Training the Corporates
Written by my co-founder Mark Pope, this is an insight into how we’ve secured and trained strong corporate channel partners, leveraging the huge impact a large corporate can have.
Selling to hotels and aggressively scaling a young tech startup might sound like a paradox due to the effort it takes to speak and sell to individual hotels at property level. However, at the beginning of this year, we actually managed to turn this expectation to something that sounds a lot more reasonable now.
At Portier, we ultimately sell hotel technology to some of the world’s best known hotel brands but, as any startup story begins, our starting point was the client in its most conventional form, namely a hotel. When we first began our journey, we sold our solution to a single property and already felt as though the pace of scaling might be dependant on the number of qualified sales staff we might add to our team.
Although the financial impact of signing with a single hotel is significant, getting to hundreds of hotels by selling one-by-one would have been a challenge for any corporation…so we adjusted and realised that, in our sector, we could leverage the great resources and the sales channels that telcos had in place already.
A couple of agreements later, and with Thailand being our initial launch market, we started closely working with the country’s second largest telco which has the biggest presence across Thailand’s hospitality sector today. In other words, they already sell a set of products to hoteliers and benefit from relationships that have been in place for years.
Wary of and despite the reputation large corporates enjoy or don’t enjoy (quote: “Don’t ever work with corporates! They are lazy and antiquated!”), we kicked off our partnership in Thailand earlier this year. As a result, I began spending time with the telco’s national and regional sales teams, gaining access to group of more than 70 highly motivated business development staff members. Imagine how long it would have taken us to build a team that large!
Despite the potential pitfalls, we started the process and agreed to put effort into this partnership, so we can benefit from the vast array of resources and scale at speed. What this means is fairly simple: signing an agreement with a large corporate isn’t where it stops, it’s actually where the hard work begins!
As a company, we were in agreement that the corporate would need appropriate handholding. At Portier, we have a team of very experienced former senior executives who did nothing but deal with large corporates in their past, so it was only natural for us to pay close attention to the way in which the relationship might evolve and progress.
In more practical terms, we have in place a weekly catch-up call, face-to-face catch-ups twice a month, we ask for weekly sales updates and, rather on the soft side, we make sure that we treat the teams to food and drinks from time to time. In addition to this, we were adamant that from our side, we would like to financially incentivise sales team members via a suitable commission scheme.
The result of all of the above has not come as a surprise to us. In fact, with the telco’s support, we were able to add 30–40 genuine prospects to our pipeline in less than a month! With the relationship now in full flow, the target is to place our solution in up to 200 Thai hotels in 18–24 months.
Despite the positives, we have also picked up some intriguing learnings. Going forward, we will be placing a senior sales person with the telco partner, so that communication and corporation become a daily routine and a lot more natural. We will also continue to be part of sales calls (this includes our co-founders and senior employees), so we maintain and improve our understanding of hotels’ challenges.
Beyond Thailand, we are now signing more corporate partnerships, in order to enter markets in a matter of days, instead of having to spend valuable time on working out the basics of operating in a given country. With particular focus on South East Asia and South America, we are now pressing ahead with more and more large telcos, and will have a significant presence in those regions by the end of 2018.
In summary, working with corporates can be a challenge, but with empathy and a willingness to think outside the box, any partnership can bloom. We plan keep a close eye on our relationships, and hope to continue our push for growth.
