Are you planning to grow through sales channels and asking yourself:
• Should you chase the largest resellers in your target markets?
• At what stage in your selection process do you travel to meet prospective resellers?
• What initial questions do you ask a reseller, to ensure that it makes sense for both of you?
• Do you sell to prospective resellers, rather than assessing the joint opportunity?
Many companies don’t have a structured process for partner recruitment, qualification and evaluation, thus relying too much on individual expertise.
When engaging the market with your newly signed sales channel partners, how do you determine the pace of potential business and thus your investment in that partner? Too many companies push sales targets on their resellers, without a proper view on how this makes sense within the partner’s business. The reality is, that many vendors or resellers don’t have a structure or the expertise to assess partner fit.
You can implement a best-practice approach for evaluating prospecting sales channel partners, for mutual partner fit. You can train any, and all, of your team to ask the right partner qualification questions within 5 minutes when they meet a prospective partner. You can determine the potential pace of business through a partner and put an appropriate plan in place to start and build. You can determine whether you have a partner proposition that would fit the largest resellers and system integrators in your markets.
Too many companies invest heavily with new partners with a minimal assessment of their ability to meet expectations.
Tenego has been building Sales Channels for companies since 2008 while developing proven methods for Companies Starting and Growing in Sales Channels. In executing on software partner recruitment intensively across many solution areas, industry sectors, and geographical regions for over a decade, we have determined that there are Three Pillars of Sales Channel Success:
1. Your Partner Proposition
2. Partner Fit and
3. Partner Enablement and Support
Partner Fit can is used for the new partner recruitment process and in reviewing current partners.
So, What is Partner Fit Evaluation?
Partner Fit is about firstly understanding the partner’s business; what they want, what drives their business, and their capabilities. Do note, the greatest capability is a credible relationship with your target customers and decision-makers. Then, while gaining an understanding of the partner’s business, you are assessing how well your Partner Proposition fits within their business.
Everyone involved in identifying, recruiting, and managing partners should understand Partner Fit.
Even if you only want a small number of partners, OR you already have contacts in potential partner companies. You may think it doesn’t need to be so complicated and rigorous OR feel you can’t interrogate resellers OR you think you can’t be too heavy with partners on the first meeting. Partner Fit is a discussion, a mutually beneficial discussion, questioning their experience and way of doing things, and you share what works for your product.
You may have the expertise and gut instinct, but you can quickly define an approach that is trainable to all your team who engage with partners and better bring success. Everyone should understand your partner relationship, from your front-line marketing and sales team, through partner recruitment, partner management through to your professional services and support teams working with partners.
In my next email this Partner Fit series, I will share a story on a great win for a €20 Million pa software product company / ISVs securing a partnership with a €3 Billion pa revenue company. I will outline the partner fit between the companies and some of the challenges that nearly killed their company.
If you have any comments or questions on your partner evaluation experiences, I’d like to hear from you.