Joint Solution Selling Canvas

Solution selling with a channel partner is not the same exercise as solution selling direct, although it is routinely treated as if it were. Direct, you are assembling a solution from your own products and services. Through a partner, the solution is built from two companies' capabilities, and the customer is buying the combination. If the pitch does not make that combination explicit, the partner is reduced to a reseller of your product and the joint value disappears.

The Joint Solution Selling Canvas is the tool used on the Certificate in Channel Sales for working that out with a partner rather than at them. It is free to download below.

What the canvas is for

It forces four questions that joint propositions usually skip. What does the customer actually get that neither company could deliver alone. Which part of that comes from the vendor and which from the partner. Who is credible talking about which part in front of the customer. And how the money and the risk split when it is sold.

Those questions sound obvious written down. They are routinely unanswered in practice, which is why joint pitches so often sound like a vendor presentation with a partner logo on the cover. A partner who cannot articulate their own contribution will default to discussing price, because price is the one part of the conversation they control.

Where it sits in the course

Both the Certificate in Channel Sales and the Certificate in Channel Management include modules on joint business planning with partners, which is where this canvas is used alongside the channel partner business plan template. The canvas handles the proposition; the business plan handles the commitments and the targets that follow from it.

Each certificate runs over ten modules against a published syllabus, online and self-paced, about 20 hours of study, ending in an exam with a 70% pass mark. The syllabus is reviewed and approved by a vendor-independent Industry Advisory Council of 27 senior channel leaders at companies including Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and SAP.

Related

Channel sales training covers why selling through partners needs its own discipline. Channel sales enablement covers what partner sales people need in order to sell without you. Successful channel partner programs sets out the ten factors behind a program that works, and channel training and certification compared shows how the certificates sit against the other options.