Having business partnerships has always been a wise decision for companies to make. The benefits of having an IoT partnership in particular are unmatched. It’s unwise to assume that you can do everything on your own. The saying “two is better than one” is famous for a reason. Many companies are hesitant to seek out a partnership because they don’t want to go through the long process of searching for the right partner and establishing a relationship. It’s certainly a wise decision to carefully consider who you will do business with, but the process shouldn’t give you a headache, and it shouldn’t take years for your partnership to be worth your time and investment. We’ve put together a guide to help you get from the first conversation to the first deal in about one and a half months. If this sounds fast, then keep reading to find out how we made it possible.
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The Importance of Technology Partnerships
Sometimes companies are hesitant to go through what they believe is a lengthy process to establish a partnership because they don’t truly understand why they should put in the work to develop a partnership with another company. Let’s briefly break down some of the benefits you gain from becoming a partner to a technology company. Being a reseller for an IoT technology company adds an additional revenue stream for your company. With the established brand and solution from our company, starting to sell is easy. You don’t have to spend time, money, and resources to create a solution to meet your customer’s needs. You can partner with someone who has already put in the work. Being a reseller to a partner company helps to streamline the selling process.
The Journey You Take
1. Searching Stage
As mentioned above, the journey you take to get a technology partnership doesn’t have to take long. Before working with a company to develop a relationship, you must do research on the companies available to partner with. This includes research on the company, their values, and their product offerings. This stage is what sets you up to find the best IoT technology partnership. Doing research will help you narrow down your options. Establish the criteria you want your ideal partner to fall into and make a list of who meets those criteria. From there, you’ll want to reach out to the company and set up a time to meet and discuss your plans and get to know them a little better.
2. Initial Stage
This is the beginning of what will prove to be a successful partnership. It starts with the first conversation you have with your future partner. During this stage, you have a meeting to discuss both companies capabilities and expectations. This is a chance to get to know your partner and their product offerings. It’s also a time to make an initial plan on how the two companies can work together and identify what the benefits of working together will look like. Now is the time to ask all the questions you have, as this is the best time to get to know this company you want to work with. It’s better to ask too many questions than not enough. After this conversation, you’ll want to make sure that you have everything you need to decide whether or not you want to move forward with the partnership. If you’re looking to partner with Link Labs, at this stage, we’ll show you a slide deck walking you through our company, our solution, and our partnership program. After this, you’ll receive an NDA to sign to protect sensitive information; we’ll sign an NDA in turn. This first step is the most important. It allows us both to gain the information we need to make decisions moving forward. This stage doesn’t take very long to complete. The meeting can be set up, attended, and the NDA signed within 5 business days.
3. Approval Stage
In this stage, we’ll evaluate whether we believe your company to be a good fit. We have various criteria we’ll evaluate to see if you meet it. We’ll evaluate if our company values and goals align. We’ll assess whether or not we’re trying to solve the same problem and much more. We recommend you take this time to do the same. Use your company’s criteria to make sure your company believes the partnership would be wise to invest in. This stage only takes about 2 business days. We want to get things moving as quickly as possible.
4. Active Stage
Once we’ve determined you meet our alignment criteria and vice versa, we can move into the active stage. In this stage, we’ll finalize our discussions on what the partnership will look like. We’ll work out any last minute details to make sure we are fully aligned with every expectation. At this point, we will also establish an ongoing communication cadence. This is important to do to ensure clear communication. Miscommunication can happen very easily without it and runs the risk of hurting the relationship. At this stage, we’ll also get our marketing teams involved. We will align marketing efforts with your company to ensure consistent messaging surrounding our solution. If you have a small marketing team or an overworked marketing team, our marketing team is willing to help you out by making co-branded marketing collateral for you to use. During this stage, we’ll help you register a deal and walk you through what a potential deal funnel might look like. This is where our training takes place. We’ll help you evaluate and weed out the less promising prospects that you come across. Depending on how frequently we can get together to work out all these details, this stage can take 2 to 4 weeks to complete.
5. Official Stage
This is the most exciting stage of the journey. This is the stage when the reseller agreement has been signed and you officially become our partner! At this point, you’ll be taking your own deals and taking your customers on their own journey to purchasing our solution. This is when your revenue starts to come in and we both reap the benefits of the partnership we created. If everything goes smoothly, the time from our first conversation to your first deal can take as little as a month and a half. Just because we’ve signed the agreement doesn’t mean we go on our merry way. Instead, it’s important for us to keep up with communication during the duration of our partnership. We want to make sure that we are continually on the same page and are meeting each other’s expectations. We should also make sure that we bring any problems or concerns to the attention of one another. Without this communication, we run the risk of hurting the relationship. Remember, this is a partnership. You’re not doing everything on your own, if you ever need help, you can always reach out and you’ll get it. We’ll also want to have quarterly reports we evaluate to make sure the partnership is truly beneficial to both parties. This way, if there is an issue, we can discuss it, find the reason for it, and make adjustments to fix it.
Why You Should Partner With Link Labs
When you’re choosing who to partner with, you want to choose a company that will truly bring you benefits. For starters, you want to make sure that you’ll receive a return on your investment. If you partner with us, we’ll work together to make sure that all the time and resources that you put into selling our solution will reap you benefits. When you partner with Link Labs, we’re not just telling you about our asset tracking solution and wishing you luck selling it, we want to help you be fully and completely prepared to sell it. To this end, we provide you with extensive training to ensure you are properly prepared to sell our solution and sell it well. Along with this, as mentioned above, our marketing team will work with you to provide co-branded materials for you to use to market our solution to your customers. We’ll provide you with all the support you need. If your customer has questions about our solution or needs any kind of help, we have a team of expert engineers available. The point is, you aren’t stuck doing everything yourself. We’re your partner; we want you to be successful.
Do You Want to Partner With Link Labs?
If you came into this blog with misconceptions about what the journey to developing an IoT partnership would look like, we hope this article cleared up your confusion. Our solution provides customers with real-time location information of their assets. With its simple integration capabilities, this solution is a top of the line IoT technology solution. If you’re looking to be a reseller of our solution, don’t worry, the journey to becoming our partner won’t take long. If you reach out today to set up a meeting, you can start taking deals in less than two months. In no time, you’ll start seeing the financial benefits of being our partner. We want you to find success. If you want to find success through a technology partnership, book a demo with our partner team to get this journey started!
