Four Drivers to Get the Most Out of Your Partner Experience
A human-centered partner program is key to unlocking hidden value and preparing for growth
By David Lewis, Luis Jugo, and Tyler Ochsner
Everyone is feeling the pressure. How can you do more with less? Do you still need to hit those growth targets? Yep. Do you still need to retain and deepen customer relationships? Sure do. Enabling partners is a powerful way to help you unlock growth and value across your customers’ lifecycles.
A partner program is one way to scale while managing constraints on growing your own teams. But does a partner program on its own do the trick? No. To get the most value out of your partner program, you need to take a human-centered approach, then enable that with the right data and technology tools.
With that combination, you can see growth in partner onboarding speed, increased deal velocity, increased revenues, increased partner engagement, and happier customers.
So how do you do this? Focus on making sure everyone gets a S.E.A.T. at the table.
1. Success measures
The first step in improving your partner experience is to focus on success measures. Not so fast — don’t just focus on your business metrics. Understand what’s in it for your partners. This means understanding what your partners want and need from your program and aligning your goals with theirs. Don’t assume. Do your research.
2. Ease of doing business
Do you make it easy for partners to work with you? Is it easier than them seeking out business in your category without you, or with one of your competitors? How you structure your partner program, and the data and technology you put in place to manage it, should make it as easy as possible to do business with you. Organizations that lead in partner engagement listen to their partners across their ecosystem. Do you know where and how you can simplify how your partners engage?
Finding opportunities to streamline
A few good places to start would be looking at your processes for registering leads, how partners connect with the right sellers and experts in your organization, how you and your partners stay connected and collaborate during the deal cycle, how partners get customer insights and product updates, and how they understand how they are performing as a partner.
Lowering barriers to partner engagement can lead to greater partner participation. For engaged partners it can drive greater engagement. Simplify their experience, measure the results, and make the data and insights available to your partners.
Creating a value exchange
Partner engagement is about expanding your ability to deliver value to your customers. For the partner, this value might come in the form of monetary incentives, higher visibility to customers, preference in leads and referrals, co-marketing investments and assets, data and insights, visibility into roadmaps and product updates, access to executives, access to technical expertise, and training and certifications.
For your customers, this can come from matching partners that best align with their needs, being proactive to address risks and blockers, and helping them get the most out of your offerings. Identify and focus on the activities that increase your joint customer metrics and changes that make it easier for transactional and non-transactional partners to help you and your customers.
3. Access to information and insights
Identifying opportunity areas, prioritizing, and planning and driving opportunities require up-to-date information and insight on everything from the customer’s industry and specific situations to the latest updates on the progress of the opportunity. What data can you share? What complies with your privacy policies and guidance? Align with your business and partners to determine what’s desirable, feasible and viable to share, and how much of that sharing you can automate. Consider things like:
Partner tier and performance metrics
What does a partner scorecard look like? Is it clear how they level up and what benefits they’ll unlock? Can they understand what stage of the partnership lifecycle they are in and how they’re progressing toward stretch goals?
Deal visibility
What attributes of the deal can you share with different participants? What’s the minimum information needed to stay coordinated while showing up to your customers as one? What data feeds can you enable? What can’t be shared and why?
Customer insights and strategies
Can you share information on the products and services your customer has and is interested in? What marketing have they been exposed to or is planned? What data or insights can customer support or success share that might help you proactively improve their experience with a selected partner?
4. Trust, transparency, and technology
I admit, I cheated a bit. You need to make sure everyone gets a “SEATTT” at the table. And honestly, we should have started here — with trust. But then we would have to been talking about TEAS, and I’m more of a coffee person, so … let’s get back to it.
Trust and transparency
We talked about sharing data and insights. This can be challenging, especially in the initial stages of a partnership. There’s often a little competition at play here, so unconstrained sharing isn’t going to happen. You can start small, focusing on the critical bits of information needed by each side to be well coordinated and keep the flow of business moving forward at pace. It’s not just about data either. Be transparent about processes, roles and responsibilities, and even just who all the players are. Avoid surprises. Are you bringing in competing partners (including your own teams) to the same deal? Be transparent. Did you select someone else? Be clear on what your selection criteria are from day one. Be transparent about conflicts with other channels, internal professional services teams, and other partners. Surprises can damage trust.
Technology
All of this — planning, sharing content, data, and information, collaborating across the deal cycle, measuring performance, growing the partner relationship — can take a lot of work. Partner relationship management (PRM) platforms, along with complementary platforms and integrations, can drive efficiency. And these platforms are becoming more powerful.
- Automation is being used to streamline repetitive tasks such as partner onboarding, deal cycle, quoting and contracting workflows and updates, data sharing, measurement, and ongoing enablement.
- PRM software is increasingly becoming more integrated with other systems, allowing for better data sharing, customer data and insights, and more streamlined asynchronous collaboration.
- AI is being used for predictive analytics, lead scoring, partner segmentation and selection, chatbots, and content personalization.
There is a lot to tackle in continually building and improving your partner motions. Like any journey, it must be done in stages. If you’re just starting on your partner experience journey, get the basics in place — even if they’re done manually — and begin to identify where the friction points are across your partner experience lifecycle.
The benefits are there. Improving your partner experience can help you grow your business by increasing revenue growth, improving deal velocity, increasing partner engagement, and making customers happier. By focusing on success measures and what’s in it for your partners, ease of doing business, access to information and insights, trust, transparency, and technology you can create a human-centered partner experience that will help you achieve these goals.
Where are you on your partner journey?
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