cloud and that company began co-selling with thousands of partners. Gholston recalls having to figure out answers to a multitude of questions: Who within those partner companies held a similar role as she did? Who at these companies held her accounts? Who was already working in them and who had influence over her accounts?

Partner Tap’s Cassandra Gholston

“It was the spreadsheet game left and right,” Gholston said. “And one day I was like, ‘You know what? This is crazy.’”

She added: “I’ve been doing this co-sell dance all of my career. I knew we all needed an application that just instantly mapped our accounts with partners and made it much easier to co-sell.”

And that’s how PartnerTap was born. Or at least in concept.

Fast-forward from 2016. Some of the largest companies globally – HPE, for example – reach out to Gholston and her team for guidance on scaling up co-selling worldwide. PartnerTap’s success may be changing the business landscape at a time when business relationships were already changing — a symbiosis of sorts.  

“Today there are multiple partners involved in each deal — consultants, systems integrators, resellers, ISVs and other vendors. So the go-to-market imperative now is to bring all these influencers and sellers together and make it easy for them to co-sell to win the business,” Gholston said.

Hyper-Specialized Alignment 

So how, more specifically, does PartnerTap work? 

Gholston said PartnerTap’s platform helps address questions such as: Which partner should an organization sign with? Do partners have real alignment? If an individual wants to co-sell, where are the parties’ alignment in …

… industry and segment size?

“PartnerTap is doing a blind match for organizations so they now know their real market opportunity before they even sign a partnership agreement,” Gholston added.  

PartnerTap’s Jasmina Muller

As Channel Futures reported earlier this year, the PartnerTap platform “builds a ‘powerful’ data lake of mapped partner data that empowers teams to take a data-driven approach to everything,” according to Jasmina Muller, the company’s chief ecosystem officer. “This includes overall channel strategy and partner account planning, MDF investments, partner marketing campaigns and multi-partner sales opportunities.”

Muller added that channel and partner teams need a centralized view of the total sales activity happening within their ecosystems. Building up a data lake of all the company’s partners, and where they are engaged in each account, can give teams the detailed information they need to operationalize everything from hyper-targeted account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns and account-based sales plays, to multipartner sales motions and partner-to-partner (P2P) strategies.

Securing a Sea of Data

The foundation of PartnerTap’s co-selling solution is automated account mapping, with real-time CRM-to-CRM mapping available and multipartner ecosystem reports. If partners want to go further, they can turn on real-time pipeline sharing and the new co-sell automation products. Essentially, it’s an ecosystem wide data sharing and mapping platform that gives enterprises full control over what each partner can see. 

The amount of data that PartnerTap must manage can seem like an overflowing data lake. So, what’s underneath the covers of this technology when it comes to security?  

“We’ve built very advanced enterprise data sharing and data access controls,” Loehr said. “This is the only way companies can feel comfortable sharing sensitive data with their trusted partners.”

PartnerTap gives every company a “digital-clean” room to securely share and map data with their partners. The enterprise controls in PartnerTap let each company decide which fields, which records and under what circumstances these records should be shared. 

PartnerTap prides itself on its security protocols, which garners the trust of organizations that take security seriously, company officials said. This includes payroll institution ADP, a company that has been using the PartnerTap platform to actively co-sell with their top partners for five years.

“Large companies come to us when they’re ready to operationalize their partner-first sales motions because we have the data sharing and access controls they need to keep their data secure and scale up co-selling with multiple partners,” Loehr said.