Empowering your partners with the right content and enablement is key to ensuring successful channel development.
Before starting a partner program you need to define the different partnership value types.
Partners have the ability to generate diverse forms of value, such as:
- Technical partners, enhance your solution by incorporating novel features and functions, as seen in the Apple App Store where tech partners add/ enhance capabilities to Apple's hardware.
- Reseller channel partners, offer a physical presence and local support and are especially beneficial for companies looking to establish themselves in a new country and minimize risk. The local reseller assists in introducing the solution to the market.
- System integrators and consultants, create complete solutions that incorporate your solution as a component. For instance, a company that helps another company implement a uniquely modified finance system, CRM, or ERP.
Once you have defined the types of partnerships you want in your partner program and analyzed the personas you need to serve on each partnership type, it is time to make some magic.
Begin by setting objectives for your partner enablement program.
Determine what you hope to achieve and assess how your partners' goals align with your own business objectives.
- Selling more is always part of the equation, but think about other goals, sales velocity for example. With the right enablement, materials partners should be able to close deals faster and with more confidence.
- I always recommend setting sales, marketing, operations, and customer success goals for the partner programs. For example, selling more is not really a valid goal. Do we want to sell more to the same client or to different clients? How much do we want the sales cycle to last? Do we want to shorter it? The marketing spends on partners, do we want to optimize it? If so when and where should we put the money? Doing co-branded events? By answering these questions crafting your partner program will be much easier.
Identify the specific audience that will benefit most from the program.
We need to make sure we are targeting the relevant audiences to consume our materials. Taking into account their expertise, experience, and ability to execute sales and marketing campaigns.
- On the point above we spoke about personas, depending on the type of partnership. For example, if you sell a physical product and you are thinking about a reseller program your target audience is the people selling in the physical shops. You want to provide them with content they can easily read and share with customers. On the other hand, if you are thinking about a system integrator program the type of personas will be much more technical, which means they will also require different materials to train themselves, but also train their customers for example.
- Develop a comprehensive program that includes online courses, training videos, and workshops covering a range of relevant topics.
- Create ready-to-use documents that are easy to co-brand.
Utilize technology to deliver and track program content.
Ensuring the partners are taking the training and making the most of it is time-consuming.
- With tools like LMS to track learning development is easier to measure such as through a learning management system (LMS) that allows partners to learn at their own pace.
- Provide ongoing support to partners, offering access to marketing tools, knowledge bases, and community forums where ideas and best practices can be shared.
Regularly measure the program's effectiveness, monitoring partner performance and identifying areas for improvement.
Measuring the effectiveness of the partner program goes by first choosing the right metrics:
By monitoring these performance metrics, you can effectively audit your sales funnel, serve end-client needs, improve enablement engagement, allocate partner program spending, incentivize partners, and develop new strategies based on quantifiable results.
- Pipeline activity metrics: Track metrics like active pipeline per partner, lead generation, opportunities from each partner, pipeline value, and support requests on a monthly or quarterly basis.
- Asset utilization: To ensure partners are effectively using the materials and programs you provide. Metrics to consider include channel portal logins, completed engagement training and certifications, sales and marketing collateral usage, and communication response rates.
- Track active, pending, and inactive partners: To understand partner behavior and identify issues that stall contracts, motivate inactive partners, and reward active partners. Relevant metrics to monitor include conversion rates, partner program abandonment rates, and content engagement.
- Analyze sales metrics to improve performance and enable accurate forecasting. Metrics to consider include average deal size, incentive participation, partner profitability, retention, and time-to-close on deals.
- Customer success metrics: Understand the quality of engagement between partners and end clients by monitoring end-client success and experience metrics, including client churn rate, customer service satisfaction score, and portfolio adoption.
In summary, creating an advantageous partner program requires investment in time, effort, and strategic planning, which can be distilled into a few key steps. Gain knowledge on utilizing a reseller partner network to promote and market your product proficiently.
