By Symantec Guest Blog

In our last guest post, we introduced this blog series to explore the key takeaways from our recent Partner Engage event about forming successful partnerships. In this installment, we’ll focus on the important role that Symantec Technical Sales and Services (TSS) teams play in achieving customer success, as well as best practices for involving Symantec TSS teams in your business.

Why is Technical Teaming Important?

Symantec’s TSS teams are responsible for the end-to-end technical engagement with customers and partners throughout the sales process: from initial pre-sales discovery activities, into the full sales cycle, to solution deployment and value realization. At Symantec, we believe that we always achieve better customer solutions when our technical teams work directly with our partners, because the right customer solution is more than a paper license for a great product. The real value to the customer includes the right implementation and operational services, additional hardware and software, as well as networking and storage infrastructure that turn the customer’s business requirement into a viable IT solution. Symantec can’t do this alone. But together with our valued partners, our teams can find better solutions to customer problems, delighting the customers, which in turn leads to new opportunities and increased profitability.

Best Practices for Working Together

So, how do we work together? Early engagement is key. Make sure your technical teams know and have regular contact with the Symantec Systems Engineer (SE) assigned to the customer. If you don’t know the SEs in your area, work with your Partner Account Manager or other Symantec contact to get the SE involved. Symantec has overhauled its channel strategy to make sure our partners are engaged early. We’re striving to foster better cooperation between our technical team and our partner teams because we can achieve more together.

Additionally, leverage your Symantec SEs to better understand where our technology fits into your business and go-to-market strategy. Whether you’re creating annual plans or retooling customer strategies, don’t forget to solicit input from your SEs. Symantec’s SEs are the experts on the Symantec product portfolio and may have additional insights on how best to address customer needs.

Symantec Resources

The first thing a partner should do is engage Symantec’s SE Online Specialists team, known as SOS. This is a unique investment that Symantec’s TSS has made to provide rapid technical pre-sales help. Partners can engage SOS via Chat for quick answers about Symantec products. Our engineers can address a wide range of technical questions, sometimes in real time while you are meeting with the customer. For more in-depth technical pre-sales questions, send an email to the SOS inbox—you can expect a reply within a business day. Additionally, SOS specialists may be able to participate on calls and product demonstrations with your technical staff to ensure customers receive and understand important information about Symantec features, capabilities and compatibility.

Symantec also offers many online resources to explain product capabilities, including webinars, an e-library with free education courses and helpful videos on YouTube. Links to Chat, SOS email and other resources can be found on PartnerNet.

Leverage knowledge from Symantec’s technical teams and familiarize yourself with the pre-sales resources available to you. Reach out to your local Symantec TSS and set up time to talk through how our teams can work together, because when we work together, we accomplish so much more.

Andy Spencer is Senior Director SE Online Specialists (SOS); and Tim Balog is Director, North America Channel SEs at Symantec. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of The VAR Guy’s annual platinum sponsorship.