Sales and continuously meeting targets is hard work, even when you are somewhat in control with your direct sales team. Building an effective partner program is hard work, where you are not in control but working with external independent companies to help you sell your products and meet your targets. So, if you haven’t figured out your partner program yet, don’t beat yourself or your team up so badly. It takes time for a company to learn what works for them.
An Effective Partner Program is one that has depth, learning, and evidence behind the Partner Pages on the company website, a partner support structure across each of the functions and is generating success for both partners and the vendor company.
Hard Thing 1: Why Should a Company Sell your Product?
The hard thing here is developing a compelling Partner Value Proposition for Partners, that gets their attention and makes sense very quickly. Your potential partner companies are already extremely busy with their own plans, so what will get them to make space for your product?
Can your product and your partner proposition enable the partner to better meet their goals?
Where you have multiple partner types, you will likely need different Partner Propositions and Partner Value Propositions as different business types make money differently.
Hard Thing 2: What Message Gets Their Attention in Partner Recruitment?
Partnerships are regularly built through good relationships, but recruiting through relationships is extremely time-consuming, very costly, and not scalable.
If you are seeking a small number of partners and wishing to move slowly then the Relationship Approach may serve your purpose.
If you want at some point to move at pace and scale, then you need to learn what message/partner pitch gets the attention of the prospective partners.
Again, different partner types will require different partner pitch messages and different pitches will appeal to different people, e.g.: pure revenue focus versus longer-term shareholder value.
Hard Thing 3: How do you Make Partners Effective for Your Business?
If you manage to secure partners, then comes the real hard challenge of getting them started in building a sales pipeline and selling your products.
To make partners effective, your company needs to be ready for the onboarding and induction phase. This sets the tone for the relationship. The Joint Market Engagement Plan is essential; the agreed commitments and activity targets. Too many companies focus solely on the revenue targets, but a focus on a revenue trailing indicator takes too long to see if the partner is really engaging and doing the business.
Hard Thing 4: How do you Scale Your Partner Program?
Or to put this challenge in another way, how do you successfully integrate your partners into your business and your business into theirs?
Building scale requires seamless operations across each function; Marketing, Sales, Professional Services, Support, Product, Business Sponsor, and Partner Management.
This does not happen by chance and requires much clarity in team roles and incentives in your team.
Hard Thing 5: How do you Start an Effective Partner Program Quickly?
This one can be really hard to do. If you have a very compelling value proposition, i.e.: you will enable the partner to generate much revenue very quickly, then this significantly helps.
It takes time to learn what works for a business. There are many obvious starting points and partner types for many companies. The hard bit comes from the subtle differences in partner capabilities
required, in partner searching and in evaluating partner fit that will likely cause many setbacks in schedules and take up more management time than planned.
It is hard when the realiation happens that it will likely take longer than originally expected, more effort, and slower results. For companies who have been successful in partnering, many had to persevere these challenges to learn what really worked for their business and build a strong, diverse revenue stream adding significant value to their business.
Sustainable success rarely comes quickly or easily. Tenego operates in a Lean approach, on the basis of constant learning to what is working and what will allow our client companies to scale their sales channels and sales organisations.