How To Structure Your Partner Program For Long-Term Success

Here at FormAssembly, we’re beyond proud of our outstanding group of partners. They’re located all over the world and have specializations in a wide range of areas including Education, Nonprofits, and Salesforce. Together, they make up a dedicated group of individuals who are knowledgeable about our software and committed to providing expert advice for their clients.

For this article, we spoke with Peter Bernardi, our Channel Solutions Engineer and self-proclaimed “Chief Wrangler” for our Partner Program, to collect some key pieces of advice for our readers out there looking to enhance their partner relations. Whether you’re part of a company that has a formal partner program or not, these tips are essential to building a rapport that is sustainable, profitable, and mutually beneficial.

Be a trusted advisor

“Offering technical help is paramount — know your product inside and out. Solving pain points and presenting use cases is key.”

If you’re not an expert on your product, you can’t expect your partners to be either. Being well-versed in your product’s features and various packages is important, but that should be a given. You should be able to take a step further and cite use cases that your partner can relate to. Know how to make immediate connections between the problems your partner is facing and issues your product has been able to help past clients resolve.

By doing all these things, you’re proving yourself as much more than just a sales representative — you’re demonstrating your abilities as an advisor. Your clients should feel confident that you’ll be able to resolve their pain points, or at least point them in the direction of someone who can. Finally, by doing all this, you’re achieving the underlying goal of gaining the support of your partners’ clients. When given sufficient tools and advice, your partners become your biggest activists since they’re able to effectively pass on their knowledge to the clients they bring in.

Know when to say no

“There are limits to every relationship, especially in business. I work to always say ‘yes’ but saying ‘no’ sets clear boundaries for your time and efforts and gains respect.”

While supporting your partners is important, you also want to make sure they’re not abusing your relationship. You sometimes have to remind yourself not to lose focus and do work that is outside the scope of your job. If Peter were to take the time to build out forms for every partner that asked him to, that would be less time he’d be able to dedicate to his other clients.

This just as important for the partner as well, because if they’re actively learning how to use our software, they’re then able to better serve their own clients. You can provide them with all the resources to learn or connect them with our team members who specialize in customer support, but constantly saying “yes” to every request is not beneficial for either side.

Contextualize everything

“Not all partners are very technical, if you can speak the business language first and back it up with tech speak, you’re golden. Put a frame of reference around their problem: why is this important?”

It’s easy to forget that your partners may not have the level of technical knowledge that you do. When in doubt, skip the lingo and stick to the language they’re used to. Remember that above all else, their understanding should be your #1 priority, meaning that you often need to act as a translator for your partners. Most partners are used to traditional forms that simply recorded unique records without the ability to track more specific metrics.

For instance, to articulate the complexity of our forms, Peter takes a high-level approach to his explanations. He focuses on conveying what these new insights mean for the company, rather than going into deep detail about our Salesforce integration. Our partners know this exists, but can focus more on what our software means for their day-to-day operations.

Offer a long-term relationship

“Nobody wants to work with a flake — ensure they know that your team is behind them always. Build trust, leverage past wins, and look forward to strategic goals in the future.”

In the end, your ultimate goal is to keep your partners happy so they have no reason to ever leave. We do this by building forward-thinking relationships based on trust and by offering competitive benefits. From the beginning, we set specific goals that our partners want to achieve from joining our Partner Program and outline the steps necessary to meeting these goals. But planning only goes so far. The real sell is delivery. Following through on your plans and keeping close lines of communication builds a high level of trust that forms the basis of your relationship. Additionally, our benefits make our Partners feel consistently rewarded for their commitment. These include:

• Your own free FormAssembly account
• Access to webinars and training
• Previews of updates and new features

If you’re interested in learning more, check out our website for more information on how to become a FormAssembly Partner and our full Partner Directory.

Did we miss anything? Comment below and let us know what’s worked for you and your company.

Post written by Shira Beder