To Partner or Not to Partner? A Not Too Uncommon Question for Startups
Of course, there are various kinds of partnerships for startup teams to consider in order to enlarge their team without hiring and paying for additional staff resources. Common scenarios are service relationships where one partner acts as a lead sales team and requires more service partners to present a full service offering for a client. Other partnerships may be of a technical nature in which a product is developed, but portions of the code or perhaps the iOS version of the service is outsourced to another provider. One of the most common ones is for the engineering team to have developed a viable product, but have no sales team to sell the product. This is commonly called a sales channel partnership. |
| Photo by BusinessNEXT Fable's CEO Paul Shih discussing his Smartboss product partnership with one of the 3 largest HR companies in Taiwan - 1111.com.tw at a recent BusinessNEXT event showcasing Startup Teams in Taiwan |
Beware! Sales channel partnerships are not as easy as they seem! In many cases, the overly eager startup team struggling for a way to sell its new tech product or service, seeks a much larger entity with a large sales team. The idea is that this new sales team starved for new products to sell will energetically learn and push the new product, and everyone generates a lot of revenue, with happy customers in tow. This dream isn't impossible, but never easy to achieve. It isn't unusual for startups to spend lots of time negotiating and working for free with a larger company in the hopes of leveraging the larger company's sales channel, but in the end, spend a lot of time, resources and gain little or nothing in return. To avoid such a secnario, the startup company has take the lead on the partnership - come up with how the larger company's sales team would sell the product, how their clients would benefit, and in the end how the larger company's sales team will be incented to sell the startup's product.
Not so simple or easy, as our Fable team will tell you. They worked for months to sign an agreement to work with one of the largest human resources and recruiting companies in Taiwan - www.1111.com.tw. In this relationship, CEO Paul Shih works hard to keep his product, SmartBoss, top of mind with 1111 sales people, who have many clients and even more of their own products to provide to their customers. Much of the sales strategy and ideal sales scenarios has to be worked out on the Fable side and then presented to their larger partner in order to make it simple for 1111 sales people to understand and be incentized to sell Smartboss. Fortunately, for Paul and team, 1111 has stepped up and begun to work closely with Fable to service 1111 clients. They've even generated some joint marketing e-DMs and an integrated home page (see below).
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| 1111's new service, powered by Smartboss |
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