We hear lots of stories of SE teams who are overworked, living on airplanes, and on the edge of burnout. Hiring more SEs is not always practical given how hard it is to justify and fund new headcount and recruit qualified candidates.

Another approach to offload SE resources is to leverage your partner’s SEs. The more self sufficient a partner SE is in selling your solutions, the less your own SE will need to do. Again, this is easier said than done, but here are some approaches to consider.

Give Them Your Training. Make your partner SE as smart as your own SE. Strive to have your company co-fund product and sales training for your partner SEs. It is in both your best interests. The smarter the partner SE, the less the partner will rely on your SE resources to make sales, and the faster they will be able make sales on their own.

Give Them Your Sales Intelligence. Proactively provide partner SEs with your internal field intelligence. Give them all your objection handling, value messaging, competitive knockoffs, product demos, proof-of-concept processes, etc. Regularly update this information — Even better, put it into a shared database accessible to both organizations.

Give Them a Mentoring Program. Mandate (perhaps thru quarterly MBOs) that each of your SEs mentor a set of partner SEs at all times. Have your SE walk the partner SE through all your training, marketing collateral, sales processes, etc. When one partner SE completes the program, your SE nominates another partner SE to take their place and begin the journey.

A goal in this controversial selling model is that direct customer contact is maximized through partner SEs and minimized with your own SEs! Yes, this flies in the face of a direct selling model, but the alternatives are either to hire more SEs, or leverage others. You may be familiar with the investment mantra, “leverage other people’s money” — Here we are leveraging other people’s SEs.

In this model, most of your SEs are a resource to leverage partner SEs, while a handful have direct customer contact. As partners become self-sufficient to drive business for your company, your SE workload is reduced.

To realize this model, change may needed in your working relationship with your partner, business policies, incentive plans, and selling culture. Despite these challenges, each SE Manager can implement a portion of these ideas and begin offloading their team’s heavy workload by leveraging the partner SE army.