As the business community continues to struggle with global product shortages and disrupted supply chains, one thing is clear: without alliance, business, and channel partners, these organizations would likely be out of business today. It’s no secret that CEOs are looking to drive innovation, and over the last 10 years, that innovation has been tied to strategic partnerships. With the pandemic, this has never been more important as organizations work to increase partnership numbers. Despite that, the best practices and approaches to accomplishing this are often times still rudimentary and basic.

Impartner recently spoke with Mike Leonetti, President of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) and asked him five key questions around these challenges. For context, ASAP’s core mission is to provide organizations with a community, a series of best practices, and professional development tools that can help them engage and drive more strategic partnerships. More information can be found here.

Question 1: How can organizations close this gap between what the C-suite knows and understands today in regard to strategic partnerships and what they need to do moving forward?

Mike: The bottom line is that strategic partnership growth takes dedicated professionals and a practitioner that can help drive that professional. In many cases, that requires education and best practices. When you have a community supporting those activities, it increases the positive outcomes. In fact, research shows that 60% of strategic partnerships fail when they don’t follow best practices. Our research shows that 80% of organizations can be successful with strategic partnerships when involved with ASAP. That means being part of our community and using our educational and best-practice tools. This sense of community is critical to success today.

Question 2: We’ve seen good best practice and some poor ones, like throwaway partners. Can you talk more about this?

Mike: When we see the development of the ecosystem today, many think they can fill it with hundreds of partners and maybe not pay close attention to all of them. If partners don’t perform, the idea is you can simply discard them and move on. This is the idea of throwaway partnerships. But in reality, does this make sense? How much time and effort goes into finding these partners, to developing these relationships? How long before that return on investment begins to come? Then the question is, do you really want to start that over again? This approach can do extensive damage through a partner community. You can become known as having a lot of friction and churn, and as a brand that burns partner bridges. ASAP tries to identify these companies so that we can reach out to help them better understand this negative image perception. In many cases, they’re totally unaware of this reputation. Once they find out, they usually want to quickly correct it.

Question 3: Your organization speaks across all industries. Is there one industry that’s getting it right and who’s innovating?

Mike:  I think if you look, tech has been the leader for a long time. For example, I learned initially at Cisco. I was amazed at how they managed and ran their partnership programs. But today, it’s expanded across the board. For example, back in 2005 the patent cliff drove pharma to get better at partnerships – and they did. Over the last 5 years, one area that has really grown in this space is Fintech – they’ll be one to keep an eye on. They’re looking to learn and do better. 

Question 4: Innovation is happening at partner companies with new business models and partner experiences. How is the role of the vendor changing, given this evolution?

Mike: You have a total re-creation of the channel model over the last couple years. With everything moving to the cloud and software as a service (SaaS), the days of throwing money at partners to solve problems is over. As a result of these new technologies and models, resellers are working to reinvent themselves. Partnerships today can’t be run on spreadsheets, so the science of partnerships is changing. When you look at other functions like finance, HR, sales and more, these are all automated and have been for years. Partnerships have automated around the edge, but need more automation that helps drive information, data and reporting up to the C-suite. This allows them to make quick decisions and understand their top 5 partners, their weaknesses and strengths, who else they can add to the ecosystem, and more. The piece that’s critical is the information to make decisions and report on them. And, there’s a lot of innovation in this space, with tools like Impartner.

Question: How do you see strategic partnerships developing over the next 5 years?

Mike: I think as digital transformation takes hold on all parts of the organization, we’re going to see rapid acceleration in this space. People are increasingly partnering both inside and outside their company. As a result, all of the savvy organizations are going to become technology companies, so to speak. We’re also going to see this shifting burden and knowledge from long time industry veterans like myself to the new generation of channel leaders, which is really exciting – and vital. Organizations have learned that if they don’t get these up-and-comers involved in strategic partnerships, their future is uncertain.

Interested in hearing the entire discussion with ASAP? Check out the Lessons from the Edge podinar.

A home-grown partner automation stack thwarted Vertiv, an enterprise tech giant with more than $4 billion in annual sales and 21,000 employees, from achieving its objectives with partners. But after evaluating different tech options, Vertiv turned to PRM-leader Impartner. Now, Vertiv is poised to scale to new heights. Here’s its story.

With a decades-long legacy in enterprise infrastructure, Vertiv launched anew in 2016 with a mission to serve enterprise organizations that need help modernizing their digital connectivity, data use and infrastructure. While most of the company’s sales efforts have been direct, Vertiv was keen on building a healthy indirect business with the help of business partners. Alas, a home-grown tech stack that Vertiv relied upon to onboard, manage and reward partners wasn’t up to the task. With the company’s old technology, for example, the simple task of onboarding a new partner took three workdays — an eternity in today’s world of digital transformation.

Recognizing that it needed to make a change, Vertiv turned to Impartner. Together, the two companies embarked on a mission to launch a new partner automation platform in 30 weeks across five regions and in 17 languages. The challenge galvanized Vertiv leaders.

“Once [our executive team] saw that we were delivering on the promises of rapid deployment, then they got very excited,” says Martin Coulthard, senior global director of digital customer experience. “Their support just bred the continued success of the project.”

Coulthard credits the teamwork Vertiv established with Impartner for greatly accelerating the automation deployment. The speed, scale and attention to detail was superb, Coulthard says. And the results show.

The three days that it once took to onboard a new partner? That’s been reduced to just 90 seconds. Moreover, Impartner technology has provided Vertiv a way to extend consumer-like experiences to thousands of partners scattered across the globe. Since launching the program, Vertiv has scaled its partner program massively. In mere months, the program has grown to 12,000 partners — several times what Vertiv had before. Without Impartner PRM, there is simply no way that Vertiv could have onboarded as many partners so quickly and efficiently, Coulthard says.

In addition to onboarding, Vertiv paid particularly close attention to things that mattered most to partners. Take deal registration, for example.

“The principal reason why a reseller goes to a manufacturer’s portal is to register a deal. With that clear understanding, we prioritized the deal registration journey in our portal design. Anyone logging into the portal can find a nice, clear and simple user interface with which they can use to get a deal registered quickly and efficiently,” says Coulthard.

With Impartner’s input, gleaned over hundreds of engagements with customers, Vertiv concluded that a simpler deal registration experience was better than an overly complex one. The 15, 20 and in some case 25 different data fields Vertiv once requested were significantly reduced to a relative meaningful few. Little wonder that milestones and objectives were quickly reached. Within a few months of becoming fully operational, the value of deals registered on Vertiv’s automation platform climbed to $500 million. Months later, the figure topped the $800 million threshold.

Today, Vertiv has a complete window into the most detailed operations of its entire channel operations. And for the first time, its partners have a single pane of glass with which they can access any Vertiv tool, support process or sales materials they need to help grow their relationship with Vertiv and better support their customers.

This, Coulthard says, is just the beginning.

For the remainder of 2021 and beyond, Vertiv has a number of developments planned or already underway. This includes embracing Impartner Through Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA), Impartner’s Google Ads tool and Impartner’s partner locator, too. The latter, Vertiv believes, “will be a game changer” that gives Vertiv a much better way of maintaining a database of 12,000 partner records. Very soon, partners themselves will be able to go into the partner portal to update their company profiles and view for themselves how they will be represented on vertiv.com.

Upon reflection, Coulthard says he couldn’t be more pleased at what he and his team have accomplished.

“We were a challenger in the channel, so we had to do something different in order to attract new partners from established competitors to our partner program,” he says. “We have achieved our expectations and are eager to put even more milestones behind us.”

For a demo of how Impartner can help you accelerate the performance of your channel, click here.

Tighten a screw. Open a can of paint. Pound a nail in a pinch. These are just some of the clever things you can do with a screwdriver, in addition to the obvious. Try as you might, however, you cannot use a screwdriver to inflate a tire.

What goes for your toolbox applies to your tech stack. Take your Salesforce CRM. It’s supremely helpful for tracking interactions, improving sales processes and otherwise bringing sense to the traditional chaos of sales and marketing. Same with Salesforce Communities, which you may use as a makeshift PRM. But neither are effective tools for helping you increase marketing in coordination with channel partners. To help ramp sales and marketing partners make on your behalf, you need a purpose-built tool known as Through Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA).

TCMA technology is not new but it’s not widespread. Blame bad design or poor implementations.

Until now.

Finally, one company has fixed both shortcomings. The company is Impartner, whose TCMA works with almost any PRM and provides customers an unrivaled tool for accelerating your indirect sales and elevating end-customer engagements.

The timing couldn’t be better. If 2020 taught industry anything, it’s that capable partners who can sell on your behalf, represent your brand faithfully and bring you new customers is priceless.

Which brings us to your company. Does your digital toolbox have a purpose-built tool for helping partners ramp up marketing on your behalf? Can they automatically launch and manage effective campaigns? Do you fully understand all the things that TCMA can do, or why it is specifically superior to other tools for igniting your channel marketing?

If not, then spend a few minutes with Impartner’s Robb Franks, director of sales engineering. In this new Lessons from the Edge (LFTE) video, Franks walks channel professionals through the foundation of TCMA, its unique capabilities and use cases for companies just like you.

“Partner-provided leads are the next best thing to referrals in terms of close rates,” says Franks. “But if you don’t have a proper TCMA tool, it’s very difficult for your partners to effectively and consistently provide those leads to you.”

Partner marketing has never been more important than now. Help your partners help you with TCMA. For more on what TCMA can do for your business, be sure to check out the Impartner TCMA Demand Generation Center.

Irish company and Impartner are working to produce a new series designed to help business practitioners, Channel 101

By T.C. Doyle

Question: Is channel management an art or a science?

Donagh Kiernan, founder and CEO of Tenego Academy, knows the answer: “Best practices exist because every business is the same,” says Kiernan. “But expertise [also] exists because every business is different.”

Translation: Channel management, planning and sales is a mix of both art and science— but you better get the answers to the “science” questions right.

Which brings us to a new series recently launched at Impartner, “Channel 101.”

Channel 101 is a new editorial project that covers the basics of channel planning, program creation, partner recruitment and more. Working with Tenego Academy, an Irish company that works with channel practitioners to help them design, build and then manage world-class channel programs, Impartner has created a series of blogs that provide companies of any size or maturity with answers to key questions.

In this new “Lessons from the Edge” video, Kiernan offers advice and support on how to develop practical skills in sales channel development and management for software companies.

The key basics of any partner program, according to Tenego, is partner proposition, fit and enablement. Put another way, it boils down to this:

• Do you have a compelling proposition that will attract partners?
• Are you able to identify and then cultivate ties with partners that are capable of helping you achieve your objectives?
• Can you enable partners once you have attracted them?

Partner fit is a particularly difficult challenge for many companies. “Vendors spend too much effort on relationships with the wrong people,” Kiernan says. The reason? Vendors keep trying to get all of the capabilities they need in a marketplace from a select set of partners. In doing so, vendors overlook the fact that expertise is typically spread out over an entire ecosystem. Vendors, thus, need more partners than they realize, and generally a mix of partner types to satisfy their ambitions.

Another thing Kiernan discusses in this video: honing your partner value proposition. It’s vitally important to attract the right type and number of partners.

“Revenue sharing is not the main thing that attracts partners,” Kiernan says, “value proposition is.”

He presses vendors to ask themselves the following: “What’s the motivation for a partner to work every day to sell our products?” If your company doesn’t have a well-defined answer, you are destined to struggle in the channel until you do.

When thinking about your partner proposition, consider your business model, technological innovation and the way in which your product or service helps partners achieve their goals.

Finally, take note of the last question I ask Kiernan: “Which is the area in which vendors stumble most?” His answer: enablement.

If you’re building a program for the first time and are not sure what world-class enablement is, then be sure to get an understanding of what automation can do for you. Among other things it can turn your art into a science when it comes to onboarding, recruitment, through-channel marketing, tiering, program administration and more. Be sure to sign up for an Impartner demo today.

T.C. Doyle is the Channel Growth Evangelist at Impartner, the leader in channel management and Partner Relationship Management (PRM) technology. A journalist, book author and analyst, Doyle has worked in media for three decades. As channel evangelist, Doyle produces podcasts, case studies, e-books and more for Impartner. Doyle can be reached at [email protected].

Managing partners and channel sales is a wonderful job, but there are some misunderstandings about the role

By T.C. Doyle

If you’re new to channel sales or management, or even a seasoned veteran of partnering, you likely have many questions on key aspects of your job. You may even wonder how other channel chiefs at companies like yours operate.

No sense operating in the dark or assuming anything. Here are seven myths or falsehoods that we can dispel to help you better understand the challenges you face. In this video, which is part of Impartner’s “Lessons from the Edge” insights series, Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB) member Theresa Caragol unpacks commonly held misperceptions. And she would know.

Caragol is a former channel chief herself (Ciena, Extreme Networks) and, as head of the vendor advisory Achieve Unite, helps educate current channel chiefs in the tech industry on best practices, go-to-market strategies and partner education. Caragol founded Achieve Unite five years ago and has helped channel practitioners, tech vendors and other companies both large and small.

In this video, Caragol explains how to interact with executive management, what to expect in terms of turf battles and how best to set expectations. She also shares some inside secrets that even seasoned channel veterans do not know.

“Revenue is not a leading indicator,” Caragol says. Instead, channel chiefs would be well advised to invest in partner automation so they can track other key performance indicators (KPIs) that are more forward-looking, including partner logins, deal registrations and training engagement.

For more on ways partner automation can help you better understand metrics inside your channels, be sure to check out an Impartner demo today.

T.C. Doyle is the Channel Growth Evangelist at Impartner, the leader in channel management and Partner Relationship Management (PRM) technology. A journalist, book author and analyst, Doyle has worked in media for three decades. As channel evangelist, Doyle produces podcasts, case studies, e-books and more for Impartner. Doyle can be reached at [email protected].

Lessons from the Edge Podcast Series Episode #1

Kicking off our first episode in our new podcast series, Lessons from the Edge, Jennifer Judy, Senior Director of Global Partner Experience at Poly joins Impartner CMO, Kerry Desberg, to discuss why now is the perfect time for a digital transformation in your channel. Jennifer offers tips and tricks for leading a large transformation and seeing positive results like onboarding thousands of partners, all while going through an acquisition. Here is a quick recap of their insightful conversation:

Is a Digital Transformation Necessary?

If you have many prospects arriving on your doorstep during this pandemic, chances are that they have not gone through a channel digital transformation. Now more than ever our clients need a robust partner program, they need their partners to be the boots on the ground, they need you to be present for your partner community and they need automated solutions to help manage their partner program. Now is the time to evolve, especially if you’ve had a reduction of staff, and get reenergized to hit the ground running. It’s no longer about surviving but thriving, scaling and prospering once we come out of this stage in time.

The Keys to a Successful Digital Transformation

Identify your overall objective, what do you want to walk away with at the end of this transformation? Evaluate the steps that you’ll need to take when you’re looking for a vendor to support those initiatives, then devise that multi-tiered plan. Once you figure out your strategy, realize that you don’t have to be all in at once and that it can be a phased approach. You don’t have to do everything at once, chip away at it and enjoy those small victories. Whether that is launching something new or adding new features and components, keep the rolling wins going. Be present and share, presence is so critical during a global pandemic and you don’t want to lose that relevance with your partners.

Transform Your Channel Program

Having a PRM allows you to simplify, gain traction and transform your channel. PRM platforms are facilitators that help you get to where you need to be. Work with cross-functional groups and figure out how a PRM would amplify what you’re trying to achieve. Do your due diligence and figure out how PRM solutions integrate with your IT and make sure they are a partner with your IT organization. Validate your content, clean up your assets and make sure you enable the PRM system’s robust search engine. Make sure you understand your partner community and define your objectives for each audience in your channel. Figure out where your ROI is and build your business plan on where you’re going to see the moving of the needle from a revenue perspective. In this time and age, your PRM platform needs to help you stay adaptive, relevant and transformational.

We’re proud to work with some of the top corporations and the brightest channel leaders worldwide. Hosted by Impartner CMO Kerry Desberg, the Lessons from the Edge Podcast Series features Impartner’s customers and brings to life valuable lessons and key insights from these top channel pros. Tune in and don’t miss an episode!

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