The discipline that embodies the principles and tactics of managing channel partners is called partner relationship management (PRM) or channel relationship management.
At the foundation of channel management, you’ll find partners. Partners fuel channel marketing, sales, and service efforts–their success is directly correlated to the overall channel’s success. While finding ways to manage them efficiently can be challenging, it’s a crucial component that can enable your organization to recruit and retain more partners, as well as, increase revenue at a much lower cost of sales and services than a direct sales and service model.
The Partner Journey
The word journey means it has a roadmap–with a beginning and an end. When it comes to partner relationship management the roadmap is all about attaining higher sales velocity and better customer satisfaction at a lower cost of sales and services. The beginning of this journey starts with partner recruitment and it ends with a high performing channel.
The truth is it really never ends, because channel is a living and breathing entity. It’s always changing. So, yes you start with a roadmap and you execute, but there are constant changes, detours, and optimization that you have to do with the new focus.
A successful and growing organization is always introducing new products, acquiring new partners, realigning their groups and incentives, etc., to achieve higher level of performances. So, while you don’t want to make changes every ninety days, you certainly don’t want to stick with a stale channel program year after year either.
That’s why the notion of a partner journey revolves around a framework, but it’s highly dynamic–not like a Disney roller coaster ride, but more like a seasoned traveler that ventures through dozens of countries with a pre-determine budget to attain certain specific goals. In this case those goals are to make more revenue at a lower cost with a higher customer satisfaction rate and very little business risks or (legal) exposures.
With this said, there are few things that are constant. For a channel focused organization, partners are always going to be a critical component to any business strategy, whether it’s a vendor just starting out or an organization that has been established for years. After all, the productivity of the partners determines the success of the channel. This is where a well-tuned partner relationship management (PRM) software or system can truly help an organization to realize its channel strategy and business goals.
With this in mind, let’s go through an overall partner journey with a vendor organization–starting with partner recruitment, training, enablement, sales and ongoing relationship management.
Partner Recruitment
This is the first step in a partner journey–joining a vendor organization or partner recruitment. You can’t expect to scale without adding new channel partners to your organization. There must be an ongoing and proactive effort to build relationships with potential channel partner organizations that can sell and support a vendor’s solution. This includes both outreach and onboarding processes. A well-designed partner relationship management (PRM) platform should allow you to do this well.
Rather than targeting any available partner, outreach efforts should be built around a strategy–one that seeks out channel partners who are likely to perform. But recruiting is only half the battle. Once you’ve signed on the dotted line it’s time to give them all the resources and knowledge they need to begin actively selling as soon as possible.
Partner Training
The goal here is to ensure partners’ functional teams are properly trained on how to market, sell, deploy and support a specific solution. This means more than just a two-day conference in a hotel.
To properly give new partners the tools they need to sell you need to take a more holistic and ongoing approach.