The Need of EBM Platforms to Manage Co-sell Channel Sales
Co-selling with your top partners is the key to supercharging your revenue. However, without any digital tools to manage co-selling, your partner managers will suffer. In reality, your partner managers are running their business on spreadsheets, so partner leaders have zero visibility into what’s happening in their business. As a result, partner leadership is flying blind!
Fig 8: Pillars of Ecosystem Business Management – An EBM platform helps companies manage a full flywheel of ecosystem activities from defining and launching joint solutions, joint account planning, co-marketing, co-investing funds, and finally co-selling with your partners
A shared platform with distinctly defined business processes and data governance enhances efficiency, stimulates real-time and agile collaboration among ecosystem partners, and allows you to scale your partner co-sell pipeline with higher revenue.
How an EBM platform helps you drive your co-sell partnerships

Co-Sell Joint Business Planning
An EBM platform enables you to digitize joint business plans with your ecosystem partners and cascade your plans down to regions or business units across both companies and track execution on a shared and complete book of business.

Co-Build Management
With an EBM platform, you can easily create repeatable packages of joint business solutions, build and launch them into the market and drive higher revenue at a higher speed.

Multi-Company Opportunity Management
An EBM platform enables partners to support each others’ disparate data models. Each partner company typically has different definitions for regions, products, industries, sales stages, organizations, and a myriad of other data types.

Multi-Company Reporting
With an EBM platform, you get a clear picture of your and your partner’s shared data. Access to such data will give you better insights to make better decisions.

Multi-Company Data Privacy
On an EBM platform, ecosystem partners can define their data security and compliance policies and they set data sharing policies at the field level on what is shared and what is private, ensuring no data leakage.

Partner to Partner (P2P) Collaboration
An EBM platform supports the collaboration of multiple partners on the same opportunity. It works as a complement to your PRM or CRM system to manage joint opportunities with your partners.
Drive Effective Co-Sell Collaboration
- No spreadsheets -- one secure platform for all co-sell partners
- Manage incoming and outgoing referrals and co-sell opportunities
- All stakeholders aligned and accountable
Reduce risk of data exposure
Run efficient pipeline reviews
Run Partner Co-Sell as a Data-Driven Business
- All partners work with timely, accurate data
- Track, forecast, and report on co-sell business in real-time
- "QBR-ready" at all times
Manage co-sell effectively
Operate Co-Sell at Ecosystem Scale
- Co-sell processess are consistent and repeatable
- Current team resources able to manage ecosystem growth
- Improved partner experience
High risk of data exposure
High risk of data exposure
High risk of data exposure
Fig 9: How EBM Platforms Manage Co-sell Motions: Ecosystem Business Management Platforms boost revenue by collaboration across companies, quantifying, and scaling co-sell motions.
“You need software like WorkSpan that can orchestrate all the moving parts to align the stars and moons and drive value from your partnerships.”
Jay McBain, Principal Analyst, Channel Partnerships & Ecosystems, Forrester
How EBM Platforms Enable Co-sell Revenue Growth
An effective EBM platform enables you to :
1. Extend your CRM for partner co-selling
2. Get the biggest bang for your technology bucks
3. Manage peer-to-peer (P2P) partner collaboration
1. Extend your CRM for partner co-selling
Your CRM platform will always be a critical mechanism for running your company’s internal sales team and managing opportunities. But without an EBM platform, your CRM and even a PRM portal won’t let your partner teams collaborate, securely share crucial deal information, or efficiently manage a co-sell process with each other.
While your CRM and partner portal helps you track direct and resell opportunities of your product offerings, they are incapable of monitoring opportunities with co-sell partners that have multiple deal sizes, close dates, product and service catalogs, deal teams, and other information that all needs to be connected to a single co-sell opportunity.
An EBM platform extends your CRM data (like joint accounts, plans, and opportunities), connecting with your partners’ CRM or PRM data. This allows each company to keep their autonomous systems in place, including their separate SKUs, deal sizes, closed dates, and owners, but extending the power of your CRM to enable your trusted partners to seamlessly co-sell with your teams and close more business together.
2. Get the biggest bang for your technology bucks
Your top partners are responsible for driving 80 to 90 percent of your indirect revenue. Now ask your partner managers how they are managing business with those top partners? They’re not using a PRM. They’re using spreadsheets. Think about that. Your partner managers are using spreadsheets to manage 80-90% of the revenue your organization is driving. And when was the last time you saw an error in a spreadsheet formula? Not a comforting thought, right?
The reality is that PRM tools were built to support many “long tail” small transaction reseller partners. They were not designed to manage peer relationships with your top partners, share opportunities securely, collaborate on those opportunities, and work together to close business.
With an EBM platform, you grow more robust relationships with those partners that are driving 80-90% of the partner revenue for your organization, allow secure, policy-based sharing of limited CRM data, manage those relationships, and deliver on-the-spot reporting across partners, regions, solutions, industries and more. Now you’re investing your technology bucks to drive and manage the MOST productive segment of your business – co-selling with your top partners.

Fig 10: The Partner 80/20 Rule: 80% of your partner revenue is attributed to co-selling with your top partners. But your most significant investment in partnering technology today is likely on PRM – managing the long tail of small reseller partners and driving a small percentage of your partnering revenue.
3. Manage peer-to-peer (P2P) partner collaboration
PRMs were built for reselling, back in the day where you were selling your product through channel sales partners. PRMs were designed for an individual vendor to host a portal for partners, own all the data and the security rights, and everyone else must log in to upload and access information.
The concept was solely for single-use, non-collaborative, and non-peer partner relationships. But partnering has changed. And that’s especially NOT how you partner with your top producing strategic partners.
An Ecosystem Business Management platform like WorkSpan serves as a unifying network where your company and multiple partners can come together as peers and collaborate securely on joint opportunities to drive co-sell deals together!
Fig 11: How EBM Platforms Transform Your Co-selling – EBM platforms significantly affect pre-pipeline motions, partner value, program effectiveness, and reporting.
Should You Consider Building Your System to Handle Co-Selling?
The answer is clear. The top four industry analysts (IDC, Forrester, Gartner, and Accenture) covering the Partnering Technology Stack have all voiced their opinion to Buy, not Build the solution. Some key advantages of buying an EBM platform instead of building it include lower upfront cost, easy scalability, rapid deployment with less time in implementation, and most importantly – agility with frequent updates, new features, and ongoing maintenance. Read More:
Manage Your Partner Co-Sell: Build vs. BuyEngineer custom objects for co-sell, co-market, co-solution
High implementation costs + per-user pricing
Buy
Ecosystem Business Management SaaS
Embed EBM into Partner Portal
Purpose-built ecosystem apps with pre-configured best practices
Unlimited users, per-partner pricing
Work with IT to roll out new programs
Partner Ops configure & deploy new programs
Fig 12: Buying an EBM Platform is Better than Building: Buying is always a better option than building an EBM platform in terms of capabilities, cost, timing, and agility.