2019 is shaping up to be a very exciting year at Sandler, especially because of four important new strategic alliances we’ve formed. In this post, I want to look briefly at all four of the organizations with whom we’ve formed strategic partnerships with (Ziglar, Inc., Top Sales World, Grovo, and Evernote), and why each partnership is important.
Let’s begin with Ziglar, Inc., which has been a leader in personal development and motivational training for over four decades. There is no one who has touched and helped more people than Zig Ziglar, and the Ziglar brand has a huge following, just like the Sandler brand does. The two brands naturally complement each other, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, we are completely aligned philosophically with the Ziglar organization. For another, what we find when we look at the user base is that people are gravitating toward Ziglar for different types of content than the types of content they come to Sandler for. Sandler tends to be seen in the marketplace as more tactical – what to do and how to do it – whereas Ziglar is seen as addressing how to think about yourself and your world; how to look at things. That’s a big difference. Can they both work separately? Of course. But when you put them together, there is a special kind of synergy.
Top Sales World (TSW), one of the truly dominant online resources for sales professionals, has established a remarkable position of leadership by offering situation-specific tools and insights that are of immediate interest to frontline sales professionals and their managers. TSW touches the same base of professionals that we serve, and it is rightfully regarded as a thought leader within that space. This is a very important relationship for us, because over a period of years, TSW has effectively segregated its market into distinct interest groups, attracting large groups of sales leaders who have basically held up their hand and said, "Hey, this is an interesting topic for me, please keep me informed about this issue over time." That segmentation is a major advantage in terms of getting our message out digitally, which is a priority for Sandler.
Our strategic alliance with Grovo, the global leader in microlearning, allows us to offer our clients a wealth of additional content in a wide array of business topics, such as project management and compliance. It made sense to partner with a company that had already spent years of time and a lot of resources to create materials that work at a best-in-class level. Grovo really owns the microlearning space. Grovo is the main player in its space, with a highly successful model as well as a huge archive of content that we know can help our client base. Now we can offer content in a completely different way, and we can even initiate new business relationships based on the Grovo microlearning content, and then expand into the sales organization and the management ranks.
Evernote has 250 million users, a huge number of whom happen to be in our target market of salespeople and sales leaders. These people are online, they are engaged with today’s most up-to-date work and communication platforms, they are tech-savvy, and they are curious. If they can find resources that will enable them to become better at what they are doing right now, or something that will give them the potential to develop additional capacities that will support their career path at some point down the line, they often want to find out more about who’s offering those resources. So working with Evernote was a natural match for us.
We look forward to building a great year for sales professionals in 2019 with all four of these superb partners!
David is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestsellers, The Sandler Rules: 49 Timeless Selling Principles and How to Apply Them and Sandler Success Principles: 11 Insights that will change the way you think and sell. He regularly authors articles for business publications and continues to be involved in the ongoing creation and development of new Sandler training products and programs.
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