When I worked as a Channel Sales Manager, we used the partner/reseller network to sell our products. And here is how we tracked it and I do the same now at SalesGang.
Usually you have some existing partners and you want to add some more. The process to get new ones is long and complicated and has several stages.
The whole process can be tracked in Pipedrive CRM and you have an nice overview of the progress.
🚀 How to do it?
A. Create 1 special pipeline to track only partner status and onboarding process. Each partner will be 1 deal in this pipeline (with zero value).
B. Create stages and set milestones (requirement to move partner to next stage)
- Lead - wish list of partners
- Contacted - you had first call/meeting
- Negotiation - partner wants to talk about working together
- Training & Agreement - partner said Yes, needs to sign agreement and does training
- First deal - partner brings first won deal - continue to work on partnership
- Active - brings won deals regularly
And 3 special stages
- Inactive - partner was active but lost traction - time to reactivate
- Reactivation in progress - you have started reactivation to turn partner to Active
- Lost - partner doesn't want to work with you, contact them in 6 months
Different way ...
You can set the deal to
- Won as the partner is active (instead to move to Active stage mentioned aboe) or
- Lost as the partner doesn't want to work with you (forget Lost stage).
🤝 As always, it is important to track all activities (calls, meetings, emails, ...) in Pipedrive and to have at least one future activity planned (next step with partner).
With the dedicated pipeline you can track the conversion funnel.
You can customize the stages and milestones based on your sales process. This hack can be done in any CRM, not just Pipedrive :-)
Any other tips you invented?
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