Reseller: give them your engineers, not a catalog

A small minor league club on the East Coast, one of the first to bet on new technology instead of waiting to see who else tried it, wanted its fans to have something they could not get anywhere else in the ballpark.

Satellite Engineering Group, an integrator that has since become part of Wesco, resold our encoder and CDN-in-a-box gear under a channel agreement, and they brought the deal to us because their customer had already sold something nobody had built yet. If you were a paying customer of the cable partner, you could pull out your phone anywhere in the stadium and never miss a pitch. Stuck in the bathroom line, watch the game. Waiting on food, pull up live stats on the guy at bat. Walk the whole concourse and stay in the game the entire time.

We never handed SEG a catalog and called it a partnership. They got access to our technical sales team, who could sit with the customer and qualify what was actually needed. When that meant real engineering, changing what the device could do, we brought the engineering team in to make it fit. My job was making sure that access was real. Technical sales and engineering both actually in the room, not SEG out there alone selling a spec sheet.

It worked. The event came off clean, and one minor league baseball deployment turned into hockey arenas, college stadiums, other sports entirely. Same problem every time. A fan stuck in a concourse, a bathroom line, a concession line, not wanting to miss what was happening on the field or the ice.

One of the doors that opened along the way: the same feed was worth more to a completely different audience. The major league owner. Not for the game in front of him. For the players he had real money in, the ones about to get the call up. Same live stream, same stats layer, a completely different reason to watch.

SEG had the channel relationship and the install. We had the technical sales and engineering that made their sale real. The cable company got a differentiated product. The club got a tool nobody had built for it before. The big league owner got eyes on his own investment. Four sides, four different reasons to say yes.

I ran partnerships and tech sales at a much larger company the same way later. A catalog and marketing funds gets a partner reselling your stuff for margin. Give them your technical sales and your engineering too, and the partner is solution-selling the customer's actual problem instead of moving a widget.

One test for a reseller. Is your product in their rep's quota, or just in their price list? Price list means they will quote you when asked. Quota means they will bring you a deal you did not know about, which is the only reason you gave up the margin.

Thursday: technology integrations, the partnership everybody announces and nobody staffs.

Which of your resellers brought you a deal last quarter that you did not already know about?

Part 5 of 15 in the Which Partnership series.