Account Mapping and the New Partner Success Process

This is a guest post by Lisa Thoman Lawson from LTL Partner Consulting. Lisa has over 15 years in SaaS technology and provides partnerships and channel consulting services and workshops to high growth, venture backed SaaS businesses. Email her at lisa@ltlpartnerconsulting.com.

 When building new partnerships, it’s critical to prioritize resources, focus on the most valuable and mutually beneficial partnerships, and generate early wins to accelerate the partnership’s success. One way to do this is to complete an account mapping exercise (Get a step-by-step on how to do an account mapping exercise here).

What is the purpose of account mapping?

1. Understand the overall partnership opportunity
2. Map out mutual customers and prospects
3. Prioritize target accounts and create a plan for bringing your solution to prospects and customers
4. Prioritize your partnerships based on overall opportunity and partner alignment

Today, the account mapping process is tedious and involves countless spreadsheets that rely on manual data pulls and a cumbersome cross referencing process. Those spreadsheets often get lost in the shuffle and it’s difficult to translate them into real urgency to drive action from within both partner’s sales teams. Spreadsheets must also be updated regularly, which means downloading data from your CRM and then re-uploading partner data into your CRM to make it usable.

In order to make the partner prioritization process more scientific and your partnerships more successful there are now tools that can automate this process. By investing in an account mapping automation tool you can accelerate mutual deal cycles and give teams back valuable time to focus on hitting core KPIs.

Tools like Crossbeam enable companies to automate the account mapping process without sharing raw data. This allows teams to easily understand where there is the highest opportunity within mutual customer and prospect accounts. They can also more easily connect counterparts and stakeholders to immediately drive the sales process forward, all while eliminating tedious, manual administrative work and hundreds of spreadsheets.

Making the investment to automate your account mapping process empowers your team to understand the big picture potential of current and potential partnerships and then allocate resources accordingly. This is critical to setting channels up for long term success and accelerating your partner ecosystem.

If you want to learn more about how to effectively execute account mapping exercises with partners or other critical partner management activities, check out these channel and partnerships workshops (and, sign up now with code LTL-VIP10 for a 10% discount).