I had a recent discussion with a start-up CRO. We were talking about his company and their selling strategies. One of the first questions I asked was, "How do you sell to your customers?" A simple question for sure. I intended to find out all the techniques used to get a customer to buy their products. As part of our focus at PartneReady, we try to find out different methods to drive alternative revenue streams, so it was a natural question. The CRO went into great detail about how his team sells. As I was listening intently, I started thinking, "Well, that's the method, but why?" Then it hit me. I started with the wrong question. As part of my bag of tricks as a partner professional, my first phase in creating a partner strategy is a proprietary method of discovery that I call the "Value Chain of the Customer." In the Value Chain method, the first steps are to ask three questions: 1) To do his/her job, what does the product & service ecosystem l...