Sales strategy—going viral in large organizations
Smartsheet’s growth has been aided by a combination of direct sales and impressive viral references, particularly within large enterprise organizations. Leveraging the strength of their platform, Smartsheet has seen success by making their solution readily available for a trial period and relying on the strength of the product as a collaborative tool to grow users via viral transition.
The collaborative nature of the solution lends itself well to this sort of viral expansion—a single, large vendor using the platform when collaborating with a number of different organizations not only realizes the benefits of Smartsheet’s solution themselves, they also demonstrate and evangelize the solution to those with whom they are collaborating. This happens both across organizations and across departments within larger companies.
“We have experienced a lot of success with our direct sales model as well,” says Mahajan.
Developing a partner channel
In order to sustain the tremendous growth Smartsheet has experienced over their first 10 years, Smartsheet in now expanding beyond their direct sales model by onboarding a number of channel partners to help them sell and position their product in international markets. By developing a channel of elite reseller partners in Europe, Smartsheet looked to double down on this accidental success with a sustainable and scalable strategy.
“About two years ago, we began developing our partner channel. With roughly two-thirds of our business in the US, our intention was to use channel partners to scale into international markets. Additionally, we knew that there was a large segment of business customers with their own trusted partners who would never come into contact with our solution if we did not have our own channel in place. By funneling our solution through those trusted IT advisors, we hoped to expand our reach into untapped markets.” – Rakesh Mahajan, Senior Director of Global Partner Sales, Smartsheet
Since the beginning, Smartsheet had a clear profile for how they wanted to scale their channel business. Their goal was not to quickly onboard a large number of partners but rather, to work closely with a few trusted partners to ensure that the partners themselves were committed to the product and a good fit for Smartsheet’s business.
“Our objective was never to add thousands of channel partners but rather, to select a few channel partners to whom Smartsheet would be complementary to their businesses. We were also selective regarding the size and commitment of the partner—we wanted to work with partners who were not too big and were willing to lean in with us and help build a better business together.” – Rakesh Mahajan, Senior Director of Global Partner Sales, Smartsheet
Smartsheet’s newfound commitment to developing a channel carries echoes of the Microsoft Partner Network and is bolstered by the support they have found from the Microsoft corporate account teams as well as the Office 365 team.
“We were rated as the top Office 365 application in 2015, and were a finalist again in 2016. Our product integrates incredibly well with Office 365. We really believe in the Microsoft story, we believe in the cloud journey. Our two companies are aligned strategically and ideologically and we try to work as closely with Microsoft as we can.” – Rakesh Mahajan, Senior Director of Global Partner Sales, Smartsheet
Seizing a new revenue model
CRM Partners’ attitude and grit have persisted as they continue their shift to implementing Dynamics 365 solutions, with an added caveat: selling cloud solutions require a change in business model, in addition to a shift in how the technology is deployed. CRM Partners has begun developing their own IP and putting it on AppSource. While they have not yet rolled out an official marketing campaign to evangelize this new IP, Dubbink has already seen a glimpse of the tremendous potential this model offers his business.
“We have only been live on AppSource for about six weeks now but already we see the potential. Despite how relatively new the platform is, we are already generating leads and deals from the marketplace. We can’t even imagine what the volume would look like if we started to make some marketing noise around the IP—for now we are working as an organization to prepare for an increase in volume from this source to avoid drowning in our own success.” – Rik Dubbink, Partner & CTO, CRM Partners
Dubbink’s story is relevant to Microsoft partners looking to grow their organization and evolve along with their technology. By aligning their organization to their vision of their own success, CRM Partners has realized this vision—building a successful, 180 person organization from two partners and a blank sheet of paper. Despite this success, CRM Partners is careful not to dwell too much on the past; as always, their eyes are looking to the future.
“For us, success is dreaming with your eyes open. You can achieve any goal if you believe it is realistic and you pursue it with the expectation that it will come true and the determination to make it so.” – Rik Dubbink, Partner & CTO, CRM Partners
Maximizing the value of their Microsoft relationship has been an invaluable tool for Smartsheet to grow their business. By collaborating with Microsoft as a true business partner and working to take advantage of the opportunities Microsoft provides, such as Inspire (formerly WPC), Smartsheet has been able to augment their partner-to-partner strategy and forge impactful partnerships with other organizations within the Microsoft partner community.
The value of Inspire
At WPC 2016, Rakesh Mahajan had the opportunity to attend the CA cocktail hour. A chance meeting with another attendee from the UK proved fruitful, as the attendee turned out to be the new COO of SoftwareOne UK.
From that meeting, the two built a relationship that they have since turned into a valuable partnership. The two companies have been in planning conversations since, with Smartsheet working to onboard hundreds of SoftwareOne’s sellers throughout the world. SoftwareOne is incentivizing their sales teams on the sale of Smartsheet’s product, giving Smartsheet a valuable, strategic channel partner with an international reach who is ideally positioned to help promote Smartsheet’s product in new markets.
For Mahajan, Smartsheet, and SoftwareOne, this partnership is the realization of the promise of Microsoft Inspire.
“We are thrilled with our partnership with SoftwareOne so far. Microsoft’s team has been great at facilitating this partnership beyond that initial meeting, helping with introductions whenever we get stuck along the way. Microsoft’s collaborative spirit and their level of engagement throughout the process has been a great help to our partnership.
“As Microsoft’s P2P story continues to evolve, we hope that our partnership with SoftwareOne can be a guiding light to other partners looking to find success in P2P relationships. There is a lot of elbow grease involved—every month I meet with SoftwareOne in Europe to drive engagement. There is work involved in any successful partnership from both sides, but having Microsoft’s endorsement, their introductions at the right levels, and the understanding by all parties that we are going to be experimenting a little bit, has helped get us to where we are today.” – Rakesh Mahajan, Senior Director of Global Partner Sales, Smartsheet
SoftwareOne was similarly complimentary regarding the value of the event in spurring the two partners’ collaboration.
“The Microsoft partner event is where our eventual partnership with Smartsheet began in earnest. Building a new partnership to generate results doesn’t come quickly, but the Microsoft event accelerated Smartsheet and SoftwareOne working together.” – Giri Fox, Chief Commercial Officer, SoftwareOne