Who the partner is, how long you've worked together, and what they've actually done. I'll tell you whether it's real and what I'd ask them for.
Talk to the real Mark for twenty minutes. Free, and if I don't think you need my help I'll say so.
Talk to the real MarkEverybody gets along. There have been plenty of meetings, maybe a joint slide deck. The question is whether anyone can point to the account where the two companies are actually trying to win something together. I test every partner against these five.
If they've never handed you a deal you didn't already have, you're working for them. One sourced deal is worth more than a year of joint webinars. Test it: Ask them for one opportunity this month. Their answer is the diagnosis.
Not a target list. A customer, a requirement, and two sellers who know each other's names. Test it: Pick three accounts, get both sellers on one call, and agree who does what by when.
Partnerships mostly run on comp plans. If nobody at the partner gets paid when you win, every deal is a favor, and people run out of favors. Test it: Find out whose comp plan includes you. If it's nobody, that's the problem.
A plan is three accounts, two dates and an owner for each. If it takes a deck to explain, it isn't a plan. Test it: Replace the deck with one page.
A real partner notices when you go quiet. Most won't. Test it: Stop calling for two weeks and see what happens.
Selling federal? fedhoo ranks which primes actually pass work to subs and which resellers hold the right vehicles.
This used to be a five-question check. Old links land here.
Useful things for the weeks when the number, the team, or both are giving you trouble. It starts with where your team's number came from, how to fight the plan, and how to hand it down, then the forecast call, pipeline, a struggling rep and review season, with a worksheet for each.
I spent six years leading federal partner sales teams at Amazon, after plenty of years carrying a number myself. QuotaBird is mostly stuff I wish we'd had back then. Most of it's free. If the problem's messier than a little tool can handle, we can talk it through.
