If you are a professional services firm that provides implementation and consulting services around Enterprise Software, chances are you meet regularly with the software vendor’s partner management team. These regular touchpoints provide an opportunity to solidify your working relationship, review successes and challenges and ultimately result in more business for your organization.

The preparation you and your team will go through is essential to ensuring you put your best foot forward to showcase your work together, highlight your firm’s unique attributes and create a positive and memorable value story that will carry through to the vendor’s sales organization.

First, let’s start with what to do:

Review your performance metrics. Document your performance metrics: sales pipeline, revenue, customer engagements, client satisfaction, and project delivery rates–both quarterly, annually and year-to-year. The more data-driven here you can be, the better. (Raven Intelligence can be a huge help with this information.)

Deals. What prospective customers are you working on together? What is the value story of your partnership that creates a competitive wedge? What unique strengths does your firm have (industry, geographic, domain expertise) that sets you apart from the other options? What ideas do you have to create additional revenue and opportunities together?

People. In a professional services business–your people are your product. Review any team changes, certifications, business initiatives or additions to your services portfolio.

Challenges / Areas of Improvement. Bring up constructively any customer-surfaced product or process issues, sales engagement challenges or knowledge transfer gaps. Offering potential solutions to issues is a big plus here.

Win Stories / Sales Assets and Competitive Intel. Documented customer wins, sales presentation materials, customer quotes / reviews / references and competitive intelligence will directly help your software vendor’s sales team sell more effectively and involve you in future deals. (Raven Intelligence can offer much help here as well.)

Here’s what NOT to do.

Don’t be unprepared. Anecdotal or dated information, vague details or lack of documentation will make it difficult for you to have a productive conversation with your vendor partner.

Don’t be a taker. Partnerships are a 2-way street. Be clear about what you’re doing to help in the area of business development, customer success and growth.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and be transparent with challenges you’re having. At the same time, have potential solutions or ideas as well so the feedback can be actionable.