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]]>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.
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]]>The post How AscendX is Driving Demand for Thousands of SMB Reseller with New Channel Marketing Services appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>Demand continues to be the primary challenge distributors and their partners face. How can you drive demand and generate demand while protecting brand identity? Doing this across large numbers of partners can be really, really hard. As the ecosystem for the channel continues to change, for example with programs like Amazon Business, big multinational companies have created huge distributor networks that work across massive reseller networks. But with this scale comes challenges, especially for the small and mid-sized reseller. As a result, big brands are trying to find new ways to deliver value and drive success.
In this post we’d like to explore how one of our partners, AscendX Digital, is helping to overcome this problem and provide a unique channel model for channel marketing services to B2B brands like HP and TD Synnex.
In the tech space, small and medium sized (SMB) resellers make up 90% of the tech channel market, and they’ve traditionally been underserved by big corporate brands. This has been driven by the fact that smaller resellers don’t often have the marketing resources required to work with one big brand, let alone multiple brands or with multiple marketing programs. To solve this problem, AscendX created a multi-vendor model that enables corporate brands, distributors, and resellers to automate their channel activities. This drives demand and protects the brand.
How does this work and what’s the process for AscendX Digital and its customers?
Through AscendX’s discussions with big brands, it was apparent that these companies struggle to reach the SMB market because of the sheer volume of resellers across the country. The question: how could they add value and differentiate when distribution to these SMB resellers was a big challenge? Distributors aggregate inventory, provide financing, logistics and more, but they tend to lag on the marketing side. This has been disrupted even more with things like Amazon Business. As a result, AscendX created a differentiated service model that helps big brands expand their marketing reach through distributors to thousands of resellers. They help SMB resellers to leverage the marketing investments those big brands have made, and to elevate their own digital presence on their websites and through social media – without the need for any in-house marketing resources.
SMB resellers have on average 8-10 employees (and can go up to 200). They’re small. By connecting the brands and distributors to the resellers through an improved model, the distributor can bring a suite of corporate brands to the resellers, so they have one place to go for the content and for the marketing programs. This eliminates the need to manage multiple marketing programs and demand gen programs. Essentially offering a set-it and forget-it model.
Impartner’s TCMA solution plays a critical role in delivering this service. Many SMBs don’t even have some of the basic social channels that are important to drive demand and sales. Some may only have a website. There’s no e-commerce store, there’s no Twitter feed, and they may or may not be on LinkedIn. By using Impartner, AscendX can offer customers a single centralized location to learn about the program, to embed a single set of code on their sites, and to opt in to participate – and they never have to come back again. The model and platform takes the content from the big corporate brands, syndicates it not only on the reseller websites, but through social channels, which delivers a level of demand they never would have achieved without it.
This results in the SMB resellers getting thousands of impressions and hundreds of new customers onto their websites monthly. And allows for the automation of content on social channels and follower growth (even if they didn’t have these channels previously). In 2020, 80% of the digital customer journey was online and half of Google searches were for local businesses. In the B2B tech space, customers are looking for brand information online and are looking for local resellers to fulfill those needs. This new approach helps the big brands, the distributors and the smaller resellers capitalize on that need. But the journey must be seamless for the reseller. That’s where Impartner delivers immense value.
Resellers don’t have the time or bandwidth to watch for emails or upload content. Impartner helps to automate that entire process, so it’s all done in the background. It’s refreshed, it’s current, and it’s compliant (which is a concern for big brands today). Resellers can finally be part of the digital customer journey without requiring major resources.
How are distributors and resellers reacting to this model?
Distributors are really at the center of this approach. It allows them to offer something new to the resellers. A lot of resellers buy from more than one distributor, and these distributors have teams of people that are champions for a lot of the brands and the resellers. This connective tissue helps drive that process and identify different trends or regions that might be worth targeting. Furthermore, the ability to take corporate brand content (like case studies for example) and push those out to thousands of resellers amplifies the entire demand process and drives credibility for the reseller. Resellers want this marketing support, but they don’t want it siloed through 10 different programs. They want an automated and centralized approach. Distribution can serve as the aggregator for all of that, making sure it resonates with resellers and that it’s efficient.
Interested in hearing the entire discussion with AscendX? Check out the Lessons from the Edge podinar here. Or learn more about Impartner TCMA here.
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]]>The head of an alliance trade group, a well-regarded industry consultant and the founder of a global channel agency join Impartner’s roster of industry luminaries.
As we head into 2022, Impartner is excited to announce the addition of three new members to its Channel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB), which is comprised of renowned industry authorities and SMEs well-versed in partnering trends, go-to-market best practices and forward-looking research. The new CCAB members include the head of a trade group devoted to partnerships and alliances, a well-regarded industry consultant and the founder of a global channel agency. The new CCAB members are:
Here’s a little more on each and why they are key channel thought leaders:
Meredith Caram, Chief Revenue Officer, The JS Group
Caram is a business expansion leader with experience leading diverse sales and marketing teams. She joined the JS Group, which provides guidance on strategy and execution to industry organizations that do business with partners, in February 2021. As chief revenue officer at the JS Group, Caram helps attract new business and expand the organization’s engagement with existing customers. A longtime veteran of AT&T, Caram brings both visionary sales experience and partnering best practices to each customer engagement. She’s especially keen on helping industry professionals find their inner “positive disruptor” that can help them dramatically improve success with partners.
Michael Leonetti, president, the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP)
A longtime pharmaceutical industry executive, Leonetti today oversees the ASAP, whose mission is to help organizations bring discipline and best practices to alliance building and partnerships. Leonetti joined the ASAP after a long career with Boehringer Ingelheim. Today, Leonetti devotes his time helping organizations and individuals alike better understand the value and demands of professional partnership management worldwide. In particular, his association offers practitioners professional development, trend analysis and peer-to-peer networking. He’s particularly motivated to help organizations adapt partnering best practices throughout their organizations, especially after leaning on partners during global pandemic.
Tom Perry, founder and CEO, Sherpa Marketing UK
Perry oversees an award-winning, high-growth channel agency that supports global companies in channel their transformation. Among other things, his company helps companies develop competitively structured and aligned strategies, management programs and measurement guidelines. Specifically, Sherpa UK provides services that help companies plan, recruit, engage, enable, grow and measure successful partnerships. In addition, Sherpa UK also offers managed PRM services to vendor organizations based on leading industry platforms including Impartner PRM. Sherpa UK has helped the likes of Lenovo, Sage, Verizon and others implement partner programs that have delivered sustained growth and improved partner satisfaction. As for Perry, he has worked in technology and channels for the bulk of his career, and is particularly knowledgeable in partner best practices, channel economics and AI technology.
New Era, New Thinking
Impartner is excited to work with these industry thought leaders, who will participate in a variety of activities with the company including podcasts, video interviews and related editorial blogs, columns and eBooks.
“As we navigate the fast-changing world of partner automation to develop new innovations for the emerging go-to-market tech stack, it’s invaluable to be able to consult and tap into the best thinking the industry has to offer,” says Kerry Desberg, Impartner CMO. “We look forward to sharing new content with input from these three industry leaders this year, in 2022 and beyond.”
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]]>The post For a Competitive Edge and a Sustainable Differentiation, Deploy a Superior Tech Stack appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>Business experts have long debated whether the future will belong to those with the brightest management team, the best culture or the most adaptable strategy. Increasingly, it looks like the future will belong to those with the most capable digital implementations.
By T.C. Doyle
The pandemic has radically changed business and what it takes to be competitive
In response, leading organizations have fast tracked digital transformation and tech stack modernization efforts so they can better respond to unexpected changes and provide unrivaled experiences
Impartner enthusiastically supports tech stack modernization, especially when it comes to it’s go-to-market PRM platform, and recognizes that leading the trend is the key to higher revenue growth, improved customer and partner satisfaction, greater evaluations and more
To that end, Impartner is proud to announce a new round of funding totaling $50 million from world-class investors
For the first time in history, global spending on information and communications technology (ICT) is expected to top $5 trillion this year. That’s nearly as much as the entire GDP of Japan, the world’s third-largest economy. It’s also more than twice the size of the global market for agriculture.
It’s a huge sum, in other words.
Of that massive outlay, a larger amount with each passing year is going to digital transformation initiatives. In 2020, spending on digital transformation totaled $1.31 trillion. In 2022, the figure is expected to increase to $1.78 trillion.
The global pandemic, of course, accelerated spending on digital transformation. In a survey, IBM found that 59% of customers were accelerating digital transformation projects as a result of Covid-19. McKinsey & Co. similarly found that Covid-19, “pushed companies over the technology tipping point” in 2020 and 2021, transforming business forever.
Companies are not only spending more in digital innovation, they are also doubling down on how they use, depend and leverage it, too. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it in a 2020 earnings report to Wall Street, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”
Which brings us to where we are today.
Were now entering a post-pandemic world in which one central truth is emerging when it comes to business: While many thought leaders have debated whether the future will belong to those with the brightest executive management team, the best culture or the most adaptable strategy, it increasingly looks as though the future will belong to those with the most capable digital implementations. To quote McKinsey Digital from May 2021, “The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the pace of business, and the companies with superior technology capabilities are winning the race.”
So what are those capabilities and how are organizations putting them to use? We at Impartner have some answers — and not just about our part of the market. Consider what one of our customers, a global manufacturer of high-tech testing gear and software, said recently: “When it comes to automation, we’ve entered a time when there can be no tolerance for sub-optimization. To prevail today, you need a world-class tech stack that optimizes every aspect of your business.”
We couldn’t agree more.
While Impartner offers a tech stack devoted to partner automation, we are passionate advocates for tech stack modernization across all aspects of an organization — from finance to product development, from human resources to go-to-market activities, and everything in between. We simply believe organizations that automate their operations to the fullest extent possible will find themselves in the best position possible to provide employees, customers, partners and other constituents unrivaled experiences.
What do we mean by, “automate to the fullest extent possible?” In short, we mean modernization without gaps, lapses or frailties. More specifically, we mean embracing technology and implementing it in such a way that your organization can leverage the following:
Here’s a closer look at what we mean.
Integrated platforms that support multiple applications and tools
Since tech companies began bundling their technologies together, there has been widespread disagreement as to whether it is better to invest in best-of-breed tools or instead go with integrated platforms that may not excel in any one area but whose sum is greater than what you would expect from individual parts. In a world where only a handful of capabilities were automated, that was a worthy debate. It’s not in the world of today in which everything is automated and connected. Things must work together, in other words. But this reality creates complexity for many organizations that have literally bought one of everything over the years.
A better way? Invest in integrated platforms that accommodate many capabilities and create a way — think APIs, marketplaces, etc. — to embrace even more digital innovation.
Intelligently designed interfaces that surface relevant data and information in a “single-pane-of-glass”
Given the speed of business today, customers and partners do not have time nor inclination to endure friction when it comes to gathering information, ordering products, providing feedback and more. They want single single-on, device and operating platform independence, and simple authentication. They have also had their fill with software upgrades, incompatibilities and digital-rights issues that impede work. When it comes to the tasks they must complete and the objectives they must achieve, workers want their technology to aid them, not thwart them. They also want screens personalized to their work cycles and workflows. This means intelligently designed interfaces that surface relevant data and information in a “single-pane-of-glass.”
“Opinionated software” developed around proven best practices
While it might sound paradoxical, today’s workforce wants innovation that is both tailored to their individual needs and standardized so it can leverage best practices defined and honed by others who have gone before. This is the promise of mass customization, which is finally arriving to the world of enterprise software. In Impartner’s case, we develop our software based on input gleaned from thousands of implementations with hundreds of customers. The “opinions” we get from these engagements go a long way in helping us provide customers software that not only leverages the best in software design but also the best in business best practices.
Common data sets that can move simply and securely between platforms without compromise
Given that there are more than 21.5 billion things connected to the Internet, the world has never been awash in so much data. Google alone processes 3.5 billion search requests every day. Today, every interaction, transaction and communication results in data. But like saltwater to a thirsty traveler, data is no good unless it can be captured, stored and shared in a reasonable manner. Many organizations believe they can leverage their data and even participate in the “big data” revolution. But they are kidding themselves if their data must be exported, scrubbed and reformatted every time it is moved between tools, applications and platforms. In the future, data will be available to everyone who needs it and to no one who does not. It will also be available in formats that are readily accessible and easy to put to use.
What, you may wonder, does an organization get for its efforts to “automate to the fullest extent possible?” It’s a fair question. The rewards for modernizing your tech stack are many and can be measured in everything from market share gains to increased revenue to improved customer satisfaction and more. Take Impartner, for example.
In exchange for our commitment to support this revolution and embrace its principles across our entire organization, we have seen our sales grow and our valuation increase. In October 2021, for example,Impartner announced new funding from investors totaling $50 million. The money will help fuel additional growth initiatives and help advance our mission to help organizations everywhere improve their competitiveness through tech stack modernization.
In addition to higher valuations, McKinsey & Co. says “digital leaders” can expect plenty of other benefits, too.
“While top economic performers are already significantly ahead of their peers in specific digital capabilities (automation, for example), they are also moving much more quickly than their peers in key business areas. Top tech companies, for example, share test-and-learn findings across the business, reallocate digital talent, and use multiple sources of insight about customers weekly, while average performers do those tasks monthly,” McKinsey & Co. says.
For business practitioners, the practical implications of digital transformation and tech stack modernization are many. You may require one or more of the following to keep pace:
For some, the journey to digital modernization is just beginning. For others, it’s a work in progress. Regardless of where you are today, we are committed to helping you make progress in your journey, especially when it comes to you go-to-market tech stack that may include a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, a marketing automation platform (MAP) and a partner relationship management platform (PRM), which is our specialty.
We at Impartner are committed to providing you the most integrated, flexible and intelligently designed technology possible. It’s why 78% of our customers believe our technology provides them with a competitive edge in their market.
We welcome the opportunity to provide them same to you.
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]]>By T.C. Doyle
Research findings reveal that information communications and technologies (ICT) services companies are overhauling their businesses like few times in their history. This provides cybersecurity vendors a unique moment to cement ties with new partners and redefine their go-to-market strategies.
But tech companies better hurry — and be prepared — otherwise they could miss out on a once-in-generation opportunity. Here’s why.
Today’s technology channel, which includes VARs, integrators, managed service providers (MSPs) and telecom agents, is experiencing unprecedented change. Take findings from CompTIA’s 2021 State of the Channel Study, which found that 44% of channel firms believe their world is “changing rapidly.” Channel companies are making changes, business owners say, to meet new demands from customers and to adjust to the new business realities of a post pandemic world.
To make their companies more competitive, for example, many channel companies are developing business practices around new technologies, embracing new business models that emphasize subscription sales, and implementing industry best practices that help their organizations run as efficiently and flexibly as possible. The same CompTIA study found, for example, that 27% of channel companies have accelerated and/or expanded their work with “emerging technologies” in the past two years.
Now consider cybersecurity. CompTIA found that better than eight in 10 channel companies are just beginning to develop a cybersecurity practice (36%) or selling very basic products and services (53%). Given that cybersecurity is expected to grow into $193 billion market opportunity by 2028, according to Grand View Research, and that cybersecurity is now an IT priority among SMBs (small-to-medium-sized businesses), according to Techaisle, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher as to why more channel companies haven’t developed more momentum in this field.
A lack of talent and complexity have hindered many channel companies from making the most of the opportunity, but things are changing rapidly. CompTIA and others expect more channel companies to double down on cybersecurity in 2022 and beyond to win deals and instill confidence among nervous customers, who report being targets of attack more than ever.
Good news for cybersecurity vendors, right? No question. Current market dynamics provide cybersecurity vendors a unique opportunity to establish ties to new partners. But there’s a caveat that innovators should be aware of. Today’s business partners want different things from vendors than in past years. If you’re optimized around the wrong priorities, you could miss a unique opportunity to cement ties to channel companies.
What Partners Want Now
As mentioned, partner business models are rapidly changing. As ICT services companies move from the sale of products sold as one-time transactions to the sale of services sold as recurring subscriptions, they require new skills and knowledge. Not surprisingly, these channel companies prioritize different things from vendor partner programs than in the past. Instead of product specs and sales incentives, they now prioritize more business support. Think professional sales training, financial acumen, business know-how, vertical market knowledge and more. “This is forcing vendors to re-evaluate traditional partner program resources and incentives to meet new expectations,” says CompTIA.
In addition to these specific demands, partners are also expressing dismay with overall vendor complexity. Put bluntly, channel companies have had it with program friction. In fact, studies show a full one-quarter of all partners will walk away from an otherwise profitable relationship if they deem a vendor too difficult to work with.
For cybersecurity vendors looking to make inroads in the channel now, this puts a premium on your business processes. World-class partner programs do not run on spreadsheets anymore, say channel experts including Forrester Research analyst Jay McBain. Instead, modern vendor programs rely on world-class software technology, the kind that automates partner onboarding and enablement, marketing, rewards, tiering and more.
If you’re looking to enlist channel partners to help you take your cybersecurity innovations to market, you must appreciate that your ideas are only part of what will make partners drawn to your business. The rest? It comes down to the quality of experiences you provide partners. Often, that quality is determined by the level of automation that you have.
Which brings us back to you. Are you using world-class technology to automate every facet of partner engagement — from partner journeys to marketing and beyond? Or are you hoping to get by with a home-grown tech stack or single point-solutions that do not integrate well or scale as needed?
Before you answer, consider another reason to invest in a world-class partner relationship management (PRM) platform: data, which McBain says is critical to “winning the channel.”
“Brands that provide an enhanced partner experience grow faster than their peers, are more profitable, and drive higher customer satisfaction and retention downstream,” McBain writes in a new blog from September 2021. “Smart channel professionals are looking at data across the partner journey as a way to differentiate themselves from the competition and accelerate faster in the market.”
That’s you, right? You’re the smart channel leader with the right automation that can produce the proper level of data you need to differentiate your company and accelerate ahead of your competition?
If you’re unsure, then let Impartner show you the way. Request a demo for yourself and see why 78% of customers who invest with Impartner say it gives them a competitive edge in their market. You’ll be glad you did — and so will those new partners you recruit.
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]]>Companies no longer have to choose between their priorities and those of their channel partners
Want to provide partners the best automation experiences possible but not at the expense of automating the workflows and functions that matter most to you? Now you can do both — seamlessly and simultaneously. Here’s how.
This month, Impartner is introducing Impartner PX™ PartnerExperience, a revolutionary new PRM interface designed with partners foremost in mind. Impartner PX gives vendors of any from — from startup to enterprise — the capability to customize partner interfaces so they can serve up the relevant data that partners need most on their portal homepages. Think information on program status, lead sharing, MDF approvals and more. Better yet, Impartner PX makes this possible via a new set of PXStudio widgets, which are extensible, drag-and-droppable tools that can easily be added to customized dashboards for different partners no matter their company type, geography, business model, technological specialty or level of engagement.
Now for the best part: Impartner PX adds this capability to the Impartner Ignite and Emerge PRM packages that offer some of the world’s most advanced backend PRM capabilities that scores of vendors have come to rely on. Later this year, Impartner PX will be added to Impartner’s complete set of PRM automation platforms, providing customers of any size the flexible and scalable backend that hundreds of organizations have come to depend on, and the partner-centric front-end that channel partners demand more and more.
This is big news on several levels. Allow us to unpack why here. First, let’s focus on who this announcement is initially targeted at, which is small businesses and emerging organizations. Then, we’ll turn our focus to your partners and share some insights as to why PX is so important to them.
With so much business shifting online due to the pandemic and other factors, technology has become the great leveler for small businesses and emerging organizations. In fact, SMBs now spend more on technology as a percent of revenue than their big-business counterparts. SMBs do so because information and communications technology (ICT) enables them to stand out among rivals in their field and avoid becoming overrun by organizations that enjoy greater economies of scale.
The pandemic of 2020 and 2021 has exacerbated this trend. In fact, one study found that 75% of SMBs have increased their technology budgets by an average of 34% as a key part of their strategy to survive COVID-19.
No doubt your business is automating key parts of your organization, including finances, marketing, customer support and more. If your business sells through partners, automating those processes and workflows is an absolute must. There’s simply no way to manage a partner program that oversees onboarding, enablement, rewards, tiering, lead dissemination, marketing and journeys without an automation platform that can elegantly and capably integrate, monitor and measure these activities at scale.
While SMBs and emerging vendors may be tempted to try this using home-grown tools or an amalgamation of unconnected point-solutions, they run the risk of falling behind more sure-footed rivals if they do. What is more, they also risk getting flattened by bigger outfits that already automate partner functions and thus command significant partner loyalty.
One key benefit of Impartner PRM technology is that it is developed using “opinionated” software design principles. If you’re not familiar, opinionated software is automation developed around proven best practices. (In Impartner’s case, our opinionated software has been built with knowledge gleaned over hundreds of engagements with customers representing nearly every major industry, high-technology especially.)
Because of this, Impartner takes the guesswork — and much of the risk — out of automation rollout. This is especially important to SMBs and emerging companies that cannot afford to burn work cycles or waste money. Which brings us to your partners.
In a recent global study of tech industry channel partners, partner organizations were asked to identify capabilities that would help make them relevant in 2022 and beyond. Their No. 1 response? Using customer experience as a “competitive differentiator.”
Funny thing about that: the more partners develop their own CX capabilities, the more attuned to PX provided by vendors they have become. Put bluntly, partners will no longer put up with bad experiences, especially when it comes to partner automation management technology. Partners don’t want your marketing materials or end-customer data sheets. Instead, they want — make that demand —the information they need to run their businesses as efficiently as possible. Again, this includes but is hardly limited to data on program status, lead sharing and MDF approvals.
In fact, studies reveal that partners will walk away from an otherwise profitable business relationship if they deem a vendor too difficult to work with. In today’s world, few things create more antagonism between a partner and a vendor that bad automation experiences. When there’s friction in your partner automation, you can be sure there is tension in your channel relationships.
Thanks to Impartner PRM Ignite and Emerge, and the new Impartner PX, you no longer have to worry about such deficiencies. Nor do you have to choose between automating the processes and workflows that are important to you and the experiences prioritized by your partners.
With Impartner Ignite and Emerge, you get unrivaled flexibility and agility to create programs for just a few partners or hundreds of thousands of partners worldwide. You also get a platform that can be customized by your channel teams without turning to a vendor or taxing your internal IT departments.
And with Impartner PX, your partners will enjoy the industry’s freshest and most intuitive partner interface that features clean, simplified views of the data that matters most to them. What is more, they will also enjoy Pipeline Manager, a new CRM-like experience that acts as a customer database to help them manage and track leads, build a sustainable sales pipeline and more.
Impartner PRM and Impartner PX. Better for you, better for your partners.
For more on the new technology, be sure to schedule a demo and see it in action.
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]]>An elegant, intuitive interface. Up-to-date information. And information at your fingertips.
These are but a few of the telltale signs of a good partner automation technology implementation.
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]]>Impartner’s Olivier Choron shares insights from 25 years of working with partner portals
An elegant, intuitive interface. Up-to-date information. And information at your fingertips.
These are but a few of the telltale signs of a good partner automation technology implementation. But an even better may be what you few people ever see — the technological underpinnings that provide for automated workflows and more. So says Olivier Choron, managing director of EMEA at Impartner.
“If I see complexity in the back end, I’m very happy because it means simplicity at the front end,” says Choron.
Over the last two decades, Choron, who first implemented a PRM solution in 1996, has reviewed hundreds of vendor partner automation solutions. These days Choron sees everything, including the good, bad and, yes, the ugly, too, in partner portals. One thing he is keen to point out is that a portal is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a partner automation technology.
While the user interface (UI) is vitally important to partners who see it every day, the underpinnings behind the scenes are where the real action is, he says. (For more on Choron’s impressions, be sure to check out this Impartner Lessons from the Edge video.)
In the past few years, the behind-the-scenes integration in partner automation technology implementations has improved dramatically, he says. While no one offers partners a “single pane of glass” to manage their entire vendor relationship, Impartner comes closer than anyone else. Impartner has paid particularly close attention to how different capabilities work together both in front of a screen and behind it, says Choron. This includes core capabilities such as deal registration, lead management, training, Salesforce CRM integration and more.
When reviewing a partner portal, Choron looks for several things, logins especially. While he is encouraged by frequent logins there, Choron says vendors can do better. Once partners log into your portal, try to get them to explore other parts of the platform that will make them stronger partners. After a partner registers a deal, for example, guide them to additional training and education, or marketing resources and incentives. Help break partners from the habit of logging in to register a deal and then logging off, in other words.
Some portals Choron reviews reveal telltale signs of an overworked partner management organization. When he cannot easily find the materials and information partners need to work effectively, for example, Choron says the culprit is usually not a bad interface but a lack of internal resources, instead.
When advising customers, Choron is keen to have them focus on relevancy and timeliness. Consider your corporate website, for example. If it is out of date, then chances are your partner portal is, too. Two-year old information? That won’t cut it in today’s world of partnering.
What’s true for portals also goes for communications. Take news-on-demand. When companies tell him proudly that they send out quarterly newsletters, Choron growns in disapproval.
“We are in 2021. A quarterly newsletter means news included therein can be 90 days old by the time it gets to the partners,” says Choron. In the era of CRM automation, social media and other forms of communication, news should be fluid and constant, he says.
Organizations also fall down when they take consumer-oriented information and post it to their partner portal. Not only is the content old, it’s also ill-suited to a partner community, in many instances.
As for the future of partner automaton technology, it will likely mean more automated steps, more technology-assisted journeys and more customizable back-end solutions, just to name a few things. But the channel will still turn to portals for help with many of the staples that it relies on today. This includes demo requests, MDF management and more.
Will customers ever get the “single pane of glass” to manage partners that many dream of? Someday, Choron says, but this will always be a work in progress due to the number of new capabilities that organizations will want to add to their partner automation platforms.
Given the possibilities when it comes to automation and partnering, Impartner should be busy for years to come.
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]]>Yes, say enterprise software experts including Bryce Maughan, director of sales enablement and business development at Impartner. “The benefits of taking a demo are many regardless of whether that demo leads to a sale or not,” Maughan says. “Any opportunity to advance a learning journey is generally worth it.”
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]]>By T.C. Doyle
Let’s be honest: a lot of partner content is awful. By awful, we mean it lacks originality, appropriateness and, far too often, thoroughness.
This, of course, assumes partners can even find content developed for them. There may be no greater irony in business than the only reason more people do not know how bad partner content can be is because so few people can find it.
If this sounds in any way like your situation, don’t panic. We make it our mission at Impartner to help PRM customers improve the communications they share with partners. We have several tools including Through Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) and News on Demand solutions that are designed for this very purpose. But this isn’t about us. Instead, this blog is for you. We want to help you better understand why your existing partner content may be missing the mark.
When thinking in terms of partner content, keep three qualities foremost in mind:
If you think about it, your partner content should be designed like a lot of the materials you share with end customer prospects in your drip marketing campaigns. In your drip campaigns, you painstakingly make an effort to not overwhelm or interrupt learning cycles and customer journeys. The same principle applies to your partner content.
Here’s a closer look at each of the three variables and why thinking of them in terms of drip marketing can help improve your partner content communications.
Studies reveal that our attention spans are under pressure like never before. A typical knowledge worker sends and receives more than 100 emails per day. This same person also spends more time in meetings. In fact, one study shows that 15% of an organization’s time today is spent in meetings — a figure that has increased every year since 2008.
You know where this is going: you know you have a short window to grab partners’ attention. But do you know how best to use that window? To achieve this objective, think in terms of audience, form and tone.
Is your content developed for specific partners types, for example? Is it focused on individual business models, professional roles, business maturity levels, geographies and more? Consider: new partners have vastly different needs than longtime loyalists. Likewise, sales professionals are generally not interested in engineering updates unless they translate into new business opportunities.
Before you create another piece of partner content, ask yourself who is intended for and if it packaged appropriately. Few people, for example, have time to read lengthy whitepapers or pore over detailed financial reports. If your information can be conveyed in an information graphic, then don’t deliver it in a lengthy text-heavy document. Also note that more professionals consume information on mobile devices than a decade ago, so consider video, podcasts and other mediums to convey information.
Lastly, don’t forget tone: keep legal out of your partner communications because nothing says, “we don’t trust you” like something written in “legalese.” A better way? Clear, concise and honest communication. That’s what partners want, every time.
Young communicators are taught in journalism school that when news is delivered is every bit as important as how it is presented. When it comes to newspapers, delivery consistency is as important as content reliability. Partner content isn’t so different.
Which brings us to you: are you communicating in a consistent and predictable manner? Or do you overwhelm partners at times important to you only to disappear for weeks if not months afterwards? Again, think of your drift campaigns.
You understand that prospects cannot go from “just browsing” to “checkout now” without going through a journey. The same is true of partners, which typically expose themselves to new material, then immerse themselves in it before finally developing proficiency in a new concept, program or business model.
As someone tasked with helping advance your organization’s agenda within partner constituents, don’t underestimate how important communications cadence is. When a new partner demonstrates interest in your organization, keep them engaged with regular and frequent communications. And after they become a productive member of your partner ecosystem, never assume that your previous communications have hit the mark 100% of the time.
You know from your drip campaigns that you must connect with a customer prospect between seven and a dozen times before they will ask for a demo or request a quote. Similarly, partners need multiple exposure to your ideas and innovations before they fully understand them. The same goes for your programs, policies and promotions, too.
This is why your emails campaigns, newsletters and other communications vehicles must be timed appropriately. Nothing helps coordinate your frequency better than automation.
Some timing miscues are a result of bad luck. In 2017, for example, Airbnb launched an ad campaign that promoted “aquatic adventures” that tantalized travelers with a chance to spend a week on a houseboat that never touched dry land. The campaigned dropped just as Hurricane Harvey pounded the Gulf Coast of Texas.
Woops.
Other mistakes are entirely avoidable. Take your asset library for example. Time and again, organizations make it impossible to search. Worse, they don’t build-in “begin” and “end” dates to things they produce on behalf of partners, which can create chaos afterwards.
The best message in the world will fall flat on its face if it’s delivered at the wrong moment. Consider a sales incentive you announced for the third quarter a year ago. If that somehow resurfaces three quarters later in your partner content stream, partners will think the promotion is still valid.
If you haven’t lived through having to tell a partner that they are not getting an incentive because it lapsed, then pray you never have to. This is doubly-true if they counted on a backend rebate to offset any margin loss on overly aggressive customer pricing.
Now consider the whole of your asset library. It may contain outdated product spec sheets, price lists, competitive analyses and more. Certainly, it has dated videos, case studies and product roadmaps. If so, that’s problematic. Like food in the fridge, information is no good once it’s past its expiration date.
When you successfully add applicability, frequency and timeliness to your partner content, you achieve greater relevancy with your community. That’s critical for building mindshare, loyalty and financial success with your partners.
But achieving relevancy requires more than commitment. It also requires automation — the kind that Impartner provides the world over in many industries and to customers large and small.
To understand how automation can elevate the relevance of your partner content, request an Imparter demo. Spend just 30 minutes with one of our partner content specialists and you will see a new world of possibilities. Ask for your Impartner demo today.
Your partners will thank you.
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]]>The post Five Reasons to Say “Yes” to That Demo appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>With an eye toward 2022 and beyond, the business world is looking at new priorities. Is your partner portal up for the task?
The post How to Spend Your Latest Round of Funding appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>Proven ideas that yield greater returns every time
By T.C. Doyle
Congratulations on your latest round of funding! Now that you have an influx of capital, do you a solid plan for putting the money to use? You’re going to need one given the expectations that likely came with the new investment.
While you may have some ideas for spending the money, there are better ways to invest it than buying Herman-Miller chairs or leasing new office space. Experts agree that the best way to spend your new funding is to invest in things and activities that will help your organization address its top priorities, which typically fit into one of three categories:
Some business experts and management consultants break these categories down into subgroups or elevate one or more items such as “workforce productivity” into the main group. Regardless, most business priorities fall into one of these basic categories. What’s interesting is how digital innovation can help organizations achieve their aims in each of these areas.
If your organization does business with partners or plans to in the future, then you will want to understand how partner automation technology can help your organization overcome challenges and achieve objectives against your list of priorities. Having this information at the ready will help you, your go-to-market leaders and even your executive leadership team make more informed decisions when it comes to spending your new capital wisely.
Improve business growth. Attract and retain new customers. Improve speed to new markets. If these growth priorities sound familiar, then you’re like most organizations, according to market researcher Techaisle, which produces an annual list of business and technology priorities and challenges for various organizational segments including SMBs. (Techaisle considers SMBs as organizations with between 1 and 999 employees.)
While some companies go it alone, the majority of SMBs and mid-size enterprises work with partners when it comes to executing their go-to-market strategies. Consider: more than 75% of global trade flows through business partners, according to Forrester. This is despite the growth of vendor marketplaces and other direct-to-consumer sales efforts.
Partners can help you expand your influence in new geographies, customer segments, vertical niches and targeted accounts where you believe growth lies. They can bolster your technical aptitude and amplify your marketing efforts, too. Furthermore, partners can introduce you to customers with whom they have existing relationships with.
But to achieve these benefits, you have to put in sufficient infrastructure to support your partners. This includes an investment into a partner relationship management (PRM) platform that can scale with you as you grow. Our research has found that organizations that invest in a PRM grow 32.3%, on average, after deploying partner automation technology. What is more, 77% report a return on their investment in less than 18 months.
If business acceleration is what you seek, then you need new growth mechanisms. Without them, you will never live up to your investors’ expectations.
Partners can provide you with new lift. But their contributions require new investments, commitment and expertise.
After deploying a PRM, Impartner customers report reducing their operational costs by 29%, on average. Another 78% claim that their PRM has provided them a competitive advantage in their respective market. Here’s insight as to why.
Unless your company has a truly differentiated innovation or idea, your partners have choices when it comes to with whom they align. While maximizing profitability is always top of mind, it isn’t always a determining factor when it comes to joining a partner program. In fact, CompTIA research finds that having “an established partner program with solid resources” rates higher among channel partners than “compensation plans in place that maximize the profitability of partners.”
Industry research also finds that one-quarter of channel partners will not work with a vendor that does not fully prioritize a seamless, workable partner experience.
For business practitioners, “a seamless, workable partner experience” translates into automation technology that reduces if not eliminates friction when it comes to partner onboarding, deal registration and market development funds (MDF) management just to name a few things.
If your company doesn’t provide friction-free experiences, it will struggle to attract the best partners in any given market. It will also wrestle trying to meet the expectations of those that it does enlist.
There’s more when it comes to automation and operational excellence: In addition to serving as a system of record (SoR) for all things partner-related, a PRM is a key component in a modern go-to-market technology architecture that also includes a customer relationship management (CRM) platform and a marketing automation platform (MAP). With a PRM and complementary adjuncts, you can efficiently extend your marketing through partners, track end customer leads in a closed-loop system and reward key constituents appropriately based on their contributions and engagement.
While it might sound like a stretch to think that a PRM platform can actually inform your product development agenda, it isn’t. Here’s why.
Partners not only give you sales leverage in a given market, they also provide invaluable feedback and insight. Consider: partners work with dozens if not hundreds of customers on average. They have tremendous insight on customer buying habits, business priorities and best practices. They understand better than most the positive impact that new ideas and innovations have on a market, and why some ideas fall flat.
Engaged partners will gladly share these insights with trusted allies who promise confidentiality and complementary insights for helping mutual customers. Partners will also serve as more than sounding boards; in many instances they will participate in beta test programs and help develop new use cases for your ideas and innovations.
If that sounds appealing to you, then remember that extracting these invaluable benefits requires partner intimacy and loyalty — the kind that a world-class partner automation platform promotes.
Which brings us back to you and your latest investment. Did you know that it comes at a time when investment in U.S. companies is setting all-time records? It has. Take startups, which enjoyed an inflow of $150 billion for the first half of 2021, according to a report from PitchBook. That sum is more than what startups have received in every full year before 2020.
This means that in addition to you, your rivals may have received some funding of late. So, the race is on, in other words, to see who can scale the fastest.
No doubt you are considering a wealth (no pun intended) of options for spending your new money. But before you commit to one thing or another, do yourself a favor and investigate how partner automation can help put that money to wise use.
Ask for an Impartner demo today.
While an investment in partner automation technology won’t provide the immediate comfort that a new Aeron chair will, it will put your organization in a better position.
Now that’s what we call sitting pretty.
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]]>With an eye toward 2022 and beyond, the business world is looking at new priorities. Is your partner portal up for the task?
The post Five Things Every Partner Portal Must Prioritize in 2022 and Beyond appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>Partner needs are evolving. So are their priorities. Are you optimized accordingly? Compare yourself to this handy checklist.
With an eye toward 2022 and beyond, the business world is looking at new priorities. Is your partner portal up for the task?
In this article, we highlight several priorities that have emerged from our conversations with customers, business partners and industry thought leaders alike. From our interactions and research, it’s clear that a change in market conditions is leading to change in thinking. Whereas global events in 2020 put an emphasis on “resiliency” and “adaptability,” new market realties have pushed “growth” and “experiences” to the top of corporate agendas.
Consider a May report from Gartner. In Gartner’s 2021 CEO Survey, 60% of CEOs said they expect their organization’s revenue to return to 2019 levels by the end of 2021. Another 30% of CEOs said they expect a resurgence by 2022. An increase in Covid-19 infections could render expectations moot, much as they did at the beginning of 2020. But if current indications are correct, then your channel strategy will need to be updated accordingly. This includes your partner portal.
Here are five areas to consider as you begin planning for 2022 and beyond.
In all but a few product and service categories and regardless of industry, business partners have choices when it comes to who they work with. With velocity foremost in many partners’ minds, ease-of-doing business has emerged as a top priority. How important? Consider what the tech trade association CompTIA reported: “For a vast majority of partners, the ease of doing business ranks highest in the why-should-we-work-with-this-vendor department. It ranks higher than even the profit-making opportunity in many cases.”
Is your partner portal designed appropriately? Can partners quickly find the information they need, or do they encounter friction at every turn? How many times do you ask them to log in as they navigate through your pages and applications? Does your homepage surface the information that matters most to them? Or do you make them dig? Do you bombard them with customer-oriented information, or provide a more tailored, personalized experience?
If you don’t like your answers, then your company may be competing at disadvantage.
Every channel chief knows the key to competing today is actionable information. This requires real-time data that you can access at a glance and can put into a report that can be easily scrutinized. There’s simply no way to do proper business planning without this kind of intelligence. But not every portal tool gives up this kind of information easily. With some tools, it can feel as though the portal were working against you to conceal the data you need. Not Impartner’s Business Intelligence (BI) engine and Channel Intel+ technology, which have been designed to seamlessly provide channel business leaders with data that drives revenue and increases partner profitability.
With Impartner PRM, everything from partner segmentation to deal registration to onboarding and more has been optimized around two vectors: making things frictionless for partners and providing you the actionable data you need to grow at scale.
Study after study reveals the degree that customers fast-tracked digital transformation projects in 2020 as a result of the global pandemic. But experts note that “most C-suites are frustrated and disappointed” with outcomes. Projects take too long, cost too much and deliver too little.
Why? Integration challenges are a big issue. Customers no longer want to mash together software components that do not mesh easily. This goes for your partner automation platform.
Impartner gets this. We know that business runs on Microsoft Office, Salesforce CRM and other tech standbys. That’s why our PRM integrates in real-time with Salesforce CRM (we were the first to do so) and Microsoft Dynamics. We also integrate easily with other key platforms.
We understand what being a system of record is all about and how it relates to velocity. Let’s face it: having to wait hours or even minutes for your batched data to “sync” can mean winning or losing a competitive bid.
That won’t cut it 2022. Integrate or fall behind, we say.
Once you embrace a modern PRM, you’re going to love how a modern, integrated automation platform can transform your business and increase partner satisfaction. But you’re likely to want more.
For example, you’re likely to want to better coordinate marketing activities with partners to ensure that your messages are delivered consistently and appropriately. This means better technology, the kind that through channel marketing automation (TCMA) provides for.
In addition to communicating through partners, you’ll also want to communicate to them more effectively. For that, you’ll need a purpose-built tool such as Impartner’s News on Demand. There’s more, including Impartner’s Social on Demand, Google Ads for the Channel and Point of Sale Management.
As you grow your channel, you’ll want to increase the capability of your partner portal. You’ll want a platform that expands and grows with you, in other words. Impartner does this seamlessly no matter your size or industry.
If you’re not familiar with the term, you’ll likely hear more about “opinionated software” as you consider your automation plans and priorities. While “opinionated” conjures up bad connotations in most instances, it means “informed” and “experienced” when it comes to digital automation. Take Impartner PRM, for example.
In addition to being integrated, customizable and secure, Impartner PRM is also informed. We built our software to leverage best practices we’ve gleaned from hundreds of implementations with world-leaders in business from multiple industries over two decades. This includes how we help customers onboard partners, train and certify them, share leads and even reward partners. When you invest in Impartner partner automation, in other words, you’re getting business best practices baked into every module you leverage.
With that, you can be assured that you are investing with an organization that is as focused on your success as you are.
In the post-pandemic era, speed and experiences will loom large in the hearts and minds of business partners everywhere. Your partner portal, thus, must optimize accordingly.
If that sounds daunting to you, rest easy; it isn’t if you have the right partner committed to your channel success.
See for yourself how partner automation can help increase velocity and improve experiences for your channel partners. Click here for your Impartner demo today.
And for more on prioritization, don’t miss “Priorities for Channel Partners in 2021 and Beyond.”
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]]>If you work with channel partners, there’s a strong chance that your world has seen more upheaval in the past two years than in the previous five. Everything from business economics to technological innovation to customer buying habits is undergoing change. Navigating this post-pandemic period will be a significant challenge, unless you have some help to guide you.
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]]>Trends, opportunities and challenges that are driving the need for greater automation
If you work with channel partners, there’s a strong chance that your world has seen more upheaval in the past two years than in the previous five. Everything from business economics to technological innovation to customer buying habits is undergoing change. Navigating this post-pandemic period will be a significant challenge, unless you have some help to guide you.
That’s why we are here.
Here’s an overview of the top business priorities that channel partners have heading into 2022 and beyond. We present them now so you can factor these realities into your future partner plans and programs. Note: most trends examined below formed before the pandemic set in. They will likely have significant influence long after Covid-19 and its variants subside.
Let’s start with a big one, the future of work, careers and organizations.
Channel partners face a number of challenges and opportunities, none more pressing the aligning their organizations and capabilities to the broad concept known as “the future of work.” Thanks to the pandemic, technological advances and shifting social norms, we can safely say that the future of work will be more mobile, virtual and automated than before. It will also be more measured, decentralized and specialized.
“Companies are now looking at a permanent shift in how they work — reassessing workflows, processes, business logic, and even real estate investments,” writes Forrester Research analyst Jay McBain.
The implications for channel partners couldn’t be greater. Regardless of industry, they will have to rethink their own workplace realities not to mention retool to better serve customers. Consider McKinsey & Co., whose research finds that between 20-25% of workforces in advanced economies could work from home between three and five days a week. “This represents four to five times more remote work than before the pandemic and could prompt a large change in the geography of work, as individuals and companies shift out of large cities into suburbs and small cities,” according to McKinsey research.
In addition to new workplace norms, channel partners are working to better understand how occupations are changing. By 2030, virtually every occupation, for example, will be influenced or directly involved with digital technology, making every worker a knowledge worker in some fashion. What is more, as much of a quarter of the workforce will seek new occupations — not just new jobs — as a result of all the change. While estimates vary, one study predicts that nearly two-thirds of children today will eventually work in new jobs that don’t yet exist.
In addition to individuals, organizations themselves are changing. According to Gartner Research, “Companies will focus on expanding their geographic diversification and investment in secondary markets to mitigate and manage risk in times of disruption. This rise in complexity of size and organizational management will create challenges for leaders as operating models evolve.”
Thanks to these and other changes, channel partners of all stripes are working hard to plan and prepare for the future of work for 2022 and beyond.
In the tech world, thousands upon thousands of managed service providers (MSPs) have desks dedicated to tech specialists whose job it is to respond to customer trouble tickets all day long. Initially, many MSPs were cool to the idea of handing some of that work to artificial intelligence (AI) bots that could respond to low-level customer requests such as resetting a password. Many MSPs owners worried about the level of service the bots would provide to customers, and the toll such bots would have on workers who feared for their jobs.
Fast-forward to today. More MSP owners are comfortable with the increased sophistication of bots and more MSPs engineers are, too. The bots provide good, base-level service and free engineers up for more advanced duties. It’s a case of disruptive innovation that works for everyone.
Not all disruptive ideas, of course, do. (Taxi drivers and homeowners’ associations aren’t fans of Uber and Airbnb for a reason.) But where possible, channel partners have put disruptive innovations at the top of their lists of priorities both for themselves and their own customers. A third of tech industry channel partners who have added new vendors to their line cards of late say they have done so to “enter new markets like emerging tech,” according to tech industry trade association CompTIA.
In pharmaceuticals, channel partners are embracing new pharmacovigilance technologies that help prevent the adverse effects of incompatible drug prescriptions in care environments. A few years ago, such technology threatened Big Pharma middlemen but no longer. Channel partners are availing themselves of the latest innovations so they can offer unparalleled levels of services to their customers.
Then there are software marketplaces, which many tech partners are trying to figure out. Once thought to be a disruptive threat to their worlds, technology resellers now recognize that software marketplaces serve as a complement to their efforts to sell software. Many have embraced them to address specific customer needs, freeing them up to focus on higher-level deals and integrations.
What do HPE, Dell, Cisco, Nutanix and other tech giants have in common? They all have committed to offer most if not all of their tech portfolios as-a-service within a mere few years.
The reason is straightforward, according to research from The Alexander Group, a market consultancy that caters to enterprise vendors and buyers of technology. A late 2020 study by The Alexander Group found that everything-as-a-service (XaaS) market leaders are growing revenue from existing customers by more than 20% annually and improving their net revenue retention by 11%.
Overall, sales of infrastructure-as-service, which includes AWS, Google and Azure, are growing 40% year-over-year whiles sales of software-as-s-service are growing 30% annually. This compares to modest growth rates for products such as servers, routers and more.
This is a massive business model transformation for vendors and channel partners, alike. In fact, experts believe it is the single largest transformation in technology in two decades. “New XaaS revenue models require post-land investments across the entire customer life-cycle and are critical for continued growth and scale,” says The Alexander Group.
For channel partners in tech, this means a reduced emphasis on product reselling and more focus subscription sales, which is good because the latter provide a more predictable revenue stream and a more durable economic model than a big-ticket, transaction-oriented business.
More than semantics, the transformation to XaaS has wide-ranging implications for how channel partners staff, fund, grow and manage their organizations. Rather than product margins, more channel partners look to make money by monetizing their influence, says Wayne Monk, senior vice president of global alliances and channel sales at tech integrator and consultant ASG Technologies. Writing for VARinsights in January 2021, Monk says “some partners are shifting their business to provide more advisory and architecture-oriented services, while others are electing to innovate and sell their solutions.”
In addition to what they offer, channel partners are rethinking how they offer their value. Consider the insurance industry, which is greatly dependent on independent agents known as “intermediaries.” At the beginning of the pandemic, roughly 90% of life insurance agents’ sales conversations and nearly 70% of ongoing client interactions were done in person, according to McKinsey findings. By May 2020, that figured dropped to just 5%.
In a report on the industry, McKinsey addressed the broader and longer-term impacts that external forces are having on the business models and best practices of insurance channel partners: “Agents accustomed to in-person interactions are rapidly recalibrating to provide uninterrupted service to clients who may be facing severe health or economic challenges. These agents are also rethinking how they build relationships with prospective clients as most rely on in-person meetings.”
For decades, study after study revealed that consumers loathe shopping for cars. But year after year, car dealerships clung to the No. 1 thing car buyers hated most: price negotiation.
Then the pandemic set it. When it did, consumers turned en masse to online buying sites such as TrueCar, Carvana and Vroom, which offer a haggle-free sales experience and at-home delivery. To promote its emphasis on superior customer experiences, Vroom ran a TV ad during the 2021 Super Bowl that parodied traditional car dealer experiences.
While some saw the move as an afront to their businesses, some dealers changes policies to provide better customer experiences. This includes Bill Camastro, a dealer and partner in Gold Coast Cadillac in New Jersey. Camastro told Automotive News, “I hope every car dealer in the country saw that commercial, to be honest with you. All it’s going to do is improve them.”
Turns out he is right. Since the pandemic, more car dealers have embraced “no-haggle” selling and beefed-up other services including free-loaner cars, free customer pickup and online appointment scheduling.
Intermediaries in other collaborative industries are similarly pulling out all stops to elevate the customer experiences (CX) they provide. To better respond to customer tech support inquiries, tech channel partners are investing in professional services automation (PSA) platforms to a greater extent. PSA technology has been shown to translate into a 48% reduction in customer dissatisfaction and a 28% improvement in channel partner response time, according to a Forrester/Datto study
As their business models shift and the need to provide superior customer experiences increases, more tech channel partners are embracing what tech publication VARStreet professes: “Customer experience is the impression customers have of your brand through all interactions across the entire customer lifecycle.” Ditto for their enterprises. Today, more channel partners believe customer experience is the responsibility of every person in their organization, according to the publication. More than a third say it’s the single most important competitive differentiator that they have, according to CompTIA.
Not surprisingly, more tech industry channel partners are retraining their sales staffs and support personnel to embrace this new reality. Salespeople, for example, are being retrained to be more empathetic to customers because their duties have grown beyond simply selling; they now include retaining customers, in many instances.
For decades, intermediaries in many industries relied on the brands of others to attract customers’ attention.
Watch dealers, for example, counted on Rolex and Omega to bring people into their stores. Tech channel partners counted on Microsoft, Cisco and HP to essentially do the same.
But times have changed. The idea that channel partners aren’t really interested in marketing is a maxim that is an outdated as a business without a website. While it bucks conventional thinking, marketing spending as percent of revenue has actually increased among tech channel partners in recent years. Traditionally less than 5% of revenue in a given year, some partners now spend upwards of 7% or more of revenue promoting their brands. Smaller channel partners, in particular, spend a greater percent of revenue on marketing than their larger channel counterparts, on average.
Interestingly, building their own brand doesn’t necessarily come at the expense of building a vendor’s brand. Just the opposite. Research from the tech trade association CompTIA found in 2021 that nearly one-third of channel partners want to tap into digital the marketing expertise and social media know-how of vendor partners. In addition, channel partners want to “appear bigger and more sophisticated to the customer” thanks to new digital capabilities.
To burnish their images, channel partners in various industries are hiring more branding and marketing specialists. They are investing in new tools. And they are rethinking everything from the language they use to attract customers to the way they measure engagement and the journeys they create for customers.
These journeys have led them to affiliate with a variety of new influencers and thought leaders. In the tech industry alone, they are nearly 150 different social media groups for VARs, MSPs and other channel partners, according to Forrester Research.
Ultimately, what channel partners want is a way to attract new business that doesn’t detract from their ability to serve existing customers. Scaling, thus, has become a priority in everything they do.
Which brings us to our last 2022 channel partners priority: rationalizing an internal tech stack. That, of course, is the single most important lever a channel partner can pull to facilitate their ability to operate at scale.
The adage that you cannot run a channel on spreadsheets is taking hold among channel partners in several industries. In tech, for example, some channel partners have gorged on tech automation — so much so that they are now trying to rationalize and standardize on a tech stack that’s optimized to help advance them in key areas including service automation, marketing, vendor relationship management, sales and more. Others — the bulk of channel partners — are just getting started.
Regardless of where they are in their journey, channel partners are eager to establish some norms and standards. Again, take a typical tech channel partner today such as an MSP.
In today’s market, an MSP typically runs its services division with a PSA and/or a remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform. It will also leverage a customer relationship management (CRM) platform such as Salesforce to help its sales team. And it will leverage marketplaces and dashboards provided to it by key distributors.
In addition to these tools, MSPs typically rely on one or more dashboards to monitor their cybersecurity operations and others for marketing. The most important tools for executive leadership are partner relationship management (PRM) platforms that provide business leaders a window into their sales pipelines, employee certifications, through channel marketing activities and more.
All of these compete for the time and energy of partners who have no time to slow down or patience for poorly designed interfaces. Nor can they afford to invest in redundant tools that confuse rather than simplify. Consider, for example, questions raised by tech consultant BCG: “Does the fourth collaboration software help, or does it just confuse us…? Finding the right balance is essential to making Smart Work productive.”
Not surprisingly, Monk from ASG Technologies believes the tech industry is entering an era in which channel partners are leveraging “hyper-automation.”
“To service these new demands from end customers, many channel partners are transitioning to hyper-automation, which is imperative to delivering a digital service because it builds resilience and improves the experience. Automation is top of mind because people aren’t in offices or data centers anymore. They’re confronted with manual tasks and human dependencies and need to stitch them together in an automated way,” Monk writes in VARinsights. “In the race to a digital-first, virtual-first world, partners that can keep pace will pull ahead.”
Which brings us to your company.
When it comes to your tech stack, are you helping or hurting yourself when it comes supporting your channel partners? To be sure you’re aligned with their priorities for 2022 and beyond, do yourself a favor and sign up for a demo from Impartner today. Let the market leader in PRM show you what hyper automation should look like and what it can do for your business.
For more on channel and programs, be sure to read, “Seven Signs Your Partner Program Is Too Complicated.”
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]]>A new global study reveals that one-quarter of channel partners will not work with a vendor that does not “fully prioritize a seamless, workable partner experience.”
Does that sound like you?
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]]>Rigid requirements, underutilized assets and unused market development funds. If your company suffers from even one of these, then your partner program may be too complicated.
By T.C. Doyle
A new global study reveals that one-quarter of channel partners will not work with a vendor that does not “fully prioritize a seamless, workable partner experience.”
Does that sound like you?
If the question makes you even the least bit uncomfortable, then your channel program may be too complicated. If partners have to hire additional staff just to navigate your program, that’s not a sign of enthusiasm; it’s an indication of a problem in the making.
When partner programs are overly complex, satisfaction suffers and utilization declines. A better way? Simplify to improve partner experiences and focus your own thinking. “Complexity reduction helps companies simplify their strategy, organization, products, processes and information technology,” says management consultant Bain & Co.
Still not certain where you stand? Ask yourself if any of the following seven signs apply to your organization. If your program suffers from even one or two of these conditions, it may be time to streamline your program.
Ever tried to check out of a retail store only to be bombarded with requests for detailed personal information before you leave? If so, let that lingering experience guide you as you devise your onboarding process. Consider the amount of information you request at the moment of signup. A detailed business plan from a partner that has never completed a single transaction with your organization, not to mention other bits of information, is simply too much. Overwhelming partners with unnecessary questions or setting unrealistic expectations will leave new partners with a bad taste.
Also, onboarding should not take days or weeks. If you cannot capture the excitement of a new partner in the same day they demonstrate it, then you risk losing their enthusiasm.
Finally, match your demands to the value your ideas and innovations offer partners. If your company develops a simple widget that solves a specific problem, don’t expect partners to comply with rigid demands for training and certification.
When partners do not navigate past your homepage, that’s a signal that something is amiss. Likely, the problem is navigation — i.e., channel partners cannot find the materials they need to complete a task or monitor their progress with your channel program. Modern partner portals simplify navigation and make it possible for vendors to customize views for partners. With the right tools, you can create custom dashboards that surface the most relevant information that partners seek, be it information on program compliance, training updates, deal status and more. Partners love it.
Not everything can be surfaced on a homepage, obviously, so navigation to specific assets or landing pages should be unambiguously clear. What is more, resist the temptation to sell partners from within your partner portal. A partner portal is not the place for ads or marketing materials, especially information that is readily available from your public website. Unless materials are specifically devoted to partner needs and interests, do not clog your partner portal with “filler” material.
Leads are one of the most frequently requested items from partners when it comes to your partner program. But lead dissemination is not generally a best practice among vendors. To be frank, most vendors are terrible when it comes to sharing leads. Email is a big reason why.
In many instances, email is the common way vendors share leads with channel partners. When an account manager is ready, they send an email to a chosen partner. But email leaves a lot to be desired. Some emails wind up in SPAM folders. Others do not stand out and get lost in partners’ daily deluge. Even emails that get opened and read leave a lot to be desired. With an email system, there’s little way to track activity and receptivity.
In contrast, automated lead systems ask partners to accept or deny leads. Accepted leads are then tracked in an automated fashion. The bottom line is you spend an enormous amount on lead generation. Don’t let that money go to waste because you skimped on a closed-loop tracking system.
A recent study in the U.S. revealed that only 10% of taxpayers could correctly answer, “how many different tax brackets are there in the U.S.?” (The answer is seven.)
With some channel programs, channel partners are similarly unaware. They find tiers confusing, partner classifications inconsistent with conventional wisdom and benefits and requirements baffling. When any of these conditions occur, partners sit tight in a comfortable groove unaware that additional benefits may only be a few deals from their grasp.
If you have stagnation in your program — i.e., partners remain at one level the entire time they are affiliated with your organization — they you may have a communications problem that is bigger than any motivational challenge you face. Engaged partners will pull deals from one vendor and give it to another if there’s a reasonable advantage to be gained. Incentives that cause them to do such things could be a bigger discount, a higher after-sale rebate or better technical and marketing support.
Where possible, provide a visual reminder of where partners are in terms of program advancement. If your airline can show you where you stand within its frequent flyer program, then your partner portal should be able to do so as well.
We could write a book on the amount of money that is wasted on market development funds (MDF) — and probably pay for it its publication with unspent MDF that piles up year-after-year.
MDF programs fail for two primary reasons: complexity and rigidity. Take 2020, for example. When the pandemic disrupted work life as we know it, it was abundantly clear that MDF plans devised six months earlier were not going to help anyone. Money for golf outings in the spring? On-site customer demos with dinner and a ball game afterwards? These ideas and more had to be scrapped. In response, many vendors simply extended time horizons on certain marketing activities. But they did so without considering what the “new normal” in marketing events, campaigns and materials should look like.
If you ask partners, most will tell you that the problem they have with MDF programs is a lack of actionable information. They do not know what funds are available or what they can do with them. Worse, even when they qualify for money, they do not know how they can claim their funds or apply for reimbursements.
How do I reset my password? How do I update my company’s information in your partner locator? Who can help me with a certification question?
You implement a partner portal, in part, to address questions on partner programs. Alas, far too many partner program portals wind up raising more questions than they answer. While many concerns can be addressed with a basic design change or better planning, improving the overall satisfaction with your partner program and reducing complexity requires more. It requires a change in philosophy.
Think about it: your partners are highly capable, independent businesses who tend to take care of themselves. When they encounter partner programs that do not encourage or, worse, allow for self-service, antibodies deep within them surface. So change your philosophy.
Give partners the ability to update information on their own. Doing so spares your team from data entry and gives your partners a sense of control. Also, share information with partners liberally. This includes product roadmaps, competitive analyses and more. Treat them as true partners, in other words.
Lastly, do you monitor the number of partners that drift away from your program each year? Do you even know why once high-performing players ghost you? Chances are it’s not due to a lack of innovation or brand competitiveness. More often than not, it’s because your company is difficult to work with. In fact, studies show that partners will stay with vendors with competitive shortcomings so long as they are easy to deal with.
If you’re wondering where you stand with your partners, ask yourself if you could pass their “Rule of 10” test. To be relevant with a partner, you should aim to either be in a partner’s list of top 10 vendors or account for 10% of their revenue.
Lastly, clean up any messes. If it takes two weeks for a partner to get a price quote, all the benefits in the world will not make your program successful, not at the current velocity of business today. If you have a chronic and/or outsized problem, then pull out all stops to address it immediately.
The German food retailer Aldi is doing what few possible in the U.S.: find a niche that exists between big box stores such as Walmart and Costco, online purveyors including Amazon, and traditional grocers such as Kroger’s and Safeway. Aldi established a foothold in the U.S. with a simple formula: basic staples at fair prices in convenient locations. If you’re looking for 40 varieties of toothpaste, Aldi is not your place. But if you suffer from decision fatigue and want superior experiences, then Aldi might just have what you’re looking for.
Which brings us to your partner program. Everything should as simple as possible, but no simpler, as Albert Einstein used to say. Simplicity for the sake of simplicity isn’t your goal, in other words. Satisfaction is — the kind that is bast achieved with world-class automation that not only addresses the challenges you have today, but already anticipates the ones you will face next.
See for yourself how partner automation can help reduce complexity and elevate satisfaction among your channel partners. Click here for your Impartner demo today.
Your partners will be glad you did.
For more ideas to help improve your channel program, be sure to check out, “Growth Hacks for Pumping Up Indirect Sales.”
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]]>Below are five proven ideas that will help you grow your channel no matter your industry or definition of growth.
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]]>The answer to, “How to grow my channel?” is here
By T.C. Doyle
Whether you are new to partnering or a seasoned veteran, chances are you or one of your peers has Googled, “How to grow my channel?” If so, Impartner has answers for you.
Below are five proven ideas that will help you grow your channel no matter your industry or definition of growth. Whether you seek to grow the amount of revenue partners generate with your ideas and innovations, increase the number of partners that affiliate with your organization or even elevate the awareness of your partner program, then “Growth Hacks for Pumping Up Indirect Sales” is for you. The following includes a mix of tips on best practices that cut across several aspects of your business — from economics to program development to partner engagement.
Let’s start with a short summary and then dive into each hack more thoroughly:
If you were asked by a prospective partner how they will make money with your ideas and/or innovations, could you answer succinctly? Could you also respond in significant detail? If not, then chances are you haven’t properly defined your partner value proposition, which is the sum total of why partners will want to work with you.
Your value proposition includes the economics of your partner program, the benefits it offers and even the competitive advantages it provides. While this blog will address several programmatic aspects below, your primary duty is to figure out how partners will make money with you. If you cannot see a clear path to enhanced profitability for partners, then they won’t either.
As you develop your economic model, consider two things above all others: the market landscape you compete in and the total addressable market (TAM) your products and/or services serve. If your ideas compete in a price-sensitive market with small or even negative margins, then you may have to budget for significant financial incentives for partners to get them interested. Likewise, it helps to be able to show partners any additional economic opportunity they will enjoy above and beyond selling your products and/or services. In the tech world, for example, many vendors attract partners because they can demonstrate that for every $1 worth of technology that partners sell, they enjoy an additional $4-$9s worth of additional opportunities around services and consulting.
For more on developing your partner value proposition, don’t miss, “Why Would a Partner Want to Do Business with You?”
Partners come in many different types and sizes. They have different business models, customer priorities and capabilities, too. Because of this, it doesn’t make sense to treat them in a monolithic way. To connect more deeply with partners, which is the key to growing your business with them, you must understand the journeys they are on and how those journeys intersect with your objectives.
Again, consider the tech community, which counts hundreds of thousands of partners in North America alone. In the tech market, tech partners look to vendors to help solve a variety of problems. Some partners need an economic powerhouse to help drive their businesses. Others need a new vendor to help ween them from unprofitable lines of business and/or outdated business models. And still others need a quick fix to address a particular customer need.
Because of these differences, your partner program should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate different partner types, but not so untamed that it offers no structure. To achieve this objective, it helps to define your potential partner types and map out what they offer both to you and require from you — their journeys, in other words.
Experts including Achieve Unite, a member of the Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB), agree that enablement matters as much as remuneration when it comes to partner journeys. Partners, after all, sell what they know. If you can help partners get to know you well, they will recommend your offerings more often than your competitors’.
No matter the researcher, study after study on partnering reveals that partners want many things from vendors, “ease of doing business” high among them.
In industry after industry, partners complain about vendor complexity and intransigence. Given how long complexity and rigidity have plagued partnering in various industries, it’s a wonder more progress hasn’t been made. That’s not to say forward-leaning leaders aren’t trying.
Consider software vendor GreyCastle. When GreyCastle decided to draw up a list of things it wanted to achieve with a reconfigured partner program, reducing complexity and unnecessary customization rose to the top of its list based on partner requests. Before it relaunched its program, GreyCastle recognized eight different partner types and allowed many variances to its standard contracts. After analysis, GreyCastle decided that this flexibility was coming at the cost of efficiency. So, it cut partner types to three. Doing so saved the company money and rewarded it with more time and energy to engage with partners in the field.
Then there’s Vertiv, a global provider of data center and communications services to global companies. When Vertiv launched a new deal registration program with Impartner automation, the company made a conscious decision to ask for less information than before. Dispensing with “nice-to-knows” and going with only “need-to-knows” helped increase the number of registered deals by several hundred million dollars.
In addition to complexity, intransigence also hampers channel growth. Consider your own list of requirements. If your ideas and innovations are complex and require special knowledge or skills to sell, then you’re likely to impose limits on who can resell your offerings and in which circumstances. In a post-pandemic world when everything from business models to staffing realities are in flux, rigid restrictions may no longer make sense outside of regulated industries.
Lastly, for a program to work properly, it must recognize that partners often belong to many programs in addition to your own. Taking this reality into consideration when devising your growth plans will pay dividends down the road.
There’s an old joke about advertising that goes like this: everyone who has ever paid for advertising knows half of their investment is wasted, they just don’t know which half.
Sound familiar? It might if your organization has allocated a heap of money for market development funds (MDF) that either goes unspent or is lavished upon activities that bear no fruit.
There’s no reason to stand for this status quo today. With modern tools available to every channel program professional, you can measure the efficacy of marketing campaigns, monitor partner activities and better manage your partner investments. If you believe market your MDF is being squandered, then chances are it is.
So make changes, not based on whims and intuition, but facts and data from your PRM and other automation tools, instead. The same goes for other parts of your channel that you want to grow.
Instead of hoping that under-performing partners will suddenly one-day turn into valued contributors, consider eliminating them form your partner program altogether. Doing so will free up time and resources to lavish upon companies that make active commitments to your company, and reduce your stress levels, too.
Making these types of changes requires more than a change in policy; it may require a change in thinking. Consider: Instead of measuring success by the number of partners your organization recruits, prioritize partner sales output, instead. Far too many companies focus on the wrong metric, resulting in miscues later.
If you’re still struggling with upending the status quo, then take smaller steps before you leap. Try working with underperforming partners for two solid quarters. During this time, ply them with extra guidance and handholding. If they still don’t generate your sales, then rest assured you have done what you could and cut them loose.
The idea that you can run an ecosystem with a spreadsheet or home-grown tech stack is antiquated; you cannot at scale. It’s like trying to apply for a job today through the mail.
Today, world-class partner programs depend on world class automation. The reasons are many if not obvious. Consider findings from a study commissioned by Impartner. It found that nearly one-third of companies that automate their channel programs saw an increase in revenue. What is more, 29% enjoyed a decrease in partner-related administrative costs. The study also found that more than three-quarters of companies that automate their partner programs report a ROI in less than 18 months, while even more say they gain a competitive advantage in their respective market.
In addition to these benefits, automating your partner program provides your organization with something that spreadsheets can never faithfully offer: actionable insight that is based on real-time partner data. With these insights, vendors can make more informed decisions about resource allocation, pricing changes, marketing activities, sales rewards and more.
Then there are the partner benefits, which number many. Take onboarding.
When one Impartner global customer ditched its outdated tech stack, partner onboarding was reduced from three days to just 90 seconds. Imagine the increase in partner satisfaction this company enjoyed a result?
Today’s partner automation tools offer partners consumer-like experiences that are similar to Amazon.com or Netflix. And they do so for more than just onboarding. Today, modern partner automation platforms simplify everything from training and certification to deal registration, through channel marketing and more.
Before you launch your next program, find out what your partners’ expectations are when it comes to these disciplines. If your competitors rely on partner resource management, then you will have to, too. You cannot pump up your indirect sales with one arm tied behind your back, in other words.
No matter how you define “grow my channel” — be it expand into new geographies, enter new vertical markets, increase sales volume through existing partners, recruit new allies, etc. — the above tips will help you in your cause. While we might be impartial, we firmly believe that automating your channel is the most important tip we can offer. We built our entire business around the idea that this is the single best way to grow a channel. We believe it now as much as we did since the day we opened our doors for business.
See for yourself how partner automation can help you answer the No. 1 question you ask yourself daily, “How to grow my channel?” Sign-up for your Impartner demo today.
You’ll be glad you did.
If you’re looking for more ideas on how to improve your channel, don’t miss this article on marketing collateral: “To Improve Partner Content, Borrow a Page from Your Drip Marketing Handbook.”
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]]>The post Tech Giant Vertiv Scales Partner Program Massively with Impartner Automation appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>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.
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]]>The post The Most Important Tool Missing from Your Salesforce Toolbox appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>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.
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]]>The post Channel Basics Revealed: The Pros and Cons of Exclusive Partner Deals appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>Key insights when thinking about partner agreements and negotiations
By T.C. Doyle
When building a channel program, prepare yourself for an inevitable question from one or more partners: “Are you willing to sign an exclusive deal?”
The question often pops up when you enter a new market and/or when a partner senses a unique sales opportunity that revolves around your product or service. It’s a conversation you should prepare for as you build your partner program, says channel program expert and Tenego Academy president and founder Donagh Kiernan.
Kiernan, a member of the Impartner Channel Chiefs Advisory Board (CCAB), advises clients on how to build partner programs and enable their channel personnel. He advises having conversations about exclusive deals when you begin developing agreements and negotiations for partner contracts*.
Why is pretty straightforward: “Exclusive agreements protect vendors and their partners from either party working with competition for a set period of time,” explains Kiernan. “Exclusivity affords partners the freedom to develop a market without having to worry about a competing reseller, and vendors the assurance that they have a dedicated sales ally who can provide access to a market, build a sales pipeline and speed their time to success.”
Exclusive deals offer both promises and challenges. No matter where you are in your partner-building journey, you’re going to have to consider them at some point. In this article, we examine the pros and cons of exclusive deals, a little business history for perspective, and questions you will want to ask before you move forward with any decisions.
Before we dive in deeper, please note: exclusive agreements don’t have to last forever or be to all or nothing propositions. Also, exclusive arrangement should always be vetted by veteran legal experts as exclusive deals are subject to different if not confusing local and national laws, in many instances.
Understanding Exclusivity
Understanding exclusivity starts with definitions. You can, for example, define “exclusive” in any way you wish. In general, exclusive deals involve granting a partner sole access to a market as defined by geography, product specialty, company type, customer segment, vertical niche, use case or more. You can also make your “exclusive” more specific, such as a list of named accounts. Again, laws vary from region-to-region, but you get the idea.
When carving up a market, specificity is the key. “Exclusive” can be as simple as a registered deal in a PRM, or as broad as a vertical market such as “government” or geography such as “the UK.” Regardless of what you choose, you will want any definition of “exclusive” to pass the McKinsey & Co. “MECE test.” A territory, sector or niche, for example, should be “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.”
The pros exclusivity? There are many. An exclusive deal can provide you a knowledgeable partner who is dedicated to the success of your products or services. It can also provide instant access to a desired set of customers, plus a local presence and trusted ally in a region or vertical market that you alone don’t have great familiarity with.
On the downside, there are as several cons that may or may not influence your decision making. When you grant a partner an exclusive deal, for example, your sales priorities become subject to the agenda of another company. That may or not work for your organization or strategy. Similarly, your exclusive deal may mean that your sales opportunities are limited to a partner’s existing customer base or tied to its sales savvy. If you sell sophisticated goods and/or services, you become defined by your exclusive partner’s technical acumen or dedication to customer service.
There are also other considerations. Ask yourself: are you willing to grant exclusivity to a partner that represents one of your rivals? How would you respond if a high-performing exclusive partner wants to expand into another market where you already have existing partners? Would you extend its exclusivity? If so, how?
Given the pros and the cons of exclusivity, it’s not surprising that business history includes examples of success and failures of exclusive deals. Apple, for example, signed a deal that made communications giant AT&T the sole carrier for the then-new Apple iPhone. (The deal worked spectacularly.) But a previous exclusive deal involving Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs failed miserably. That deal, struck in the late 1980s, gave computer reseller Businessland exclusive rights to sell the NeXT computer to educators and students. It was just one of several missteps that doomed the device and, ultimately, the company.
Questions to Consider
If asked for exclusivity, you need to consider several questions before deciding. They include:
What to do when things go wrong is an especially important consideration. The problems you encounter with an exclusive deal could run the gamut from very firm (you partner gave business to a competitor) to more squishy (your partner took sides with an end-customer over a contract dispute). At any one time, the calculus of your deal could change when one or more of the following occurs:
If any of these developments occur, change is inevitable.
One last thing: don’t confuse fidelity with loyalty. You might be tempted to grant a partner exclusive rights to a market because of its pledge of fidelity to you. What might make better sense is to enlist the support of loyal partners that are equally capable and dedicated to customers’ success but may represent other brands.
For more thoughts on how best to build your partner program, but sure to check out our series on program building blocks, Channel 101*. In addition, see for yourself how partner automation can help increase your sales by a full third. Sign-up for your Impartner demo today.
Coming next in Part Seven: Partner Program Tiers and Supports Matrix
*The Channel 101 series was produced with insight and information provided by Tenego Academy. Tenego Academy is a Cork, Ireland-based company that provides support to companies wanting to grow their organizations with third-party “channel partners” be they dealers, agents, referral partners, distributors, consultants and more.
Tenego Academy’s 12-part “Build Your Partner Program Like a Global Leader” education program helps companies looking to create, grow and/or optimize a partner program regardless of their size or market focus. No matter where your company is in its channel partner program journey, you will benefit from Tenego Academy’s 12-part program, which covers everything from channel strategy to partner recruitment to automation and more.
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].
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]]>The post You Cannot Achieve Your Goals Without a Marketing Engine to Drive Your Indirect Sales appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>You rely on marketing automation for your own salespeople, so why leave your partners to fend for themselves when your brand is on the line?
More than three-quarters of marketers use some form of marketing automation technology today, according to Social Media Today. By the end of 2021, the number will be nearly 90% among enterprise organizations.
When it comes to investing in through channel partner automation (TCMA) — the kind that vendors use to enable channel partners to run effective marketing campaigns on their behalf — the numbers tell a very different story. Less than half of vendor organizations provide TCMA technology to partners, according to Forrester Research. While the number is growing, it’s not close to what it should be for organizations to fulfill their marketing ambitions, according to Forrester Research analyst Jay McBain.
For years, McBain has predicted that a “third-wave” of digital selling will take root in the corporate world, one that is propelled, in part, by business partners that historically haven’t played much of a role in vendor brand enhancement.
“Enabling partners of all types to leverage vendor content, messaging, branding, and demand generation initiatives in their local markets is critical to driving a winning customer experience,” McBain has written. “Those brands that can balance their direct and indirect execution while ensuring consistent customer expectations through distributed and localized marketing will have outsized success in the market.”
Despite its promise, however, a lack of widespread adoption of TCMA is holding back this promising wave of business transformation. This begs a question that you should consider if your investments into TCMA are underwhelming:
You don’t compete without marketing automation for your company, so why leave your partners to fend for themselves when your brand is on the line?
We at Impartner, which provides one of the world’s most advanced TCMA platforms, have heard all the excuses before. The three we hear most are:
Here’s why you’re kidding yourself if you believe these falsehoods.
Our existing CRM and marketing automation platform does just fine on its own
No doubt MAPs have revolutionized go-to-market strategies the world over. But MAPs aren’t designed to help you effectively market your products and services through partners. For that, you’ll need a TCMA, which is purpose built for the task.
Here are three reasons why your MAP is no substitute for TCMA:
Consider some specific things you cannot do in a MAP that you can easily do with a TCMA. With a robust TCMA solution, you can customize campaigns around products, services, price points, geographies, reseller authorizations and much more. You cannot do that with a MAP. Nor can you give partners the flexibility to run your campaigns on their time schedule with a MAP.
Also, you can easily attach a partner’s logo to your mailings and landing pages with a TCMA, but not in a MAP. You can also append a partner’s social media feed or its URL to its homepage with your TCMA, but not with your typical MAP.
We could go on — and on — but you get the picture. Like a screwdriver, you can do a lot with your existing MAP. But try as you might, you cannot use it to inflate a tire.
TCMA is an under-utilized investment
While accurate, this sentiment if also woefully incomplete. Impartner has done extensive research on the topic and identified why TCMA systems are chronically underutilized. Among other things, business partners complain that ease of use leaves them wanting and that key steps are not automated. To combat this, Impartner has launched a new TCMA platform offers partners a simple, four-step adoption process can be completed in minutes — literally. After enrolling, partners quickly realize that vendor campaigns will run automatically afterwards, resulting in a steady stream of leads that can flow indefinitely. What is more, all co-branding is automated. No additional partner input is required in order to participate in campaigns once a partner provides its logo and contact information.
Channel partners aren’t really interested in marketing; they focus on technology instead
While once true, this maxim is an outdated as a DVD player. Contrary to popular belief, marketing spending as percent of revenue has actually increased among partners as they have tried to promote their brands along with those of their vendors. Small companies, in particular, have hiked their spending. In fact, they spend a greater percent of revenue on marketing than their larger channel counterparts, on average.
But don’t just take our word. Consider CompTIA’s “State of the Channel” study. Researchers have probed historically probed thousands upon thousands of partners worldwide on their view of go-to-market strategies and more. In particular, researchers asked, “Which of the following facets of joint selling/marketing [with vendors] are most relevant to your firm and/or most likely to contribute value?”
At the top of list, naturally, are the usual suspects: more quality leads and better negotiating leverage. But also high on the list is something that underscores a growing desire among partners to step up their marketing with vendor allies: the opportunity to tap into digital the marketing expertise and social media know-how of vendor partners. Today, nearly one-third of partners today say these capabilities are highly relevant to their organizations. So, too, is the ability to “appear bigger and more sophisticated to the customer” thanks to new digital capabilities.
Which brings us back to you. You have a powerful sales engine today. But without a TCMA, there’s no way you can fire it on all cylinders. How do you expect to get your destination on time?
For insights on how you can use a TCMA to drive your indirect marketing, start by clicking here.
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]]>From resellers to consultants, you have plenty of options when it comes to partners
If you’re a fan of the Annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, you know that dogs come in all shapes and sizes.
The same is true for business partners, though even partners themselves would joke that some of the dogs are better groomed.
Looks notwithstanding, your channel partners can be your best friends in the market. They will steady your company in good times and bad, and provide your customers with satisfaction that you alone simply cannot provide at scale.
In part one of Honing Your Partner Proposition, we zeroed in on the basic components of building a channel. In this installment of the “Channel 101” series, we will focus on the different types of partners you will likely encounter, especially in the high tech, cybersecurity and fin-tech markets.
Once you identify and create the components of your basic partner program, you will want to consider creating specific requirements and rewards for different partner types. To do so, it helps to understand their businesses to a greater degree.*
Partners differentiate or categorize themselves in a variety of ways, including:
When you consider your total addressable market (TAM), you might be surprised to learn that there is a wide array of third-party organizations that may be suited to help you achieve your objectives. Here’s a sampling of different partner types, complete with an overview of what they do and why it makes sense for you to consider working with them.
Partner Types
Volume Resellers
High-volume partners are skilled in delivering innovation at scale. They often trade in multiple geographies and are very responsive to changing market dynamics buffeted by disruptive innovations, economic upheaval and changing customer buying habits.
For vendors, they offer existing relationships, sales competency, local influence if not presence and strong logistical capabilities.
On the downside, volume resellers are not always brand loyal or technically astute. Because they work in highly competitive environments, they often demand financial uplifts and marketing development funds.
Your best bet to connect with them: demonstrate your proactive sales and marketing prowess (so they don’t have to do that heavy lifting) and show them a way to achieve higher margins with the sale of your products and services.
VARs/Systems Integrators
For tech and other vendors, VARs and SIs are credible and influential sales and delivery partners.
They boast subject matter expertise (SME), vertical market knowledge and market reach. They are tight with mid-market customers and thrive in complex, multi-vendor environments.
What makes them difficult partners? It’s hard to secure their mind share. They have high employee turnover, long sales cycles and meager marketing resources if not capabilities. In many industries, they are experiencing significant financial upheaval as a result of digital transformation among their customers. They are looking for help transitioning to a new business model in many instances and are looking for organizations that can lead the way.
Your best appeal to these organizations, thus, is to showcase the additional service opportunities your innovation creates for them and your commitment to them regardless of what business model they latch onto.
Service Providers
Service providers thrive on repeatable business, long-term contracts and project-based fees.
Their strengths: longstanding ties to customers, and/or legal regulatory incumbency. Though they may be lumbering, they have scale and outsized influence in many markets. They also have honed businesses and can thrive in low-margin conditions.
Their weaknesses are they are challenged by stiff competitors including outsourcers. They are sometimes slow to react to disruptive innovation and have limited partnering experience in many instances.
What they want is upsell opportunities, new service offerings and scalable pricing.
In some instances, they also want to be treated as customers, not partners, which can muddle your contractual relationships with these companies.
The key to working with these organizations is understanding their business models and intersecting with their existing workstreams.
Sales Agents
In many industries, such as insurance, Real Estate and telecommunications, sales agents are ubiquitous. They are sales and transaction-oriented, and motivated by commissions and fees. More and more, they are very eager to embrace recurring revenue sales models that reward them over time.
Sales agents boast close ties to customers and an ability to close transactions. Because of their ubiquity, they often give vendors unrivaled geographical reach.
On the downside, they are often short-term focused and brand agnostic. In some fields, they are technical wizards while in others they are outmatched by specialty resellers.
Sales agents want clearly defined programs, leads and proven compensation models that pay out over time. And they expect and prefer that a vendor handle billing, support and more.
Consultants
Consultants are driven by business relationships and service projects. Historically, they have lived off billable hours and project-based fees though their business models are changing. Many now prefer service level agreements (SLAs) or contracts that reward them for improving business outcomes.
On the plus side, they have influence with decision makers and subject matter expertise. On the downside, they typically have their own agenda, do not make the bulk of their money on the sale of goods and services, and may prefer a level of independence you might find uncomfortable.
What they want most is anything that they can turn into a service opportunity. They also want referral revenue.
Managing these relationships requires significant effort. And your return on investment (ROI) can be difficult to quantify. But their access to key decision makers can be very appealing.
Distributors
Think of distributors as the middleman’s middleman. They are responsible for providing the products and services that vendors develop. Everything they do they do it at scale. They are known for the breadth and depth of their relationships.
Their strengths include existing reseller networks, support sophistication, proactive marketing and sales support.
Their weaknesses include challenging finances, outmoded business models and a lack of sales sophistication for more advanced ideas and innovations.
Your best option for winning them over is showing them sales momentum, complementary relationships and/or helping them launch into market adjacencies.
One thing to note: they require significant attention (think cash) to get their internal salespeople interested in your offerings. Once you sign up a distributor, in other words, your journey just beginning, not ending.
ISVs
In many industries, these are specialized developers of digital products and services sold commercially or embedded into other products.
ISVs are driven by the sale of their products and the retention of users. They are also keen on aligning with those who can pair up to create new combinations of value.
For third-party vendors, ISVs offer their own marketing and sales mechanisms, and additional lift for your products and services. On the downside, they can be slow to decide on anything and they get territorial if your “complementary” products and services compete with anything they offer now or plan to do so in the future.
What they seek is anything that can help make their own product more useful or “sticky” with a customer.
Trade Associations
Professional associations may not be the first partner type or organization that comes to your mind when thinking about partners, but they should be considered, nonetheless.
Trade and professional associations range in size from the American Medical Association (AMA) to the local Kiwanis Club. Organizations like these live to provide value to members and to raise awareness of their industry, market and/or cause.
They generate revenue from member dues, event attendance fees and more.
Why are they a possible partner? Well, consider their strengths. They are in regular contact with decision makers, provide invaluable insights and networking opportunities, and attract a consistent following.
Weaknesses? As a rule, they generally do not sell on behalf of vendors, and they often lack a formal mechanism for translating influence into action.
What motivates them? They want research, new members and sponsorships for ongoing activities.
Working with them takes some effort. But the returns can be enormous in terms of awareness and influence building.
Final Thoughts
Finally, it’s worth spending a moment on what Tenego Academy* calls model alignment.
After gaining traction with partners, you might learn that you could do more business through partners if you change or alter your deliverable in some fashion. The change could be in how you sell your technology, to whom and for how much.
You might learn, for example, that your ideas or innovations are too expensive compared to your competition. You might discover that there is insufficient add-on revenue opportunity associated with the sale of your product or service. You might also learn that third parties consider you difficult to work with.
All of this is perfectly natural and to be expected. Relax, in other words: you got this.
After thinking through your partner value proposition, make sure you don’t let that good work go to waste by under-investing in partner automation. It is worth repeating: The products and services you provide the market are only a portion of what partners evaluate when considering your value proposition. They also take into account your onboarding, marketing support, training and more — the kind made possible by world-class automation. For more insight, sign up for an Impartner demo today.
Coming next in Part Six: Partner Agreements and Negotiations
*The Channel 101 series was produced with insight and information provided by Tenego Academy. Tenego Academy is a Cork, Ireland-based company that provides support to companies wanting to grow their organizations with third-party “channel partners” be they dealers, agents, referral partners, distributors, consultants and more.
Tenego Academy’s 12-part “Build Your Partner Program Like a Global Leader” education program helps companies looking to create, grow and/or optimize a partner program regardless of their size or market focus. No matter where your company is in its channel partner program journey, you will benefit from Tenego Academy’s 12-part program, which covers everything from channel strategy to partner recruitment to automation and more.
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].
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]]>The fourth installment in the Channel 101 series offers insights on basic program components*
Question: Why would anyone want to partner with you?
If you think that’s impertinent, then chances are you haven’t thought through everything that is required to build a successful partner program. Whether you’re new to channels or struggling to make them work, you’re going to have to hone your partner value proposition. It’s nothing less than the raison d’etre of your entire program.
Put bluntly, you partner value proposition is the sum total of all the reasons why partners will want to align with your company. It includes the economics of partnership (as in how partners will make money with your company and what it will cost them to align with you), what kind of support you provide (both technical and marketing), how you stack up against the competition, how you fit with other vendors partners represent in the market and much, much more.
In this, our fourth installment of the “Channel 101” series, we zero in on the basic components of your partner value proposition. As a quick recap, we previously provided an overview of different partners, program requirements and more. Now it’s time to focus inwardly on the basic program components.
(Note: A complete partner value proposition includes more than an analysis of program components; in our next installment we will examine another aspect, different partner types and their needs.)
Your Partner Value Proposition: Basic Program Components
Let’s come back to the central question: why would anyone want to do business with your company? If you break it down, your answer will likely include a mix of the following elements:
Below, we break each of these down a bit more. One thing to note: partners of different maturity demand and/or need different things from your organization. New companies that come into your world will likely need more technical and sales support whereas partners more versed in your products and services will likely want more marketing support and/or opportunities to build on top of your innovations.
The Innovativeness of Your Solution
Chances are your solution solves one or more end-customer challenges. It might enable them to generate new revenue or better serve their own customers. In all likelihood, you have developed a sound customer value proposition. You’ll need the same for partners. Why is fairly obvious.
Suppose your product solves a challenge that undermines a revenue stream that would-be partners rely on? Good luck trying to get them to partner with you. What you must do is concisely tease out what business problem or market opportunity your idea addresses for partners. You must also look at how your idea is “packaged.” Some ideas, for example, cannot be packaged in way that they can be sold or supported by a third party. If that’s true with you, then partner recruitment is going to be a challenge.
Once you have a defined understanding of what problem your idea addresses, then you’re halfway there. Now you must think in terms of more mature partners who will likely want more detailed information about niche use cases and/or vertical market applicability.
The Economic Opportunity Your Product or Service Provides
Sell a widget, make a buck. That’s the basic reward model for many ideas sold though partners today. But it’s only a fraction of the economic reason why a third party would align with you.
In addition to immediate financial rewards, partners are looking to align with companies that help them create new business practices and/or revenue streams. They are also looking for those that create opportunities for them to sell additional services.
What attracts potential partners most is the total economic value that surrounds your offerings. In the tech world, many software vendors invite third parties to join their partner programs because they can demonstrate that for every $1 worth of their technology sold, there are an additional $4-$9s worth of additional services generated for partners. That’s a compelling proposition.
While that economic opportunity doesn’t exist for every industry, you’ll benefit from doing the math on what economic opportunity your ideas generate.
One additional thought: As your partner program matures, your financial incentives and rewards will have to be better thought out. You’ll want to keep things simple but must figure out how to reward different activities and behaviors. You’ll also have to figure out how to reward different levels of contribution, which will likely stimulate you to consider adding tiers and other adjuncts to your program.
Your Distinct Customer Acquisition Process
In addition to knowing how your ideas solve buyer problems, partners want to understand how your organization targets customers. The steps you take to educate the market, to position your ideas and even whom you target are key considerations for potential partners.
Critically, it is important to understand how your buyer’s journey meshes with your go-to-market activities with partners. In days of old, third-party dealers, consultants and more played a significant role in helping steer customers to your brand. Now Google and other influencers play a role. Today, most of a buyer’s journey is nearly done before end customers ever connect with one of your partners. This has significant ramifications in terms of how you educate, motivate, support and reward partners.
When thinking about the distinct customer journeys you create, you must factor in where partners fit into the mix. What stage do partners naturally fall in? And are your policies and programs aligned accordingly to yield the maximum from their input and support?
When your program is more advanced you will likely need to consider additional tools and means for generating demand. At some stage, you might turn to partner events. At the very least, you will need to think in terms of community and ecosystem building.
The Level and Type of Marketing and Sales Support You Provide
Ever been excited to attend an event because of the guest list only to arrive and find the food is lousy? If so, chances are the experience was less than what you hoped for.
That’s not unlike what happens in the partner world when a vendor comes to fore with a creative innovation and a lot of brand awareness but will no support for partners. The net result is the same: dissatisfaction all around.
To be successful with partners, you must provide them with comprehensive marketing and technical support. Don’t skimp.
When it comes to sales, early-stage partners will need help with basic questions so budget appropriately (read: disproportionately) for pre-sales support. And pony up for post-sales support, too. Remember: partners don’t have access to your engineering department the way that your direct sales team does, so make sure they are supported adequately.
When it comes to marketing, make sure they have everything they need to faithfully position, price, configure and sell your idea. They will need Powerpoints, sales scripts and more.
One final thought: share liberally. Some companies prefer not to share competitive information with partners because they fear it will fall into the wrong hands. Bad idea. Give partners the same access to tools and information that you provide your internal sales teams.
After getting established, you will need to think in terms of PR, success stories and, most importantly, leads. (We will address lead generation in another installment but just note that it requires an investment in automation.)
Your Commitment to Customer Success
This bucket covers a lot so we will focus on one aspect that matters regardless of what product, service or idea you provide. This is how committed you are to your partners’ customers’ success. In far too many instances, this is an afterthought. But it shouldn’t be.
Prepare yourself to work cooperatively to measure end customer satisfaction, not as a way to identify under-performing partners, which is something you should absolutely do, but more as a method to ensure that the people or entities actually using your ideas are as satisfied as they could be. Doing so sets you up for continued success, be it subscription renewals, upsell and cross-sell opportunities or more.
If your ideas are complex, then you must commit to seeing delivery through partners to the very end. Not all organizations do this. Some expect partners to handle everything once they step into a buyer’s sales cycle. This is a mistake for several reasons. It cuts your company off from important feedback and insights that customers will share based on their experiences, and it abstracts actionable steps that you could take to make things better.
One final thought: Whatever you to do with regards to customer success, make sure you do it in coordination with your partners. Do not let the final step in a long process unravel everything because a policy or bad practice ruins an otherwise solid relationship.
What do we mean? Think warranty claims, returns and more. Oftentimes, unrealistic demands on the part of idea originators spoil an otherwise healthy relationship. Be fair to the bitter end: your partners will appreciate it.
Final Thoughts
After thinking through basic program components, it’s worth spending a moment on what Tenego Academy* calls model alignment.
After gaining traction in your market, you might learn that you could do more business through partners if you change your approach in some fashion. The change could be how you sell your technology, to whom and for how much.
You might learn, for example, that your ideas or innovations are too expensive compared to your competition. You might discover that there is insufficient add-on revenue opportunity associated with the sale of your product or service. You might also learn that third parties consider you difficult to work with.
All of this is perfectly natural and to be expected. Relax, in other words: you got this.
After thinking through basic components, make sure you don’t let that good work go to waste by under-investing in partner automation. It is worth repeating: The products and services you provide the market are only a portion of what partners evaluate when considering your value proposition. They also take into account your onboarding, marketing support, training and more — the kind made possible by world-class automation. For more insight, sign up for an Impartner demo today.
Coming next in Part Five: How to Hone a Value Proposition That Appeals to Different Partner Types
*The Channel 101 series was produced with insight and information provided by Tenego Academy. Tenego Academy is a Cork, Ireland-based company that provides support to companies wanting to grow their organizations with third-party “channel partners” be they dealers, agents, referral partners, distributors, consultants and more.
Tenego Academy’s 12-part “Build Your Partner Program Like a Global Leader” education program helps companies looking to create, grow and/or optimize a partner program regardless of their size or market focus. No matter where your company is in its channel partner program journey, you will benefit from Tenego Academy’s 12-part program, which covers everything from channel strategy to partner recruitment to automation and more.
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].
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]]>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:
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].
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]]>The third installment in the Channel 101 series provides answers to get you moving
By T.C. Doyle
Congratulations on your decision to grow your business with partners. Choosing a leveraged sales model will almost certainly give your business some additional strength. But it requires significant effort to make the most of the leverage that partners can provide.
In the first two installments of the “Channel 101” series, we introduced the concepts of basic channel building in the tech industry. This includes the types of programs you can build, and the best ways to leverage current partners that may have come into your world. Now it’s time to get more serious and start thinking about the ideal partners for you.
In this installment, we examine ways to help you better understand the types of business partners that exist today, the ones that are best suited to your business, and the best ways to attract their interest.
“Determining the right type of partners that make the most sense for your business is a core step in building the ideal partner program,” says Donagh Kiernan, founder and CEO of Tenego Academy, a training and channel team support company that helps tech vendors build effective channel programs.
Understanding Company Types Before You Begin Your Evaluation
If you have a product or service to sell, you’re probably thinking first and foremost about recruiting reselling partners who can introduce you to new business. Building a successful partner program, however, requires more than signing up as many of these types of partners as possible. A better plan is to think in terms of your partner community as an ecosystem that thrives in the right conditions and survives in the most challenging ones.
Where to start? Begin by thinking in terms of the roles that you need third-parties to help with as you go to market. This includes:
While many partners provide all of these capabilities, very few are good in all areas. Rather than exhaust significant energy trying to cultivate ties to the ones in your market that excel in each area, you are better off recruiting partners that are best in class in one area or more. This way, you can ensure that you are covering all your end customers’ needs in given market.
There are many pluses to this approach. But it does require that you take the time to identify the company types that participate in your market, and the specific skills your product requires. There may be more that you think, including all the company types from your target customers’ point-of-view:
Even if you do not choose to work with all of these company types directly, you should at least understand the role and significance they play in your chosen field. Some, for example, generate their own sales leads, while others prefer not to get entangled in the implementation of services, just the closing of transactions. Other partner types are just the opposite.
Key to understanding how each partner works is how value flows in your ecosystem. If you understand how each partner makes money, then it becomes much easier to determine if they might be a fit for your business.
Another consideration: nomenclature. Not every vendor — or partner for that matter — agrees on basic terms and monikers for various partner companies. An integrator in one part of the world or tech market, for example, can be a system house or service provider in another part. For a better understanding, learn what each partner does. This is a better indicator of who they are and what they might be able to do for you.
Also: within each partner category, there may be more than one partner type. In the broad area of “sales partners,” for example, there are referral partners, resellers, affiliates, agents and distributors. This sounds more complicated than it is. Keep an eye on what partners do and how they make their money and you’ll better understand the market dynamics that will likely take shape within your ecosystem.
Selecting Company Types for Evaluation
Once you’ve taken the time to understand your options, then it’s time to make some partner selections. There a dizzying number of ways to go about this. But the best efforts are based in some basic data. Remember: partnering can be personal, but it shouldn’t be emotional. Data and facts will point you toward partners that are best positioned to help you achieve your objectives, not sentiment and gut feelings.
To that end, build a scoresheet for each partner type and match it against your objectives. Your scoresheet should start with a high-level list of criteria for completing a sale — everything from lead generation to implementation to valued-added post-sale services. It should also include a section for scoring additional capabilities that you might need including specialized knowledge and focus, customer influence, ease of doing business, time-to-engagement and deal velocity.
After you have completed with this exercise, you should arrive at the point where you determine who or what fits you “target partner profile.” Having one or more target partner profile galvanizes your sales team, your channel managers and more. It helps everyone connected to partnering within your company understand your mission and objectives. It just makes life easier, Kiernan says.
One tip: don’t create overly short target partner profiles. If your product or service complements Microsoft’s Dynamics software platform, then do not assume that all existing Microsoft Dynamics partners are ideal for your company. There are 10,000 of them, after all! Evaluating whether each one is suited to your company could take months if not years.
A better approach? Develop a target partner profile with specifics based on your sales objectives and technological needs. This way you will quickly be able to exclude those that do not align with your target customer segment, market specialty or even business model.
Armed with more information about which types of partners to choose, it’s now time to focus on one more internal task. This is honing you partner value proposition. While it might feel more intuitive to devise this before your consider any other aspect of building your partner program, experience has shown you cannot do it in a vacuum. Going through the exercise above, as well as the others examined in the Channel 101 series, sets your company up for better success.
Lastly, don’t forget to start thinking about automation. The products and services you provide the market are only a portion of what partners evaluate when considering your value proposition. They also take into account your onboarding, marketing support, training and more. World class experiences demand world-class automation, the kind that Impartner provides. For more insight, sign up for an Impartner demo today.
Coming next in Part Four: Honing Your Partner Proposition
*The Channel 101 series was produced with insight and information provided by Tenego Academy. Tenego Academy is a Cork, Ireland-based company that provides support to companies wanting to grow their organizations with third-party “channel partners” be they dealers, agents, referral partners, distributors, consultants and more.
Tenego Academy’s 12-part “Build Your Partner Program Like a Global Leader” education program helps companies looking to create, grow and/or optimize a partner program regardless of their size or market focus. No matter where your company is in its channel partner program journey, you will benefit from Tenego Academy’s 12-part program, which covers everything from channel strategy to partner recruitment to automation and more.
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].
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]]>The post Supporting Current Partners: Quick Wins That Can Provide a Boost to Performance appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>The second installment in the Channel 101 series provides answers to get you moving
How do you work with partners?
It sounds like a simple question but it isn’t. Successful partnering today demands exacting answers. This is especially true of partner enablement, management and prioritization.
Here are some questions and answers that will help you get up to speed and rack up wins quickly to help build momentum.
Partner Enablement Basics
What kind of onboarding do you provide partners? Does your organization, for example, insist on training for everything right away?
If you’re new to partnering, prep for this question early in your “partner program-building journey.” Here’s why.
Traditionally, vendors, especially tech vendors, demanded that channel partners complete exhaustive training before representing their products and/or services to customers. But this “bootcamp” training is falling out of favor as vendors embrace new thinking that is based on recent research and more evolved tech solutions.
Studies show that learners absorb more when they have an opportunity to apply early learnings and then get feedback on their initial efforts. Hands-on or active learning, thus, is becoming more common in business, including tech channels.
To get started with new partners, think in terms of basic tech training, solutions selling and customer experiences. You need to show new partners how to evaluate whether their existing customers are good fits for your products or services, for example. Partners will also need to know the basics of how to position your innovations, qualify leads, present and demos products, provide competitive bids and, finally, close new business.
Afterwards, it is time for partners to put these lessons to the test by engaging with customers in real-world settings. This is the time for you to monitor, support and assess early results. If engagements go smoothly, then partners are likely ready for additional “layers” of training and support that exposes them to more sophisticated sales techniques, marketing concepts and technological concepts. If not, you will need to reassess where your programs, training or products are coming up short.
Remember: the fault could lie with you, your partners or both. If multiple partners are stumbling for the same reason, for example, the problem likely lies within your own four walls. Don’t ignore informative results, in other words — even if the truth hurts.
Partner Management Basics
Once I get partners selling on my behalf, how can I manage them?
Once you get partners moving, it’s then time to guide them where you want them to go. Managing their journey with your company requires some foresight — not to mention automation (more on that below). For example, you will need to map out the following for your partners:
For larger or more sophisticated partners, you will want to develop partner business plans that are developed jointly and managed regularly. In addition to basic enablement, vendors and service providers must take pains to not overlook the tactical things that help make engagements successful. This includes developing marketing materials including:
Then, there are sales materials that cover everything from slide decks to sales pitches, call scripts, objection handling tips and even references.
One thing that has become increasingly important in software markets is modern contracts. These must be thoroughly conceived and road-tested to ensure fairness, repeatability and scalability.
Before unleashing these items on your entire partner ecosystem, road test them with a select few organizations. Think of this period as your “pre-mortem” during which you can identify roadblocks. If you treat this step seriously, you will eliminate a number of issues that could frustrate partners in the future. This includes helping partners understand your technology’s shortcomings or competitive weaknesses.
In most instances, you should address your shortcomings with select partners so they are prepared to best represent you in the market. Companies struggle with this decision, but experience has shown that partners appreciate candor. When treated professionally, partners respond in kind and work collaboratively with a vendor to overcome issues.
Prioritizing Partners
How should I prioritize partners?
Most companies invest in partners based on hope and intuition. But there are better ways to assess potential. This includes the level of enthusiasm a partner demonstrates as measured by the number of people they send to your training, the level of activity they have with your brand and the number of accounts they introduce to your organization. Other factors to consider include their skill level, competitive position in the market and ability to complement what your organization does to promote itself. This is especially true when it comes to generating leads on your behalf.
When assessing a partner, consider: Do your marketing activities mesh with their own? Do they conflict or, worse, compete? Finally, consider your partners’ soft skills and even their ethics. Do they offer award-winning service? Do employees like working there? And do customers rate their services highly?
These things and more must be considered.
You should also take note of the competitive products partners represent in the market and whether individual partners have the wherewithal and commitment required to represent more than one brand in each category.
Finally, you should identify bottlenecks that individual partners might have when it comes to building a practice around your technology. Some partners, after all, excel at sales but are weak at implementation. Most have just the opposite problem. By taking the time to understand the strengths and weaknesses of as many partners as possible, you can better assess which ones you will be successful with.
Even in the best of circumstances, however, expect problems to arise. Partners may present your products or services poorly. They may seem too busy with other vendors. And they may fumble with leads provided to them by your team.
These and other problems could be symptomatic of a broader problem: you are simply not a priority to some partners. That you will have to address when developing your partner value proposition, which we will cover in an upcoming Channel 101 article.
Consider the above steps for now. And don’t forget to start thinking about automation (we said we’d come back to it). The products and services you provide to partners are only a portion of what they expect from you. They also expect work class experiences when it comes to onboarding, marketing support, training and more. World class experiences demand world-class automation. For more insight, sign up for an Impartner demo today.
Coming next in Part Three: Partnering Strategy and Partner-Type Selection.
*The Channel 101 series was produced with insight and information provided by Tenego Academy. Tenego Academy is a Cork, Ireland-based company that provides support to companies wanting to grow their organizations with third-party “channel partners” be they dealers, agents, referral partners, distributors, consultants and more.
Tenego Academy’s 12-part “Build Your Partner Program Like a Global Leader” education program helps companies looking to create, grow and/or optimize a partner program regardless of their size or market focus. No matter where your company is in its channel partner program journey, you will benefit from Tenego Academy’s 12-part program, which covers everything from channel strategy to partner recruitment to automation and more.
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].
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]]>Channel chiefs and thought leaders debate wisdom of radical thinking in latest Channel Growth Hack
By T.C. Doyle
You can never have too many partners, right?
Well hold on: Technology industry channel chief and thought leaders debunk the idea in the latest Channel Growth Hacking, a bi-monthly discussion hosted by hosted by Kerry Desberg, CMO of Impartner, and Michelle Ragusa-McBain, vice president of global channel and digital strategy with JS Group. Channel Growth Hacking takes place on the second and fourth Thursday every month on Clubhouse, the drop-in social media platform.
“My growth hack idea? Fire [underperforming] partners faster,” says Steve Stewart, the head of channels at Smartsheet.
After years of managing high-tech channels, Stewart is convinced that too many partners weigh a company down, not give it lift. Instead of measuring success by the number of partners you recruit, why not prioritize partner sales output?
“A lot of us in channels management accept the 80-20 rule that says 80% of your sales will be achieved by 20% of your best partners. But most channel leaders fail to do anything about it,” he says.
A better way? Reduce your costs and administrative overhead by eliminating partners that do not perform. You will save money for doing so, and win back time to spend with more promising and higher-performing partners.
This has never been more important than now, Stewart adds, due to the pandemic, which has left some channel companies in shambles. Try as it might, Smartsheet cannot transform a struggling partner company alone with its technology or programs. That’s not to say it doesn’t try. It works with underperforming companies for two solid quarters, providing extra guidance and handholding along the way. If partners don’t generate sales after the extra help, Smartsheet trims them from its ranks.
It might sound controversial or harsh, but the idea is embraced by others, including another recent Chanel Growth Hack speaker, Steven Kellam, senior vice president of marketing and with 360insights.com. 360insights.com is a channel incentives and program strategy and execution company that works with a variety of vendor companies. Like Stewart, Kellam believes vendors waste money on partner companies that do not have the wherewithal to make the most of the investments vendors make into them. This is especially true of marketing investments including MDF.
“You really have to figure out what partners capabilities are,” says Kellam. Those that are struggling as a result of the pandemic stumbled in many instances because they could not market themselves appropriately at a time when demand for partner services was on the rise.
“Vendors give too much marketing support to those who cannot use it,” Kellam adds. “They’d be better off investing that money elsewhere.”
In some instances, that money could be better spent looking inward and addressing internal shortcomings, says Sean Phillips, director of partnerships and alliances for GreyCastle Security. While Phillips generally agrees that vendors invest too much in underperforming partners, he’s a big believer that vendors could get better traction with partners if they made themselves easier to work with.
This is what GreyCastle did when it reformed its own partner program. GreyCastle, for example, trimmed the number of categories that it divided partners into from eight to three after analysis. The company recognized that it was making its life and the lives of its partners overly complicated by counting so many different partner types and allowing for variances in standard contracts. Now it divides partners into three types: influencers, paid referrals and alliances. Doing so saves the company money and rewards it with more time and energy to engage with partners in the field.
“If I have any growth hack for fellow channel leaders it is this: wage a war on complexity within your own organization. You and your partners will be better for it.”
Neil Darling, president of RingLeader, a VoIP company, agrees. Darling’s company believes in the importance of taking time to properly align products with a focus toward frictionless demand generation to benefit both partners and their customers.
“If providers generate market demand, then channel partners will fulfill demand — and not the other way around,” says Darling.
Finally, Donagh Kiernan, CEO of Tenego Academy of Cork, Ireland, weighs in on culling excess partners from programs. While not opposed to the provocative idea, Kiernan agrees vendors must look inward to determine if they might be the reason why partners underperform.
His company, which provides guidance to vendors and helps support their efforts to share partnering best practices, advises clients to hone their value proposition. Many, he notes, have done so with exquisite detail when it comes to customers. But some fumble with the basics when it comes to the channel. Many vendors, Kiernan notes, don’t take the time to understand how partners will make money with their products or services, or why they would embrace the company over a competitor. (For more on Kiernan’s thoughts on this topic, don’t miss Impartner’s new Channel 101 blog series for early stage practitioners.)
Manage your channel ranks as efficiently as possible, Kiernan agrees, but take an honest assessment of your own business. If your value proposition is wanting, your processes lacking or your automation full of friction, then take steps to fix what’s wrong with you.
Be sure to join us next time on Channel Growth Hacking. If you’re wondering how you can take complexity out of your channel partner program, sign up for an Impartner demo a 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].
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]]>The post What Every Channel Professional Needs to Know About Customer Data appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>From spreadsheets to platform automation, there is a better way to handle data
By T.C. Doyle
We can put a drone on Mars but we cannot automate data sharing to help grow our businesses?
For many tech vendors, this is sadly true. If you’re still passing customer information in spreadsheets shared via email, you’re woefully behind the curve, says Cassandra Gholston, co-founder and CEO at Partnertap.
A veteran of the enterprise software industry and member of the Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB), Gholston looks forward to the day when every vendor adopts channel management automation technology. But even those that leverage Partner Relationship Management (PRM) technology have questions when it comes to responsible and effective data sharing. Partnertap, a Seattle-area tech consultancy that specializes is helping software companies better coordinate sales activities with partners, knows why.
Vendors struggle to implement best practices because they don’t understand the full scope of data they collect from customers, partners and more, Gholston explains in a new “Lessons from the Edge” video. But best practices are exactly what they need. This is more true than ever given increased scrutiny around regulatory concerns including GDPR, and the increased interest in doing business through partners as a result of the global pandemic.
Data management has never been more important, Gholston says, but it remains an underdeveloped skill at many companies. One reason: many channel professionals are unsure how to conceptualize working with their data.
“When I think about data sharing, I think about it in three buckets,” says Gholston. These include pre-pipeline data, pipeline data and closed or won business data.
If you can identify who needs what data, when, for how long and for what purpose, you can put it to use more effectively and responsibly, Gholston says. Miss any one of those important steps and you could end up with disgruntled customers, partners or both.
Another tip: develop a realistic expectation of what partners will share with your company and when.
“If you build your program around certain expectations about partners and their data sharing, you will be sorely disappointed until you build a level of trust with individual partners,” says Gholston. Close partners will share information and insights willingly because they have trust in your organization. But newcomers with no track record with your team, technology or processes? Good luck with that, she adds.
For more on data sharing and channels management, don’t miss this latest, “Lessons from the Edge” video Q&A with Gholston, which can be found here.
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].
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]]>By T.C. Doyle
“Grow” may be a goal but it is no strategy.
Differentiating between the two is just one of the many things you need to understand as you begin to build your channel. In addition, you will need to learn the basics of compelling partner propositions, channel economics and partner program building blocks. Before you get to these, however, it helps to look inward at your existing organization, specifically to your company’s culture. Believe it or not, culture will play a significant role in determining whether your organization can succeed with partners. Here’s why.
Know Thyself
If your culture is hyper-competitive, controlling and/or embraces a winner-take-all ideal, for example, then it is unlikely that you will win many fans in the channel. You will need to share the fruits of your efforts more when you rely on partners, after all. You will also have to share your best insights and your expertise to those whom you barely know.
As unsettling as that may be, it’s true just the same. Likewise, you cannot expect to thrive in the channel if your company is punitive or uncollaborative. Channel partners often represent several brands and may recommend one of your rivals over your products or services in certain situations. If you retaliate unfairly, you’ll likely develop a reputation for being hostile.
Similarly, if you’re overly rigid or difficult to work with, some partners will call you out for it quickly. Others will simply walk away. If customers today find your company difficult to engage, don’t expect partners to find it an easier unless you adjust.
When you begin on your channel journey, it helps to do so with a proper attitude and commitment.
Hone Your Partner Proposition
The No. 1 reason channel companies will work with you is the quality of your partner proposition. If the quality of your proposition is high, partners will take your certification courses, represent your brand faithfully and treat leads with great respect. They will also share information, competitive insights and profits willingly.
If your proposition is weak, partners won’t respond. If you cannot fathom why they would sacrifice time and energy to do business with you, in other words, don’t expect them to do so.
To better understand how compelling your partner proposition is, consider your current sales process. It typically starts with your product or service, then passes through several stages including lead generation, opportunity, sales, delivery, client success and, finally, after-sale services.
As you build your partner program, you need to understand where partners can help reduce your bottlenecks in your go-to-market strategy. Performing this exercise will help you craft a differentiated partner value proposition. It will also help you understand the different types and numbers of partners you need.
Finally, persuade your executive management team to ask itself one difficult question: does it view partnering as a cost or an investment? The answer will help you, a channel practitioner, better understand your organization’s commitment, expectation and understanding of doing business with partners.
Understanding Partner Economics
If you sell directly, chances are you understand your business economics. You know, for example, your costs when it comes to generating and qualifying leads, making presentations and demonstrations, and crafting evaluations and proposals. You know key metrics as well, including the number of leads you need to close a new customer.
But for partners? The math can get fuzzy. Understanding partnering economics, thus, is vitally important.
In a direct model, of course, a vendor or innovator incurs upfront sales costs (personnel, automation, campaigns, etc.) and risk. As a result, every new piece of business takes money from a vendor’s bottom line.
With partners, who already enjoy ongoing relationships with customers, a portion of sales costs are reduced. This is because partners leverage existing relationships and other sunk investments such as sales training, marketing know-how and more.
That said, partnering comes with its own set of costs. This includes the cost to train, manage and recruit partners. Then there’s the cost of commissions and other forms of rewards.
In general, doing business through partners can be more cost effective. But as the saying goes, your mileage may vary.
Creating Your Partner Roadmap
Start by listing your priorities, be they growth, market expansion, customer satisfaction or even company valuation. Next, map your total addressable market (TAM) to the number and type of partners you believe you need to achieve your objectives. After, assess your readiness, including the strength of your partner proposition and your competitive positing. Finally, take a look at your messaging: would it appeal to you if you were a partner, or would it miss the mark?
Taking these steps will help you determine if you have the right type of partners, whether you need more and whether your expectations are in line with reality.
Finally, start thinking about the automation your company will need to manage, enable and reward your partners. Capable programs do not run on spreadsheets in 2021.
Additional Steps
In the blogs that follow, you will learn more channel basics, including assessing partner readiness, developing effective policies and processes, and addressing specific challenges that arise in early stage program development.
Up next in Blog Two: Supporting Current Partners.
*The Channel 101 series was produced with insight and information provided by Tenego Academy. Tenego Academy is a Cork, Ireland-based company that provides support to companies wanting to grow their organizations with third-party “channel partners” be they dealers, agents, referral partners, distributors, consultants and more.
Tenego Academy’s 12-part “Build Your Partner Program Like a Global Leader” education program helps companies looking to create, grow and/or optimize a partner program regardless of their size or market focus. No matter where your company is in its channel partner program journey, you will benefit from Tenego Academy’s 12-part program, which covers everything from channel strategy to partner recruitment to automation and more.
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].
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]]>Channel impresario Rod Baptie shares observations in new video
By T.C. Doyle
Changes that were working their way through the information and communications tech channel have accelerated as a result of Covid-19, new business models and powerful automation platforms.
So says Rod Baptie, founder and managing director of Baptie & Co., one of the tech industry’s most influential events and networking businesses. Baptie & Co., which consistently attracts top industry channel executives and influencers to is in-person and on-line gatherings, recently wrapped its company’s largest annual event, Channel Focus. As usual, the event showcased key thought leaders who analyzed and debated key industry trends including marketplaces, program tiering and more.
In this Impartner “Lessons from the Edge” video, Baptie, who is a member of the Impartner Channel Chiefs Advisory Board (CCAB), discusses three trends rippling through the high-tech channel in 2021, including:
Here’s a snapshot of Baptie’s thinking on each. For more, be sure to check out the “Lesson’s from the Edge” video featuring Baptie.
The Rise of Recurring Revenue Business Models
For years, channel advocates and thought leaders including Craig Schlagbaum, vice president of indirect business at Comcast Business, have tried to persuade more tech industry partners including value added resellers (VARs), systems integrators and other influencers to embrace business models built around recurring revenue, much like their agent counterparts who sell telecommunications services. It’s been a tough sell — until recently.
Like other thought leaders, Schlagbaum and Baptie see more partners embracing sales of subscription-based services. In many cases, customers are forcing their hands with select purchases of software sold as-a-service. This is having a significant ripple throughout the channel. In February 2022, for example, Exclusive Networks, a fast-growing tech products distributor based in Europe, reported that subscription sales are growing five times faster than traditional sales.
“The rapidly changing business model of both the vendor community and partner community, at the moment, is the biggest transition [in the technology channel],” says Baptie.
Progressive Partner Programs That Address New Business Realities
As part of the push by Riverbed, Nutanix, Datto and others to make their products more virtualized and thus available to be consumed as a monthly service, vendors are also making significant changes to their partner programs. The changes take into account the different rewards, incentives and behaviors that vendors must create in order to satisfy customers and partners alike.
“A key goal in a recurring revenue model is renewal. And that renewal will only happen if consumption is happening and there is satisfaction at the client level. So you are seeing a shift in terms of what partners are focused on,” says Baptie.
Vendors are doing the same thing. “All this means that things like behavior modeling with partners is changing,” says Baptie. “You’re moving from transaction-based incentives to behavior-based incentives.”
These changes put enormous pressure on vendors to rethink everything from onboarding, training and certification, rewards, market development funds (MDF) and more. The only way vendors can manage this complexity today is with better data, tools and processes — automation, in other words.
Advanced Automation Technology
Given the changes of late — think Covid, cloud technology and line-of-business buying — partners face new challenges and opportunities. With few customers to see in person, they have new interest in remote selling, which is fueling their interest in digital marketing such as TMCA, among other things.
All of these trends have put a premium on partner automation technology.
“If you’re in a substantial organization today and you cannot automate most of the processes and you’re still running around with Excel spreadsheets, you have a problem,” says Baptie. “Automation is the key but you’ve got to partner that with providing a really valuable experience for your partners.
In addition to these trends, this “Lessons from the Edge” video also sees Baptie share his thoughts on new vertical market specialties, channel economics and channel chief careers. If you work in or around channels and/or partner, you’ll definitely want to check it out.
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].
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]]>The post Three Reasons Why Your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) Is No Substitute for a TCMA Solution appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>To communicate through partners, you simply need purpose-built tools
By T.C. Doyle
You can do a multitude of things with a sturdy screwdriver, but you cannot use it to inflate a tire.
Similarly, you can do many things with your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) — generate leads, coordinate campaigns and measure marketing efficacy, among other things — but you cannot use it to effectively market your products and services through partners. For that, you’ll need another, purpose-built tool: Through Chanel Marketing Automation (TCMA).
Here are three reasons why your MAP is no substitute for TCMA. Actually, let’s make it four reasons (see below), starting with these three:
Here’s a closer examination of why not, followed by a bonus, fourth reason why you cannot expect your MAP to do the job of TCMA.
Localization
Suppose you create a compelling marketing campaign geared to a specific end-user audience. You’ve done your homework and know your audience’s needs and interests, spending budgets and even their buying journeys.
Thanks to this, you can create a campaign that includes links to web sites they might enjoy, a social media conversation that will help them complete their journey and branding iconography that reinforces their attraction to your brand.
Now try and do the same with a partner in the middle of your campaign. Can you easily attach a partner’s logo to your mailings and landing pages? How about a partner’s social media feed or the URL to its homepage?
Chances are these and other things will be a struggle. And that’s just for one partner.
Now imagine trying to do this for dozens, hundreds if not thousands of partners. Consider the number of images, hyperlinks and contact fields you will need to coordinate. Mix these up and every partner you work with will raise a stink while every customer you hope to attract will be left scratching their heads.
The reason for the issues outlined above have to do with the design and limitations of MAP tools. Simply put, they are not designed to help you automatically localize marketing campaigns through partners. But TCMA technology is.
TCMA can effectively perform “a mail merge” of digital assets for campaigns that include partner assets and digital information.
Customization
If your organization offers goods and services in different sizes, configurations, product categories and geographies, then there’s little chance that you can fully automate marketing campaigns and other activities with your partners using a MAP. This is especially true if your company has tiers of reseller partners with different levels of access or interest to your catalogue. Here’s why.
Imagine you’re a maker of healthcare products ranging from very sophisticated surgical-quality hip replacements to basic commodities such as personal protective equipment (PPE). Chances are that not all of your partners are authorized or inclined to sell your complete catalogue. If you launch a campaign that sends end customers to partner home pages, your partners are going to want their customers to see only the products from your company that they actively sell. Partners do not want to overwhelm potential customers with your complete catalogue, in other words. And whatever you offer for partners to show to customers on their websites, they are going to expect it to be in their preferred language.
While this might sound simple, it isn’t if you’re trying to use a tool that wasn’t designed to allow for individual partner customization. With a robust TCMA solution, you can customize campaigns around products, services, price points, geographies, reseller authorizations and much more.
By doing so, you will make both you and your partner more relevant to end customers.
Prioritization
Timing is everything in business, so the old adage goes. With marketing, the maxim is often true. Again, take partners.
As a vendor or services provider, you take great pride in the efforts you put forth on behalf of partners. This includes the quality of materials you provide them, the level of sophistication in the messages you craft and even the exactitude of the offers you create. But sometimes your timing may be out of synch with a partner you hope to help.
Some of your partners may be new to your company, for example, and not ready to introduce their customers to your goods and services. Other partners may be concerned that some of your efforts dilute or overwhelm marketing efforts of their own. And still more may be dismayed that your campaign conflicts with that of another supplier or provider they represent to the market.
To partners with these concerns, timing is everything. But they are out of luck if your marketing tools lack effective prioritization capabilities that help partners and vendors alike get the timing of their marketing activities aligned and in-synch.
TCMA technology can help you automate and coordinate this for partners with ease. But MAP tools? In most cases they struggle with this essential functionality.
Finally, here’s one additional reason why you shouldn’t think of a MAP as a substitute for TCMA: Google Ads. Without a TCMA, you will struggle with harmonization of your marketing initiatives. Again, here’s why.
Harmonization
When it comes to Google search, only a relative handful of partners can match the brand recognition of a product vendor or service provider. If your organization relies on channel partners to satisfy end customers, this presents a challenge for those that search the web for your goods and services. Your challenge is how to easily and effectively connect customers who find you through a Google search to individual partners best positioned to satisfy their needs.
If you try to achieve this with most MAP tools, you run the risk of missing an elegant handoff from you to your partners. Not so with sophisticated TCMA technology. Take Impartner’s TCMA toolset, which features “Smart Linking” technology that allows vendors to harmonize their content with that of their partners so that end customers who perform a Google search not only get the right product or service information they seek, but the right channel partner as well.
With Smart Linking, Impartner customers can easily blend partner information such as a home page, physical address and contact info with their own marketing content that surfaces in a typical Google search. And they can do this with a thousand partners as easily as they can for a few dozen.
For more on how TCMA can help you provide partners the localization, customization and prioritization they need to make the most of your marketing efforts, ask for an Impartner TCMA demo today.
You won’t be able to inflate a tire with Impartner TCMA, but you sure can harmonize your through channel marketing activities with it. That will get your rolling to wherever you want to go.
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].
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]]>The post Impartner Debuts Through Channel Marketing Automation That Partners Cannot Help But Put to Use appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>Insights and understanding why your partner investments go underutilized if not wasted
By T.C. Doyle
IKEA customers that don’t read directions. Chefs who don’t follow recipes. Workers that do not take advantage of employer-provided benefits. What do these groups have in common?
They are all examples of people that fail to take advantage of knowledge, tools and advantages created expressly for them. The complete list is long and includes doctors who fail to follow carefully developed medical guidelines. (Their patients aren’t much better, according to the CDC, which finds 20-30% of consumers never fill their prescriptions for chronic conditions.)
Why is adherence or utilization of important benefits so poor is so many instances? Complexity, inapplicability and ineffectiveness are some reasons. Human frailties including lack of imagination and even laziness are others. In some instances, the waste is trivial. Not so for tech vendors, manufacturers, insurers and others who squander a staggering sum of time, energy and money on benefits for business partners.
If only there were a better way, right? There is in marketing. Make that partner marketing, specifically. This April, Impartner, the world leader in partner automation technology, is unveiling updated Through Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) technology that removes the obstacles that have historically kept partners from utilizing vendor provided tools and benefits.
Here’s what you need to know.
A TCMAosaurus Is Reborn
After extensive research and work with vendor customers, Impartner identified why TCMA systems are chronically underutilized. Among other things, business partners complain that ease of use leaves them wanting and that key steps are not automated. In industry after industry, partners either ignore vendor provided tools altogether or struggle mightily to put them to use.
Vendor brands suffer as a result. Take the tech industry, where partner spending on marketing as a percent of revenue is historically low. (For all but the top echelon of channel partners in technology, spending amounts to less than 3% of revenue per partner, according to various studies.) Little wonder that tech brands suffer from brand compliances issues, poor lead attribution and follow-up, muddled marketing campaigns and dismal reporting on key performance metrics.
To be sure, the positive results vendors do enjoy are typically achieved by a finite set of very marketing savvy partners that often represent multiple brands at once. (If they are good at marketing your brand, they are likely adept at marketing the goods and services of your rivals, too.)
This is why so many vendors put their faith in the “long-tail” of business partners . These are the smaller, mid-sized companies that work with SMBs the world over. Historically, this tier of partners is populated with scores of technically astute companies that do not prioritize marketing. Most, in fact, do not employ a full-time marketing professional let alone a marketing team. Because of this, your long-tail never gets unfurled and put to use. Until now.
Impartner’s new TCMA platform offers partners a simple, four-step adoption process can be completed in minutes — literally. After enrolling, partners quickly realize that vendor campaigns will run automatically afterwards, resulting in a steady stream of leads that can flow indefinitely. What is more, all co-branding is automated. No additional partner input is required in order to participate in campaigns once a partner provides its logo and contact information.
Thanks to advances in Impartner’s TCMA platform, vendors can confidently expect their long tail to unfurl to a length never before seen. (Think Brontosaurus-sized.)
The timing could not be better. Again, consider the tech industry. A new study from CompTIA finds that 38% of channel partners are looking to make significant changes to their marketing this year as a result of the pandemic that limited customer engagements throughout 2020. What’s thwarting them, experts believe, is the limited number of professionals available to them and their past experiences with vendor and distributor-provided tools. A robust TCMA tool or service that overcomes their challenges, thus, would be a godsend.
Another reason to take a closer look at TCMA technology, which some joke has been around since the age of dinosaurs, is partners’ desire for help in the post-pandemic era. When asked, “Which of the following facets of joint selling/marketing are most relevant to your firm and/or most likely to contribute value?,” partners ranked “easier and better access to customers and leads” as their No. 1 request, again according to CompTIA research.
In addition to helping addressing partners’ top request, vendors that invest in Impartner TCMA also enjoy other benefits, including:
As with other Impartner PRM solutions, Impartner TCMA includes a set of features unmatched by any vendor in the industry. This includes Journey Orchestration, Training & Certification, Showcase Syndication, Email Campaigns and more. Be sure to check out the latest on Impartner’s new TCMA technology. Better yet, ask for a demo today.
If you worry you investments into partner marketing technology are under-utilized or worse, you know they are, then stop wrestling with your TCMAosaurus. A new one from Impartner has been reborn and is likely to make other TCMA products extinct.
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].
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]]>Covid, enhanced teck stacks and new business models are driving new thinking around partner success
By T.C. Doyle
Partnercentricity is back in a big way. This time around, it’s not a platitude but a corporate priority for many instead.
If you are not familiar with the concept, “partnercentricity” is a business theory that took hold among tech vendors several years ago. It’s the idea that everything a company does must have a partner-centric component baked in from the start. While a popular buzzword, the idea caught on among some tech leaders and upstarts who leaned heavily on partners, but not all. Several trends have brought partnercentricity back to the fore. Reasons include the spread of Covid-19, the advance of new tech stacks and the maturity of new business models. Here’s why.
Covid, of course, disrupted the go-to-market strategies of organizations the world over. Seemingly overnight, selling through a broad and diverse network of business partners never seemed more important. Similarly, the rise of new tech stacks such as partner relationship management (PRM) and through channel marketing automation (TCMA) software have provided vendor organizations with tools and confidence they need to more effectively sell through partners. Then there is the maturity of once fledgling business models. Today, thousands upon thousands of new companies have found ways to make money by affiliating with vendors in any number of ways, not just product reselling.
As a result of these and other trends, “partnercentricity” is back on the minds of business leaders. To work this time around, the concept must be woven into the fabric of a company, not affixed to the side as an afterthought, says Kristine Stewart, vice president of client success and marketing at Channel Impact, a San Francisco Bay Area-based channel firm that advises companies on their go-to-market partner strategies and services. Stewart helps organizations extend efforts to elevate customer success and experiences to business partners that engage customers daily. By doing so, Stewart helps vendors and partners alike deliver superior outcomes to customers of all sizes regardless of their market, geography, maturity, etc.
A member of the Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB), Stewart has studied partnercentricity in depth as part of her work on partner success and transformation. Her assessment? Improving partner success and experiences hinges on a number of key factors that organizations with high-levels of partnercentricity get right. They include alignment, decision-making, business economics, product development, support and more. (For a complete list of factors, be sure to download Stewart’s thoughts on partner success and partner transformation.)
Here’s a look at three things that successful vendors must get right in order to be a truly partner-centric company.
Alignment
Here’s a quick test of partnercentricity: how close is your organization’s top channel manager to your company’s chief executive? By that I mean does he or she have a direct line of site to the C-suite? If not, that’s a potential problem. This is because channel success depends on corporate alignment — the kind that is best achieved when an organization’s channel chief has a seat at the executive table.
In many organizations that have a longstanding commitment to doing business with partners, this is a non-issue. Think Cisco in technology, GM in auto manufacturing or AmerisourceBergen in pharmaceuticals. Little wonder that these companies have organizational alignment when it comes to go-to-market business models, partner investment and product development. In such companies, everything from how products and services are developed to partner enablement to compensation is aligned to promote partner success. Channels thrive as a result.
In other instances, however, infighting, siloed-thinking and morale problems are commonplace.
From the C-suite to the warehouse to the call center and beyond, partner success depends on organizational alignment. If partner success and experiences are not among an organization’s top 10 priorities, then channels are an afterthought and will struggle to achieve success.
Economics
When asked one time if he was concerned about his partners’ inability to make money from their engagement with his company, the CEO of one of technology’s largest companies shrugged. “We have different business models,” he sniffed.
Translation: that’s their problem.
For the better of a decade thereafter, this company struggled with partner satisfaction. That is until a new management team recommitted to partnering. Among its top priorities? Leave more on the table for partners.
Which brings me to your company: do you fully understand how your partners make money with your company? And how much? Also, do you know if partners earn more with your rivals than they do with you? If not, you should.
Getting the economics of partnering right is a by-product of proper alignment (see above). But there’s more. Partner economics requires a deep commitment to strategic thinking and financial management. It also requires sophisticated analysis of business models, macro-economics and intangibles. Take ecosystem monetization.
Companies including Salesforce measure how much additional revenue partners generate for doing business with them. At many companies, the additional revenue is anywhere between $4-to-$7 for every $1 of vendor revenue partners generate. That extra amount translates into cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, consulting, training, support and more. It’s enough to thrive on, in other words.
Does your company’s products and services create such an opportunity? If not, then the amount of direct remuneration you provide must be significant to keep partners engaged.
Commitment
This last bucket includes a number of things that Stewart studies in depth in her work. Commitment translates into a number of items both large and small. Take enablement.
At companies with a mix of go-to-market strategies, competitive information shared with direct or inside sales is often not shared with partners. It’s because corporate executives fear that “secret ingredients” may ultimately fall into the wrong hands if shared with less than scrupulous partners.
On the surface the concept seems reasonable. But in practice, it puts every partner you work with at a disadvantage when it comes to your competition. Worse, it pits your partners against your own sales team.
A better way? Demonstrate your commitment by graciously sharing your best thinking, data and tools with partners. Yes, your secret sauce could fall into the hands of your competition. But by the time it does, you’ll have moved well beyond your rivals’ ability to use internal information against you.
Now consider tool sharing. Today, world class partnering requires world-class automation. So why not provide that to your partners? Put it this way: If you give your direct salespeople the best tools in the world, doesn’t it make sense to do the same for your partners? (We at Impartner certainly believe so and can show you why 78% of your peers believe PRM provides them a competitive advantage.)
Commitment comes in other forms. It includes a pledge to keep confidential information shared between you and a partner, a promise to share the customer support burdens and the spoils of a good year or quarter. It depends on thoroughly understanding partnercentricity through and through.
Can you hack that?
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]]>The post Make Partner Marketing FREE appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>Accomplish more by following this powerful partner marketing strategy
By T.C. Doyle
Here’s a bold thought: make your partner marketing FREE.
That’s right, FREE as in Frequent, Relevant, Empathetic and Empowered. Here’s what I mean.
Vendors struggle with partner marketing basics every day. They grapple with what to say, how often to say something and in what format. They need not, according to experts. There is a cadence, tone and significance to proper partner communications that can be easily achieved if you follow the simple FREE concepts recently discussed by experts in Channel Growth Hacking, a new, bi-monthly discussion hosted by Impartner and the JS Group. Channel Growth Hacking takes place on the second and fourth Thursday every month on Clubhouse, the drop-in social media platform.
To better understand the FREE concept, which is a modern update on the venerable marketing adage that says good marketing should be recent, frequent and monetizable, let’s break each element down into simple bites starting with frequent.
Frequent
Just like good journalism, good marketing depends on consistency. In addition to being objective, timely and accurate, a good newspaper, in other words, must hit a reader’s driveway or inbox at a predictable time. When it comes to channel marketing, experts including Heather K. Margolis, the founder and CEO of two well-known advisories, Spark Your Channel and Channel Maven, advises vendors to think in terms of weekly touch points. Communicating via LinkedIn, she suggests, should be done three-to-four times per week. “Go nuts on Twitter,” Margolis says, but post judiciously on Facebook due to the mix of business and personal audiences.
While every vendor’s needs differ, establishing a cadence and then sticking to it are musts in order for your messaging to connect with your intended audience. While it sounds counter-intuitive, sometimes being predictable is the right thing to do with communications, at least as far as frequency is concerned.
Relevant
After you determine when to say something, you must determine what to say. This is perhaps the most difficult step to master. Why is simple: what you want to say is often at odds with what resonates with your audience. The reason is relevancy.
Typically, vendors want to promote their solutions and services at every turn. But communications anchored in product messaging often fall short in terms of relevancy because they fail to factor in what partners are attuned to. Consider channel partners in the tech industry. Their customers no longer prioritize faster and cheaper products. Instead, end customers want answers to business problems. If your messaging to partners is rooted in solutions, great, then partners will respond positively to your message. But if your messages are little more than spec sheets about innovations and not about answers to their customers’ problems, partners will ignore you. That’s a major problem, says Dan Tomaszewski, president of Everything MSP, a tech advisory for channel partners. “If partners don’t know you, they won’t feel comfortable with you.”
Empathetic
Good partner marketing must be “stinking empathetic,” says Janet Schijns, founder and CEO of the JS Group, a Florida-based consultancy that helps organization refine their go-to-market strategies. By “stinking,” Schijns means messaging must be so obviously empathetic that it reeks of compassion and inspiration. This differs from relevancy, which appeals to a potential customer’s brain. In contrast, empathetic messaging connects with audiences in a much deeper way.
If you appeal to an audience’s desires and ambitions, for example, you establish a much deeper level of credibility and authenticity. This helps your audience escape the confines of traditional thinking so they may see problems and opportunities in a new light, Schijns says. When this occurs, intangibles such as quicker, better and more long-lasting seem very attainable.
“You have to remember that you are selling a dream,” says Schijns. “Your messaging, thus, shouldn’t be all about ‘look at me,’ but instead ‘look at you.’”
Empowered
One of the challenges marketers face today is scaling successful messaging. This is due to the sheer volume of messaging that your content must compete with. Good content not only resonates, it also scales.
Today, scale depends on automation more than ever. Without proper tools, marketers cannot reach broad audiences, measure messaging effectiveness or follow up on responses in a timely manner.
In a bid to overcome these limitations, many organizations have developed or invested in various tools. But their scattershot approach leaves them saddled with gaps in functionality that more nimble and/or automated rivals can exploit.
For context, Channel Growth Hacking co-founder Michelle Ragusa-McBain notes the overwhelming majority of decision makers look to five different pieces of content about a service or product before they ever talk to a salesperson. Following a person on their journey and then offering influential content at the appropriate moment requires a level of automation that basic tools simply do not provide.
As a marketer, you must be more than a voyeur or “lazy liker” on LinkedIn, says McBain. You must be a thought and technology leader.
Making partner marketing FREE might not be the first thing that pops into your head when you think of ways to improve your messaging and communications, but it might be the best idea for your improving business.
For more on how technology can help you embrace FREE marketing concepts, be sure to check out what the world leader in partner automation technology, Impartner, has to offer. Ask for a free demo today.
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]]>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].
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]]>Here are three questions that will help you determine whether you can retire your number
By T.C. Doyle
Ever feel like retiring your channel sales quota is akin to taking down Goliath?
If you do, then take heart: you can overcome your quota Goliath just like David overcame the Philistine who stared him down. Some new thinking may help your cause.
To stimulate new ideas, here are three questions that every channel sales manager and channel salesperson should consider at the start of every month, quarter and year:
Let’s examine each.
Do I Have the Right Talent?
Chances are you have a mix of high-performing channel salespeople, underachievers and sales jockeys that run somewhere in the middle.
You know how to measure their output, but have you measured their suitability? It’s an important question to ask because of how often deliverables, target markets and objectives change. In the tech industry, for example, many salespeople who joined the industry in the client-server era dominated by one-time transactions involving physical goods find themselves struggling in the new era of cloud computing that revolves around digital services sold as monthly subscriptions. To them, everything from compensation to sales cycles to deal financing is completely new and different.
Similarly, channel sales managers find themselves working in a very different market than just a few years ago. The rise of marketplaces, non-transacting partners and new sales motions are but a few of the new ripples that channel sales managers must contend with. Because of these, partner journeys are very different than they were just a decade ago.
Navigating new relationships, expectations and technologies often requires skillsets and dispositions that your existing team simply may not have. To find out if it does, you may need to test the suitability of you channel sales team. Some team members are no doubt ideally suited for these times. But others? Maybe not.
This includes many who enjoyed early success in the field after completing their education brimming with confidence and charm. While glibness and positivity often help in transactional sales, they do not necessarily translate well into a world of more collaborative and consultative channel selling. (If they did, there would be even more improv comedians in sales than there are today.)
Do I Have the Right Processes?
Compensation determines behavior. How many times have you heard that sales maxim? It’s probably more than you can count. But is it true? It’s a question worth pondering whenever you tweak or update your channel sales compensation plans.
In most instances, a channel sales manager or director will adjust reward policies to reward achievement based on key organizational objectives. Most comp plans are devised on the principle that individual salespeople are motivated first and foremost by money. But research and experience suggests this to be incomplete at best. According to the Harvard Business Review, “…stars, laggards, and core performers are motivated by different facets of comp plans.”
Other motivators include:
Peer or industry recognition: At one Silicon Valley tech giant, different global sales teams competed for “Viking Awards” that came with a cash prizes and a cheap, store-bought Viking helmet. One year, the company decided to eliminate the competition. “Cut the money if you must,” salespeople said, “but don’t eliminate the helmet.”
Organizational cohesion: Some people just love sales. They love the competition, comradery, customer engagement — all of it. Some naturally get very distraught when their jobs turn sour. This can happen when individual superstars and mid-range performers clash. Policies that pit team members against each other unnecessarily or unfairly demotivate sales teams as a whole.
Stress reduction: Retiring a quota for some isn’t all about the money; it’s sometimes about “lifting a burden from their shoulders.” To an untrained observer, it might appear that a high-performers love turning over new busines. But it could be they just want to reduce stress. In such instances, process changes might make their workplaces more productive.
Do I Have the Right Technology?
You wouldn’t line up for a single play in competitive football without a helmet, so why have your sales team take the field without proper equipment? It doesn’t make business sense.
Today, “proper equipment” can take on many forms, including world-class marketing tools, customer experience software and relationship management automation.
Relation management technology comes in two forms, customer relationship management (CRM) software and partner relationship management (PRM) software. Today, nearly three-quarters of all businesses and more than 90% of companies with more than 11 employees use CRM software. However, the percent that use PRM software is less, which is surprisingly given the amount of commerce the flows though middlemen or business partners. (Estimates vary but the figure is in excess of 70% in many sectors globally.)
Of those companies that do use PRM technology to help business partners grow, manage and support their sales, a surprisingly number rely on homegrown PRM tech stacks that have been cobbled together using different software components or built from the ground up internally. Homegrown tech stacks don’t typically scale, anticipate future needs or integrate easily with broader organizational objectives such as migrating to the cloud or standardizing around a core set of software providers.
All of this can thwart even the best of salespeople, including partner sales specialists, from trying to achieve their objectives. Without the proper equipment, in other words, your salespeople may as well be banging their heads around with little to show for it but bruises.
A better way? Invest in the tools your salespeople need to achieve their objectives. Better yet, let Impartner show you why nearly eight of every 10 customers who invest in PRM say they have gained a competitive advantage.
And don’t forget to ask the right questions that will help you take down your quota Goliath.
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].
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]]>By T.C. Doyle
Let’s be honest: some of your business partners just don’t get it. They don’t understand or fully embrace your business proposition, strategic vision or go-to-market strategy.
Some days you wonder whether they have their own agenda, right?
Well here’s a newsflash: they do. And it isn’t to sell your software or recite your sales messages as though they were performing on stage.
If you expect channel partners and business allies see the world through your lens given how much time, money and energy you invest in them, then here’s another news bulletin: your expectations are unrealistic. Chances your priorities are, too.
So says Glenn Robertson, CEO of Purechannels, a global marketing and sales advisory based in the UK that helps vendors, distributors and channel partners upgrade their go-to-market programs and activities.
Robertson was among several channel experts who shared strategic insights in Channel Growth Hacking, a new, bi-monthly discussion hosted by Impartner and the JS Group. Channel Growth Hacking takes place on the second and fourth Thursday every month on Clubhouse, the drop-in social media platform.
In the inaugural Channel Growth Hacking event, Robertson challenged conventional thinking that says partners will respond positively to your message and agenda if you simply offer the right incentive. That’s nonsense, he says. In the Clubhouse session moderated by Kerry Desberg, CMO at Impartner, and Michelle Ragusa-McBain, vice president of global channel strategy with the JS Group, Robertson challenged channel practitioners to upgrade their thinking.
“If you can assume anything about your partners it’s that the majority are either unhappy with you or unmoved by pleas to sell more of your stuff,” said Robertson.
If you want to better resonate with partners, “switch your pitch” to them, he says. Instead of pushing innovation, offer business value.
“So many vendors pitch partners to sell their solutions. But the messaging and programs they lead with is all about them,” said Robertson. “Partners don’t wake up every day thinking or even caring about your marketing or lead generation program. They get up every day and ask themselves ‘who gives me best experience so I can go out and do what’s best for my customers?’”
Like other channel experts and members of the Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB), Robertson works closely with vendors and partners every day. Time and again he is dismayed by myopic thinking. Doing business through partners successfully requires a level of selflessness if not empathy that is lacking in the tech industry. Take partner programs.
Many vendor programs fall short due to the following:
Here’s a closer look at each, and a suggested growth hack worth considering.
Unrealistic sales expectations
Vendors with hot-selling innovations often assume partners will line up to sell their technology. They also believe that partners will agree to minimum requirements from the very start. Vendors may even believe that partners will agree to sign long-term commitments and invest in training and certification without ever closing a single piece of business. If your program has minimums, comes with one-sided contracts or includes expectations that channel partners pull their people out of the field to train on your technologies, then prepare to explain to your chief revenue officer why you failed to hit your revenue goals.
Channel Growth Hack: Every partner that joins your program did so for a reason. Chances are it was to help customers solve a business problem, not to grow their business. If you understand this first and foremost, you will understand that getting to that first sales is wholly dependent on solving those customer problems. Instead of goal setting, optimize problem solving.
Overly Rigid Program Requirements
One sales engineer, two salespeople and an organizational certification that must be updated every six months. Oh, and an agreement to perform a certain number of marketing initiatives every year, plus a promise to participate in quarterly business reviews and a pledge to hand over customer lists. If this sounds like just some of the things you expect from partners, then don’t expect to make many friends in the channel. Ditto if you lavish your best rewards on a small set of Gold or Diamond partners. For a program to work properly, it must be fair and equitable. Your program must recognize that partners have high-turnover, long sales cycles and different business needs. Inflexibility is inexcusable.
Channel Growth Hack: Offer a solution when a partner loses a top certified engineer, not a penalty. Let’s face it, tech jobs are hard to fill because top tech talent is in high demand. As a result, certified tech professionals move around a lot. That can wreak havoc on an organization that must maintain a certified professional on staff at all times. Rather than cut a partner loose when a certified professional leaves, why not offer a solution to the problem such as a program to backfill certified engineers on a temporary basis?
Feeble Automation Tools
The idea that you can run an ecosystem on a spreadsheet is woefully outdated. It’s like trying to pay a month’s worth of bills with hand-written checks. World-class partner programs run on world class tools — the kind that provide consumer-like experiences when it comes to onboarding, training and certification, enablement and through-channel marketing. With world-class tools, vendors also have access to data so they can properly plan, manage and reward partners. If partners struggle with any aspect of your program, you will earn a reputation for being difficult to work with. That’s a kiss of death in the channel no matter how innovative your solutions are.
Channel Growth Hack: You didn’t hear this from us but it pays to understand where you stand in terms of best-in-class in your market category. Before you launch your next program, take the time to research who prospective partners think is best-in-class when it comes to partner automation technology. Then find out which of your competitors are using partner automation software. If you think you can compete without proper tools, you’ll be sorry later.
Poorly though-out out economics
Chances are you have calculated the ROI you get on every deal you close. But have you done the same for your partners? Moreover, have you asked yourself whether the amount of money you earn from the efforts partners on your behalf is commensurate or at least fair with the return they enjoy? These are serious questions that beg for honest answers. Even top tech companies struggle in this area. There were times that Microsoft and Cisco did, for example. Other vendors are today. Whenever financial returns are imbalanced, partner satisfaction falls precipitously.
Channel Growth Hack: Before launching any initiative, program or promotion with partners, ask yourself where the money is in it for them. If you cannot see it, they surely will not find it. Partners are too busy to follow breadcrumbs and too wise to believe in promises. Show them the money.
In business, that’s akin to showing them you care.
You can start by putting empathy into your expectations, your policies and guidelines, your tools and technology, and your economic plans, too. As Ragusa-McBain says, “your partner program is a reflection of how you see the world. Show partners your best.”
For more Channel Growth Hacks, be sure to tune into Clubhouse every second and fourth Thursday of the Month. Each week, you’ll hear from channel experts like Robertson, including:
One hour for a years’ worth of wisdom from leading business experts? That’s a fair exchange any day.
Now do yourself a favor and see what world-class automation tools can do for your business. Sign up for an Impartner demo and gauge how well your partner experiences compare to your competition.
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].
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]]>The post Three Steps to Winning Your First 30 Days on the Job appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>New in town? Welcome to your new role in channels.
No doubt you want to make a great first impression. But what if we told you there were steps you can take to achieve more? Better still, what if we said you can begin taking these steps today? You can with this three-step primer.
Follow the steps below and you will absolutely win your first 30 days on the job.
Before you begin, keep in mind that everything that follows is designed to help you and your organization develop something called a Vision, Strategy and Execution (VSE) framework for channels.
If you’re not familiar, a VSE is essentially a plan for helping professionals like you identify where you want to go, how you can get there, and what specific steps you can take along the way.
If you were planning a vacation, you might think of your Vision as your destination, your Strategy as your budget and travel plans, and your Execution steps as your dates of travel, transportation details and daily agenda.
Your vacation VSE, in other words, could be the following:
Before jetting off to Rome or anywhere else, let’s get you started on your new channels job. (For a complete roadmap, don’t miss our “Definitive Guide for New Channel Chiefs.” It’s designed to help you define a VSE for understanding, planning, and executing steps that will increase your probability of achieving success in your first 180 days.)
To help you defy expectations in your first 30, we recommend the following:
Step One: Familiarize yourself with the surroundings
While the preceding might sound obvious, you’d be surprised how many executives fail to prioritize this important step. Eager to get started quickly, headstrong leaders do not take the time to thoroughly understand their company’s products or services, it’s go-to-market strategies and competitive challenges. A good place for you to start is with your own executive management team. Get on the calendar of your leaders quickly. This includes everyone who has influence if not responsibility over sales, finances, product delivery, marketing and customer service. In between meetings with your organization’s leaders, pore over your company’s website. Study your company’s language and learn its taxonomy. Also take note of how often it communicates with the outside world and how.
If you don’t take these steps within your first two weeks, you could have trouble later getting buy-in for any programmatic changes that may be required. What is more, taking the time to familiarize yourself with your company’s history, deliverables and culture will go a long way to helping you understand the types of partners it engages, the programs it offers and the receptivity they enjoy in the market.
Bonus tip: Take note of little things. Do employees lock their doors or office desks? If so, that could be a sign that your company has trust issues. Do people leave food containers in conference rooms? That could be a sign of arrogance. Even little things convey insights. Monitors with Post-it Notes filled with passwords can indicate a lackadaisical attitude about security. Unused videoconferencing equipment collecting dust in a corner could suggest a lack of follow-though on initiatives.
Step Two: Gauge the strength of your team and its expectations
After you fill out HR forms and introduce yourself to your new team, you’re going to want to get a sense of its strengths and weaknesses. A review of past performance appraisals will offer some insights, but you’re likely to get a better understanding of team member capabilities by reviewing their recent performance. Find out what their individual goals are, and how they are compensated.
Also, ask them about their levels of satisfaction, stress and motivation. Make sure to ask if any team member applied for your job and whether any team member is currently looking for another position elsewhere. If you get the sense that there is widespread job dissatisfaction among your new team, recognize that team members may not see you as an agent of change but a supporter of the status quo, instead. In such cases, it’s best to set realistic expectations and not over-promise.
Another management must: determine the level of truthfulness and candor of your team. From the start, you’re going to want to know what’s working and what isn’t. If your team has been conditioned by punishment to avoid the truth, then overcoming your challenges will be doubly difficult. You must foster a safe environment where the good, the bad and ugly are treated with equal respect.
Bonus tip: With Covid-related lockdowns coming to an end, workplace norms are once again likely to change. Set workplace guidelines quickly but take into account that some personnel disruptions are likely to outlive the pandemic by quite some time.
Step Three: Learn the tools you have and what your industry’s best relies on
If you believe that this three-step plan is another take on people, process and technology assessment, then congratulations; it is — albeit localized to channels and channels management. So let’s turn to technology and automation used to help manage, enable and reward partners.
Not long ago, partner management was more art than science. But those days are gone, say leading market experts including Jay McBain, a technology industry analyst who studies channels at Forrester Research. Among other things, McBain tracks investments world-class organizations make in partner automation platforms. His assessment: “Ecosystems don’t run on spreadsheets.”
Instead, they run on world-class partner platforms that automate everything from onboarding to training and certification to through channel marketing. More than three-quarters of those who have invested in world-class partner automation platforms say their organizations enjoy a competitive advantage as a result. And nearly a third say that have enjoyed revenue growth since adopting a partner relationship management (PRM) platform.
Which brings us to your company: In your first 30 days, immerse yourself into the tools your team uses. This includes the portal your company expects partners to use. Take a tour for yourself and pay close attention to the signup, onboarding, accreditation and marketing experience. Nothing you do to familiarize yourself with your organization will help you understand your partners’ journeys better than using the very tools you provide to them.
Bonus tip: In a lobby display case or executive suite somewhere is a piece of crystal glass or wood plaque that your company gave to its “Partner of the Year.” Make an appointment with that company and ask its top executive if you are their best partner. If not, ask why. Pay particular attention to what they say about automation and ease of doing business.
Follow these three steps and we believe you will be closer to developing your channels VSE. When you’re done, don’t forget to check out our complete 180-day guide.
We don’t promise that this three-step plan will lead to a suite at the Hotel Hassler Rome. But if it does, we promise to send you a bottle of bubbly on us.
In the meantime, good luck in your first 30 days. Be sure to check out the free insights and thought leadership on channels and automation that Impartner provides. You’ll be glad you did.
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].
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]]>The post Building A New Channel for The Post Pandemic World and Beyond appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>Don’t miss go-to-market strategist Theresa Caragol highlight new channel dynamics transforming partnering today. Theresa is a member of the Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB). The CCAB is a group comprised of top channel thought leaders, analysts and consultants who each have decades of channel experience and insights to contribute to channel best practice discussions.
Thank heavens for partners.
That’s what a lot of business leaders must be thinking today, more than a year after the global pandemic shut-down workplaces everywhere. When Covid-19 upended our world, millions of business leaders scrambled to adjust. Many fast-tracked digital transformation projects. Others tossed five-year plans or recalibrated policies to support work-from-home (WFH) initiatives.
Those that doubled-down on go-to-market strategies centered on third-party business partners found they had a leg up on rivals that over-emphasized direct sales. Like never before, partners were literally the eyes, ears and feet on the street that many vendors depended on. Thanks in part to partners, vendors mitigated business disruption and enjoyed surprisingly strong customer engagement.
The results speak for themselves. Take the IT industry.
Though the technology industry as a whole shrunk in 2020, partner-centric companies including Microsoft, Cisco and Datto fared well during the pandemic. Microsoft, which relies on partners for more than 90% of its sales, posted record sales and earnings in 2020. Datto, meanwhile, saw full-year sales jump 10% over 2019 and subscription sales increase 16% year-over-year.
Even sales through distributors, a more mature segment of the tech channel, demonstrated resiliency in 2020. In Europe, sales of IT products and services through distribution grew 7.3% in 2020 compared to 2019, according to CONTEXT. In the U.S., sales through distribution matched 2019 results, despite pandemic-related product shortages, business interruptions and economic challenges, according to NPD Group.
Which brings us to your company: If you oversee or work in channels and partnering, then be sure to tune into our friend Theresa Caragol’s April 8 online presentation, “The Ultimate Guide to Building a Channel in 2021.” Caragol is the founder and principal analyst with Achieve Unite, a Washington D.C.-area consultancy that helps vendors optimize their channel programs and strategies. She is also a member of the Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB).
In her exclusive presentation for Impartner, Caragol will share her insights on key channel trends Impartner believes are transforming partnering. This includes industry economics, technology and management strategies. Again, take the tech industry.
Today, nearly half of channel partners are undergoing a digital transformation themselves as they rebalance their technology portfolios and overhaul their business models. The latter has significant implications for vendor companies. Just a decade ago, for example, channel partners in tech looked to vendor commissions and rebates for much of their profits. Today, this is no longer the case, according to CompTIA, as partners embrace new business models that prioritize the sale of digital services and consulting.
That’s not to say partners don’t want financial help from vendors; they do, obviously, but one that comes in a predictable and manageable fashion. Which brings us professional automation.
Channel building today depends on world class automation that can help vendors with the management and disbursement of marketing development funds (MDF), partner onboarding and enablement, and so much more. With advanced automation, vendors have the following at their fingertips:
If your company does not have this information readily available, you’re likely competing with one arm tied behind your back.
Finally, there’s partner management, which is also evolving — from an art to a science. Thanks to automation, partner management is more metric driven, more scientific and more equitable than ever. As a result, it’s more human, too.
So how can a partner program manager or channel chief keep abreast of all the changes happening simultaneously? Caragol suggests thinking in terms of what Achieve Unite calls the five “Ps” of channel development. Each one triggers a distinct question to ponder:
One you’ve thought through these issues, you’ll be on your way to start building your channel. If you’re wondering where to begin, don’t miss Achieve Unite’s “The Ultimate Field Guide to Starting a Channel.”
The channel can be a tricky thing to navigate. But we’ll always be here to help guide you.
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]]>The author of this piece is Peter O’Neill, Research Director at Research in Action which is an internationally recognized powerhouse for their core strength in Marketing and IT Automation.. He is also a member of the Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB). The CCAB is a group comprised of top channel thought leaders, analysts and consultants who each have decades of channel experience and insights to contribute to channel best practice discussions.
In my activities as an industry analyst, I talk to many B2B companies about partner automation systems and the discussions are always focused on how to recruit, categorize and generally manage their partners.
Basically, the focus is on partner relationship management. This is because most organizations continue to think of various channel partners – be they agents, distributors, influencers, resellers or eCommerce aggregators – as serving a pure distribution function for their organization. While they do often share product marketing content with these partners, it’s merely because they want to ensure that their own brand is well represented, as well as trying to govern how products are presented to customers.
But that’s only half of the partner automation story…
More-savvy B2B marketing professionals are waking up to the fact that channel partners can be leveraged for local marketing reach as well. They’re learning to open up marketing automation systems that can be accessed by channel partners. This concept of through-channel marketing automation (TCMA), sometimes called local or distributed marketing, is the practice of engaging channel partners to extend and amplify a firm’s marketing campaigns and activities. And for those willing to invest, it can be incredibly powerful.
But why set up a TCMA program? Here are two key considerations:
TCMA is slowly being adopted across the technology industry where marketing automation investments have started to become the norm (I’m seeing it first-hand). But I also notice interest in other B2B industry sectors as well. All companies want to onboard new partners more quickly. They also want to scale partner marketing efforts and build partner loyalty, leverage partner’s promotional efforts to amplify their own marketing efforts and maintain corporate brand integrity. TCMA gives them new levels of visibility into channel marketing performance.What functions does a modern TCMA system support?
Syndicated content with agile control over messaging – Content syndication in TCMA is the ability to create a content feed for the channel partner’s website keeping authorized content in synch, effortlessly, with the manufacturer. In fast changing industries (like technology) or regulated industries (like financial services or health care) the ability to implement change quickly, but with complete control, is a key imperative.
If the benefits are so clear, why is there not more investment in TCMA?
My observation is that the main hurdle to realizing these benefits is based on organizational challenges. The word ‘channel’ is unfortunately used in marketing departments to mean communication channels and so the business partner channel is often neglected or overlooked by marketing. It’s often the case that many CMOs don’t even think of business partners in the context of a marketing channel. And many organizations still manage their business partners from within the sales organization, so marketing doesn’t feel responsible or empowered.
Once you’re ready to start your TCMA journey, how can you help ensure that the initiative will be successful? Here are some quick tips based on the projects I have seen:
Peter O’Neill is a research director at Research in Action, a leading independent technology research and consulting company. He is also a member of the Impartner Channel Chief Advisor Board. Read more about Peter here or contact him at [email protected] or [email protected]
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]]>The post New Year, New Job? Guide for New Channel Chiefs appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>If 2021 started off for you with a new role in the channel and have officially taken on your first gig as a channel chief, this quick guide will help you make a significant contribution to your channel goals, objectives and performance – and defy expectations in the first 180 days. Whether you have been hired on to build, rebuild or accelerate your new channel program, at the end of the day, your objective is to generate revenue, contribute to your channel program and create an amazing partner experience within your channel ecosystem. Take time to understand channel-culture, use your resources and stay focused on your goals in your new role as channel chief. You got this!
Approaching the Start Line
Just like any new role you find yourself in, define the start line, figure out where you are on the channel journey and think about your initial road map. To start off:
Observe and Learn
It doesn’t matter if you’re new to the channel or a channel veteran, the onboarding process can be challenging for everyone, whether it is navigating through processes, IT systems setup or training. Don’t rush, try to understand everything before moving on and identify any major challenges that surface. To make the most out of your new role:
Review, Plan and Socialize
Once you’ve gathered data, communicated with many members in your channel program and have a better understanding of your new role and responsibilities as channel chief, you are ready to focus on setting organizational direction, refining your goals and developing a plan. Start by:
Plan and Execute
Once you’ve done your research, socialized, reviewed and you have a set game plan for your channel program, it is time to shift your focus on tactical execution. Remember to be flexible, make adjustments if you need to and don’t forget the strategy when it’s go-time. Start the execution process by:
Change can always bring a lot of uncertainty, remember to always listen, communicate and plan ahead to make this easier for yourself and for everyone that is part of your channel program. Your partners want consistency, transparency and want clear communication, make sure to become an effective channel-steward for your channel program and adopt all the new changes that create a meaningful contribution to your channel. This is a great starting point for your channel journey, and we hope this guide helps you make a lasting impact for your program.
This blog is a summary of the eBook, The definitive Guide for New Channel Chiefs, How to Defy Expectations in the First 180 Days by Channelnomics (formerly the 2112 Group). To read the full eBook, click here: https://impartner.com/portfolio-item/ebook-the-definitive-guide-for-new-channel-chiefs/
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]]>The post Universe Proofing Your Channel appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>A message from Impartner CMO, Kerry Desberg
If 2020 were a movie genre—what would it be? Impossible to categorize, I think. Maybe part thriller, part horror, part drama—even some comedy here and there.
As a marketer, on many levels it’s felt like the marketing Hunger Games—constantly twisting, ducking and turning to find ways to move forward in this unscriptable period of history that has challenged and changed every aspect of business in some way—sometimes bad, occasionally good, and always different.
The irony of it, while no one would ever wish for what has happened in the universe in 2020, in some strange way, and like many others, our team and our company have emerged more powerfully because of it. There’s a saying, “calm seas don’t make good sailors,” and for countless reasons, large and small, I can see that’s true.
Our marketing and biz dev teams are is tighter, smarter, and more refined in every move they make—having had to pivot to markets with pandemic-driven demand, go into overdrive to compensate for normally hot leads that slowed due to COVID-induced spending caution, find ways to drive opportunities without a steady stream of events which had regularly generated bursts of demand—all of it. Our product and engineering teams have kept their roadmaps on track, collaborating and moving things ahead despite no longer working together and being able to easily hang over each other’s desks to work through a problem.
But we’re doing it! Who knows what the universe is going to continue to throw at us, but in action after action, powerful things have happened this year:
Without question, I squint a bit as I look at 2021, wondering what other unscriptable thing is headed our collective way. What I do know for sure, is the Impartner team is committed, stronger and ready to help make 2021 the best year ever for our customers’ channel—no matter what the universe throws at us. So, stay safe everyone. We look forward to working with you channel pros and tackling the challenges of the business universe together.
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]]>The post Your Channel Role is Changing—Here are the Benefits appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>For years, channel sales, account management, and marketing roles have remained, largely the same. Namely, sales teams have endlessly been on the road, meeting partners on a case-by-case basis to go over agreed discounts, supported deals, and marketing plans. In parallel, marketing teams have tried, often retroactively, to support what their sales counterparts have requested, and put plans and programs in place to meet these needs.
It’s taken COVID-19 to allow channel teams to break for the norm. We are not talking about the fact that these meetings are now happening all online. We’re not even talking about the surge of enabling activities surrounding Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platforms. We are talking about radical changes to the way these channel teams work together and collaborate.
Channel account managers now have more time to meet more partners. This is enabling them to be less reactive and allowing them to do more analysis, planning, and spend more time with those partners who have more potential; as opposed to those who shout the loudest. They can now look at enabling ‘second-tier’ partners who not only show potential but want, and maybe need, to do more.
Because all of our meetings are online and take less time to organize and travel to, we see channel account managers involving their marketing counterparts more often. This collaborative change has resulted in joint meetings where not only do all parties (channel partners and vendors) discuss current and new deals, but also future activities and plans around these future activities.
In the past, this rarely happened but it is now the new normal. More joint discussions, more joint business planning, and more strategic activities being driven by sales and organized by marketing. So, are we at a juncture where we need to continue on this path and ensure tighter and consistent collaboration between channel sales and marketing? Our obvious answer is a resounding ‘yes!’ Include marketing, sales, or others on any calls where you see an opportunity for innovation and growth, and watch the collaboration take place.
So, let’s chat and discuss other changes your channel organizations and teams are facing and experiencing. We’d like to invite you to join our Channel Chief & Chill series. It is an informal but highly engaging drop-in interactive meeting happening every Friday. Find out more about this new series from Impartner by registering for the North America discussion or the EMEA discussion.
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]]>The post How to “Marie Kondo” Your Partner Experience appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>If we opened your shirt drawer and found perfectly folded shirts row after tidy row, chances are you’re one of the millions of people that tuned in to Netflix’s hit show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and suddenly felt the urge to organize your closet. We might not be a celebrity tidying consultant, but we want to share a few tricks on how to declutter and spark joy in your channel program. Gina Batali-Brooks, President and Founder of IsInspired and Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board member, joined Impartner CMO, Kerry Desberg, on our latest podcast discussion from the Build a Better Channel series and she explains how the principles of a popular house-organization television series can be applied to giving your channel partners a better experience. Several of the concepts that Marie Kondo uses really make sense, even for your channel partners. Below are the five tips on how to Marie Kondo your partner experience:
Commit to Being Tidy
If you think about tidying up and committing to tidying up, people are really starting to look at how you optimize your partner experience. It’s not a short-term fix, it has to start being built in the fabric of how you’re working with your partners. And so, committing to tidying up really means, putting in place the supportive infrastructure that you need over time. Similar to a publishing governance body, trying to move the publishing date of content closer to where it’s from or where it’s being developed, but then being able to say how do you make sure that it’s going to be relevant to the readers? How do you make sure that you’re getting rid of stale content or stale data over time? You really need to make sure you’re committing to being tidy and as well as tidying up for the long haul.
What do you want your Partners’ Experience to Look Like?
Imagine your ideal partner experience and truly put yourself in your partners’ shoes. Think about simple tasks like occasional onboarding as a new partner, you need to have an understanding of what that experience looks like and remember to talk to your partners about what their experience was like for them. Talk to your partners about the vendors they’re working with, think about all of their systems and then you think about all of the vendor systems that they have to know, all the logins, and all of the steps. Take the time to evaluate and think about a partner’s journey; for example, utilizing single sign-on solutions or integrating any tools that might create a better experience. Thinking about it from the partners’ perspective will really help you understand what your partners deal with on a day-to-day basis and will help you create a better partner experience for them within your partner ecosystem.
Focus on Discarding Before you do Anything Else
Marie Kondo says, “Just envision what you’re trying to move to and then finish discarding first.” She advises viewers to discard by category and not by location. So, if you think about discarding data, what is the data that you really need, and what is the data you’re going to get rid of? Looking at it holistically across what you need from a partner and not just what you’re going to need for the portal for instance. If you look at it more holistically, spending time discarding before you decide where it’s going to go and making sure everything has a place to go into. When you’re combining what you’ve learned about your partners and what you’ve envisioned for the partner experience with what you’ve done from discarding, you’re going to put those two things together to make them all work in your channel program.
Does it “Spark Joy” in your Channel?
What you hear most often from partners is that they don’t like doing something because they know it is going to be a hard process and they want a simple process that is consistent. You need to give partners what they want, provide easy solutions, and create simple partner journeys. So, to take a lesson from Marie Kondo, just ask yourself, “Does it spark joy?” For example, if you’re going to a partner portal and you’re going through an onboarding process, and if it’s an email coming into your inbox, you want your partners to respond with excitement or joy and not drudgery. Implement partner personas, implement new processes based on partners’ experiences and partner satisfaction, and improve and remodel your channel. Create a meaningful experience for your partners in your channel and optimize your partner experience so that every process and every piece of content shared sparks joy for your partners.
Practice Gratitude
It’s hard not to fall in love with Marie Kondo because she is incredibly grateful, she thanks the house for what you have over your head, and she thanks the people she works with. Practicing gratitude can be challenging when you think of all the problems that are sometimes present in your channel, but when you take a step back, you might realize that you actually have a lot of good things going on as well. Don’t forget to be grateful and practice gratitude for what you have. Often, we talk to partners on behalf of our customers and you talk to the partners and they think they have all of these major issues or they’re doing things wrong. Encourage your partners, express all the great things they do well, and take the time to show your gratitude for their hard work.
It’s time to reimagine your processes and think about how you can declutter your partner experience and simplify it. Create bite-sized plans along the way that allows you to reach your goals, measure your success throughout the journey, and know where you’re going. If this blog post sparks joy, listen to the full podcast with Gina Batali-Brooks, President and Founder of IsInspired and Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board member. Tune in to the Build a Better Channel series and don’t miss an episode!
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]]>The post Integration Partnerships for a Better Partner Experience appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>Let’s talk about integration. With everyone working from home and many offices switching to fully remote positions, we are relying heavily on tools and solutions that help keep our teams connected and our customers happy. If you’re using online communication tools like Slack to chat with your partners or if you’ve invested in management solutions and business planning tools, it is so important that these solutions integrate seamlessly with your channel. Integration partnerships are the key to building better partner relationships, and now more than ever, we need to create a one-stop-shop experience for our partners.
Multi-channel Communication Integration
Whether your program has 25 or 2,500 partners, you need a quick and easy way to communicate with your partners. With a huge increase in remote workers, we have been seeing a rise in multi-channel communication tools like Slack and Teams. Companies are steering away from email and instead of leaning on messaging tools to get real-time conversations started and interact on a quick basis. Working closely with your IT and development team to integrate these communication tools with your current channel will help you manage your team, stay connected, and help send out important notifications to your partners. Whether you are sending a quick message to congratulate partners on finishing their certification, sending reminders to finish training, or simply doing wellness checks on your team, we find there is real value in integrating multi-channel communication tools.
Business Planning Integration
Working with a lot of data can feel challenging and integrating tools into your current channel might sound overwhelming. We find that starting the conversation with your IT and development teams to get the ball rolling is always the hardest part of this integration journey. You might think that integration means building and creating a new portal or user interface for your channel, but a lot of solution providers will license their business planning tools so that you can easily and seamlessly integrate it with your channel. Your IT and development teams will draw from the actual business planning dashboards with a parameter that pivots the data within the dashboard for the partner who’s logged in, while still keeping in mind the partner experience they’re used to with these tools. You will be able to see portal traffic going up, updates on sales and be able to track leads with real-time data right in your channel by integrating your business planning tools.
CRM Integration
We have a handful of customers that have CRM integrations with their top partners, yes, it is an IT-heavy integration, but the benefits and high revenue truly outweigh the work involved. Applying a CRM integration in your channel eliminates that swivel chair that so many partners have complained about. How many sales reps are your partners dealing with, how many customers do they have, how many portals are they logging into and how many products do they sell? It’s almost impossible sometimes to get them to go in and register a deal, and in some cases, if you’re dealing with a large partner, they won’t allow their sales team to access another portal. Having some of that back and forth eliminated with CRM integration has proved to be very successful for our customers and has resulted in automated actions that expand the functionality of their portal, eliminating the need to jump back and forth between systems.
You may be surprised at how many channel chiefs are experiencing the same challenges you are. If you would like to meet with and talk to other channel chiefs and find out how they are working through their obstacles, join our Channel Chief and Chill discussions every Wednesday morning at 9 am MST for North America and every Friday morning at 9 am GTM for Europe. You can sign up for your respective region’s discussion here.
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]]>The post 5 Key Fundamentals to Fortifying Your Channel Foundation appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>With so many variables that have surfaced in 2020, everyone is talking about what is going to change and how they need to adjust. Whether or not you’ve adapted and pivoted to the new normal, often times the fundamentals that need to remain the same regardless of market conditions are overlooked. Patricia Rush, President of Rush To Channel and Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board member, joined Impartner CMO, Kerry Desberg, on our latest podcast discussion from the Build a Better Channel series on how to fortify your channel program for any obstacles that may come in the future.
Now more than ever, it is important to keep up with trends and continue to adjust, adapt and connect. So much of the conversation in the marketplace today is about what’s changing because of the pandemic, however, the foundations that really make a channel organization run well are things that don’t change, shouldn’t change and won’t change. Listen to the full podcast with Patricia Rush, President of Rush To Channel and Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board member. Tune in to the Build a Better Channel series and don’t miss an episode!
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]]>The post Why Right Now Is The Perfect Time for a Channel Digital Transformation appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>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!
Subscribe to the Lessons from the Edge Podcast Series
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]]>Remember the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray? Working during a global pandemic can feel like you are living your own version of Groundhog Day. You’re stuck at home, days have turned into weeks, weeks have turned into months and escaping the monotony of your daily work-from-home routine can be challenging. Although it feels like there is no end to this unforgettable chapter in your life, you have to remind yourself that you are encountering problems you’ve never dealt with before and you are resilient. You’ve learned to be resourceful with fewer resources, to embrace change and to be a channel-champion for your partners. Here are a few more helpful tips to get you through those channel challenges:
Rely on Referral Partners
In addition to your regular onboarding process of recruiting traditional partners, build out a lower tier for your referral partners. Allow these lower-tier partners to refer opportunities and receive an award for doing so; this can be an incentive for closed opportunities or an incentive for new opportunities. This will help speed up the sales cycle and provide a low barrier to entry by waiting to onboard some partners until they spend more time demonstrating their value. It’s fairly inexpensive to pay out a referral and it’s a way for you to observe the self-qualification of those partners that will naturally rise to a productive partner position. Help partners get in, spend less time onboarding and help new opportunities get into the pipeline and close.
Organize Your Content
Because we can’t go onsite, having a quick playbook of short videos demonstrating a product or functionality can be extremely beneficial to partners. Create product playbooks by organizing your content in such a way that partners can grab blocks of assets without searching across different portal pages or different folders. Organize them into a playbook that can be favorited quickly by the partner so that they can easily find that content block. These content blocks can have talk tracks, information on the competition, training videos, scripts and quick role play videos.
Create a Partner Advisory Board
Similar to a client advisory board, creating a partner advisory board can help build lasting relationships within your partner program. It can be as simple as asking partners what they want to see in the portal, getting honest feedback on the portal, products, or the company, and creating a space where they can speak openly. It can be as easy as setting up a call on a quarterly or semi-annually basis, asking for feedback and just making partners feel more included in the process of coming up with the content and strategy around their partner program. Make sure to also follow up and provide feedback on future plans or what the next steps are.
You may be surprised at how many channel chiefs are experiencing the same challenges you are. If you would like to meet with and talk to other channel chiefs and find out how they are working through their obstacles, join our Channel Chief and Chill discussions every Wednesday morning at 9 am MST for North America and every Friday morning at 9 am GTM for Europe. You can sign up for your respective region’s discussion here.
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]]>The post Creating Partner Personas: The Ultimate Personalized Experience for Partners appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>One size doesn’t fit all. As we’ve all been at home a lot more lately, shopping online has become a regular way of life. Every time you log in to Amazon, you see things that are strategically positioned to your liking and interest. This obviously benefits Amazon, but it also benefits you, as the consumer just as much. Because it’s not one size fits all, you don’t have to wade through products that don’t relate to you. This is the exact reason partner personas are so important to create for your partner program.
You may have already ventured into the segmentation of partners by type, size, or other criteria, which is a great start, however, creating partner personas digs into the next level of personalization to enhance the partner experience. There may be multiple titles at one organization logging into your partner portal and typically they don’t all want to see the same content. Not only that, but they typically should not see the same content. A marketing contact at your partner account does not need to have the same experience as a sales contact logging into your portal.
As discussed in our recent Channel Chief & Chill best practice discussion, building these personas not only benefits the partner, but it also lets you, as the vendor, see what personas are accessing various content and pieces of training. These reports give you an advantageous viewpoint on how your partners use the resources you give them. Once you have these insights, you can reevaluate and revise the experience and the journey you are giving to partners based on actual data and activity.
If you have not yet created partner personas for your program, here’s a tip to start: Put yourself in the shoes of the different people logging into your portal. Physically map out these personas on a spreadsheet, on paper, or any way that feels right to you. What would you want to see if you were that partner contact? From there, decide which resources should be accessible to which personas and what experience you want each of them to have in your portal. With these changes, your partners will realize how easy it is to do business with you and how much you enable them to do their job effectively.
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]]>Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American philosopher, and poet, once said, “Life is a journey, not a destination”, and just like life, your channel program needs to focus on the partner journey and not just the end destination. To create the best partner journey, you need a continual lifecycle management tool for your partners. That’s where we come in. Impartner’s new Journey Builder is a ground-breaking solution that moves beyond just automating transactions to automating the journey and experience of partners and rewarding the behaviors that determine success. Easily curate every step of your partners’ journeys through every stage of their lifecycle with a visual and user-friendly partner experience. Take your partners on a journey and have the tools in place to fully optimize your channel revenue.
A partner journey is what happens on the way to the destination, here are the top five reasons why Journey Builder will help you get the most out of your partner relationship:
To learn more about how Impartner helps organizations unlock the potential of indirect sales by helping them manage and optimize every step of their partners’ journeys, the best place to start this conversation is with our award-winning channel management platform. Impartner’s Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solutions provide you with the right tools at the right time to represent your brand, build new relationships, and sell more effectively. If you don’t have a PRM, request a demo today and we can show you how Impartner’s new Journey Builder integrates with the rest of our world-class channel management solutions. Find out more by visiting impartner.com/demo.
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]]>The author of this piece is Peter O’Neill, Research Director at Research in Action, which is a leading independent technology research and consulting company providing both forward-looking and practical advice to enterprise as well as vendor clients. O’Neill is also a member of the ImpartnerChannel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB). The CCAB is a group comprised of top channel thought leaders, analysts, and consultants who each have decades of channel experience and insights to contribute to channel best practice discussions.
Many of us are eagerly debating what has changed in channel marketing and enablement due to the current crisis. More importantly, many are asking which of those changes, if any, will become permanent. Let me make an attempt to answer those questions here.
Last winter (BEFORE Covid-19), I fielded a global survey asking 1500 manufacturers/vendors about their channel marketing and enablement projects. We asked about their investment drivers, giving 15 options. 1500 ranked “involving partners in our own digital marketing programs” as #6 in their priorities – so already a top priority. In discussions with channel partners themselves, I find that this item is even more important to them, and I expect that trend to continue in the future, as digital business truly dominates marketing, selling, and business relationships.
The survey also showed that businesses now prefer a more comprehensive channel management software platform that covers all of their needs – partner marketing, management, and even sales. Currently, most partner management vendors focus on either channel marketing or enablement only. But manufacturers will seek a channel platform that can support a highly-volatile partner community through a much more complete business cycle, from connection to order processing and service delivery… a quite different partner management world.
How different and why?
I see this transformation under seven separate trend headlines with all these aspects of channel management moving, over time, from the left-side state to the emerging state described on the right-side.
For decades channel enablement and marketing were just a peripheral process in most industries; the mantra was: “first we sell direct and then we’ll find some partners.” Most firms were selling physical products (or at least on-premises software) and just needed knowledgeable sellers to position the offer to buyers they couldn’t reach.
But now…almost every industry is morphing to an “as-a-service” business model. And buyers pull the service based on their own research. But heh! Channel partners are not being “dis-intermediated” — this was such a strange cliché back in the 1990s when the Internet took hold and everybody was writing about eBusiness and eCommerce taking work away from channel partners. If anything, the channel has become even more influential and advocational for businesses. The business model in the channel has changed too and they’re more than likely to live off revenues earned from the end-user than from the manufacturer they now occasionally represent. In addition to resellers or distributors, we now have channel players called affiliates, referrers, associations, communities, groups, and ambassadors.
In fact, just as we like to talk about customer-centric or buyer-led purchasing, the partners are now taking control of the partnerships they need to maintain with vendors. From push to pull. Vendors can no longer map out their target markets and plan partnerships around the battlefield like generals ordering armies around a warzone. The market, the partner communities, run the new game.
This is not only the case in the tech industry. Consider a leading manufacturer of industrial bearings, Sheaffler Group in Germany. They’ve found that their new sensor technology creates a whole set of opportunities as an Internet-of-Things data provider. The sensors they’ve installed in trains, combined with AI technology, can provide vital maintenance data on the railway track itself, which is sold to the Bundesbahn who maintain the infrastructure. Schaeffler continues to be a manufacturer but now also has a data service business with new partnerships. As-a-Service is happening everywhere.
That is the bigger picture and most trends are the result of changing expectations on the buyer side and the proliferation of digital channels across all businesses and industries. It has been the fact that digital transformation has been somewhat held up in certain countries and industries due to the classical resistance to change. COVID-19 has burned away many of those hurdles. Hardly any executive or HR manager will now claim that WFH is bad for business. Companies have learned quickly to continue most of their business relationships both internally and externally through digital media.
Here are the most important other trends I believe are here to stay:
The current crisis has created a sort of perfect storm for sales and channel enablement projects and that is a change that I think will outlast COVID-19 and become a strategic imperative in many companies over 2021 and beyond. Those channel enablement and marketing platform vendors who can cover the needs described above will flourish in this marketplace.
To learn how to stay ahead of these trends, watch the full webinar I presented with Impartner CMO Kerry Desberg, where I dive deeper into the channel research I mentioned, along with each of these trends. If you have questions on how to better manage partners through a partner relationship management platform to increase channel revenue, visit impartner.com/demo.
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]]>The author of this piece is Michelle Gunter, EVP at Partner Perspectives which is a full-service channel consulting and enablement firm which guides companies in launching channels, expanding existing ecosystems and developing new ways to improve channel performance. She is also a member of the Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board (CCAB). The CCAB is a group comprised of top channel thought leaders, analysts and consultants who each have decades of channel experience and insights to contribute to channel best practice discussions.
The Missing Step
I take an agile approach to planning: analyze available data, develop a strategy, make swift decisions and set the team in action. Missteps are not failures, but ways to learn that help to refine the strategy. As a channel sales leader, this approach has yielded strong results. It wasn’t until I led a more complex, global sales organization that I realized I was missing a step.
Even the best strategy and flawless execution can miss the mark if you can’t be clear on who you want to be before deciding what you want to do. I’m not talking about corporate values or a code of conduct, but deciding in every initiative or project how you want to show up and the impact you want to have. Setting a “To Be” list before your “To Do” list creates a clear focus on the desired outcome. This simple step of aligning everyone to a single why had a powerful impact that could be felt by our employees, our clients and our partners.
Vendors, You’re Being Graded
Right now, channel partners are grading their vendors. Many partners are currently realigning their vendor relationships and while this is in part driven by shifts in the marketplace and increased demand for security, cloud and consumption based solutions, this grading is also heavily influenced by how vendors showed up when the world shut down. Partners are heralding vendors who were there for them with relief programs in their time of need and re-evaluating those who were not.
What’s the Criteria?
As partners talk about moving from survival to recovery and revitalization, I was curious about what factors were given the most weight in vendor re-selection. Financial relief? Flexible payment terms? Free licenses? Relaxed revenue targets? And what about the smaller vendors who couldn’t offer relief packages quite so robust? By knowing exactly what partners valued most during the crisis, could it help vendors better understand how to support partners moving forward?
The Results are Surprising
What did grade-A vendors do that set them apart from the rest? The results were surprising.
As I met with partners and scoured polls and online commentary, my focus shifted. I was originally looking for trends in what vendors did, but it was the way they showed up that seemed to resonate with partners. Partners definitely cited the tangibles like financial relief and other programs, but they also focused on how the vendor behaved and made the partners “feel.” It was the level of concern from the vendor—the sense of urgency—and how the importance of the partnership was communicated that set them apart from their lower-grade counterparts. The vendors who showed up strong did not overlook that first but crucial step.
Those companies that first decided who they wanted to be in this crisis were led by a higher purpose when deciding what they needed to do. It resonated in their communications; it showed in their relief offerings; it was reinforced at all levels within their company, from executives to reps. Early remarks from partners such as “they are there for us,” “they understand our needs” and “they are working with us” showed an increased sense of loyalty even during the height of the chaos. The following word cloud lists some of the most common words or phrases partners used to describe their perception of vendors in response to the COVID-19 crisis:
When describing the standout vendors, they used words like “sense of urgency,” “responsive,” “supportive,” “accessible” and “engaged”. Even words not usually associated with corporations like “human,” “caring” and “heart” were used to describe some vendors. While some of the likely candidates with more robust channel programs were cited, many smaller vendors who led with “heart” were mentioned as well.
Retired Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz said, “If people think they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.” The pandemic created an unprecedented moment for brands to make strong emotional connections with their customers, partners and even employees. Those companies that connected with their partners through a shared set of values have strengthened loyalty and will be rewarded as revenues rebound.
So Now What
As partners scramble to adapt to the new normal, they are having to re-think how to sell, support and connect with customers in a whole new way. For many partners, they are adapting to:
Vendors are simultaneously trying to adapt programs and engagement strategies to support partners in these efforts. Some vendors are providing techniques and tools that enable remote selling. Others are creating effective marketing strategies to build customer relationships virtually. Some vendors are working with partners to design an E2E customer journey without ever stepping foot on the customer’s site. The list of things vendors can do to help partners is long, but if having a clear purpose really is a key differentiator in gaining partner loyalty, vendors should seize this golden opportunity by aligning their “To Be” to their partners’ challenges.
5 Tips on leading with “Be”
If you’re one of the vendors who got an A from their partners, put a gold sticker on your forehead and take an extra 15-minute recess! If you’re one of the vendors who maybe didn’t get the grade, don’t worry—there’s still time to retake the test.
To Be or Not to Be……I think you know the answer. Happy Selling!
To find more content like this from our insightful Channel Chief Advisory Board members, visit the resource page on Impartner’s website.
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]]>2020 has been a pivotable point for many security companies, whether you’ve experienced major changes to your channel ecosystem, supported more partners with fewer resources or witnessed a major boost in new channel partners, Impartner is committed to protecting and preserving your channel programs. We are the most secure PRM solution, our customers include some of the world’s leading security companies and we are the PRM solution that security companies trust the most.
Not only does Impartner meet security protocols strong enough to be listed on the Salesforce AppExchange, we have achieved the coveted SOC 2 certification and follow stringent security standards for the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Burp Suite security testing. We also keep your content secure with our SegmentAI, which makes it easy and intuitive to share the right content with the right audience. We strengthen your channel, secure your data, provide boots on the ground through automation and provide a robust product that protects the entire platoon.
Train the Troops
What Coronavirus has taught us about remote work is that most of us were not prepared, we had to move swiftly and adapt to the current situation. One easy way to keep your program data secure is to provide targeted training for partners on security. Whether that training is a quick refresher course on data security, setting up new policies and procedures for working from home, or providing in-depth information about data breaches, this is one of the most important considerations when moving your team to work fully remote. Targeted training and using the right tools are going to guarantee you that piece of mind.
Activate Additional Artillery
It was decided that our physical offices would be closed, and our entire staff would begin working from home for the foreseeable future. This was not the time to think about how to cope with these new changes, our customers are our first priority and we quickly focused on creating COVID-minded content. Coming up with additional assets and creating new collateral about securely working from home will truly provide support to your remote partners. Present partners with resources and tips on how to be secure at home, enforcing multi-factor authentication, sharing sensitive data safely, and exercising caution when using mobile applications with corporate data. Delivering these new assets will allow you to gain mindshare and give value to partners for engaging with the portal.
Backup the Barracks
Whether your team is working in different time zones, weekends, or in the middle of the night, data should always be accessible to them. This important information needs to be available 24/7 and should be housed in one easy to find place. Manage all of your partner information within the portal, keep important files in this system of record, and keep your data secure. Providing data security provides value to partners and helps gain their loyalty. Our customers trust us because we integrate with their CRM, we keep data and program materials separate to avoid unintentional mixing of files and we create a true balance of separation and integration.
To learn more about why Impartner is the choice of top security corporations worldwide to accelerate their channel and growth year-after-year, the best place to start this conversation is with our award-winning channel management platform. Impartner provides an enterprise-class solution for managing all aspects of the partner life cycle, from partner recruitment to marketing and sales, to performance management. Impartner’s Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solutions, keep you and your partner’s data safe and secure while giving your partners the right tools at the right time to represent your brand, build new relationships and sell more effectively. Find out more by visiting impartner.com/demo.
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]]>We are currently finding ourselves in a new dystopian-like situation, having to adjust and adapt quickly, learning fully-virtually, and adapting to whatever gets thrown on our plate. As the current market gives and takes, we are given more time to focus on optimizing our channel operations, but we have fewer resources and facetime with our partners. Pre-pandemic, channel managers have aligned partners from the top-down—starting with their own organizations’ end goals in mind and then figuring out how partners fit into the strategy. With the world turning upside down in recent months, so has this process. Summarized from a recent webinar as part of Impartner’s Build a Better Channel Series, Purechannels CEO and Impartner Channel Chief Advisory Board Member (CCAB) Glenn Robertson joins Impartner CMO Kerry Desberg to discuss how to dramatically increase partner experience, partner effectiveness and drive partner revenue.
Start at the End
The best results happen in the end, so why not start at the end? Most companies focus on their needs and goals in mind, but what about our partners’ needs? According to neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) communication therapy, the best judge of our communication is the impact that it has on the recipient. The focus and emphasis are on the recipient dictating success, rather than the deliverer expecting or assuming it. Focusing on your partners means placing more emphasis on their choices; choice of solution, choice of service, choice of support, choice of how they do business, and who they do business with. Choosing to shift your focus from your needs to your partners’ needs will create more emotionally driven decisions for your partners and affect their buying decisions within your channel
Customer Experience to Partner Experience
Drive to create and provide the best partner experience in our channel ecosystem, partner experience should be the focus at the starting point, and we need to place more importance on partner experience throughout the program process. When was the last time you asked your partners what they want? If you don’t ask your partners what they want, you will never be able to deliver what they need. Partners exist to help with sales, to allow ease of doing business, and to generate leads. Knowing what partners want at the end, means knowing where to start and creating less chance of disconnect. By putting partner experience first and relating everything back to partners’ needs and wants, we are far more likely to get the desired end results.
The Five E’s
Based on research, surveying, and data, Purechannels developed a model for achieving the ultimate partner experience. There are Five E’s that are critical to creating a good partner experience. The Five E’s focus on engaging partners, educating partners, enabling partners, evaluating the process, and then evolving over time. There is no necessary starting point to this model, you can jump into it at any point and it will still be relevant and cyclical. Ask what your partners’ needs are, respond to those needs, and understand what you need to do to ensure partner success. Continue to base your actions on your partners’ needs in every part of this cyclical process. It’s never-ending change and you can dive in and start and stop at any particular point. People change, businesses change and your channel experiences change.
The bottom line is that good partner experiences drive good customer experiences. You need to provide contemporary solutions for the current climate and offer expertise, insight, leadership, and help your partners make more informed decisions during this uncertain time. We are living in a strange period in world history and now more than ever companies need to shift their focus on their partners’ wants and needs and create a wonderful partner experience. That’s where Impartner comes in, Impartner provides the tools necessary to give your partners that world-class experience. Create customized partner journeys, empower partners with insightful resources and actionable training, and energize partners to be more productive by providing them a personalized partner experience. Visit impartner.com/demo to learn more.
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]]>Have you ever asked yourself what drives channel revenue, what makes partners profitable and what does it take to make your channel successful? The front edge of the challenge with Business Intelligence (BI) tools is always finding a better way to show what really matters and making informed decisions based on real-time data. If you’re a channel chief looking for visibility into your channel, Impartner is here to help and we’ve built the perfect tool that answers those golden channel questions. Channel Intel+ unlocks the ability to create unlimited visuals and reports to provide actionable and crucial insights into partner performance as an extension of Impartner’s robust BI engine. With Channel Intel+ in your channel toolbox, you are the author of your own success.
Find Your Next Trophy Partner
One of the biggest challenges you will face as a channel leader is digging through those large channel haystacks and finding the buried needles. You have to be ruthlessly efficient when identifying the partners that are the diamonds in the rough and the partners that are overperforming relative to their expectations. Whether you’re managing tens or tens of thousands of partners, our BI tools help you create unlimited visuals to enhance out-of-the-box dashboards to get a segmented distillation of partner data and sift through the pretenders and find the true contenders within your partner program.
Provide Partner Value
Channels are almost always understaffed, relative to their counterparts in the direct-side, and even more so as we deal with the current climate. The entire premise of the channel is about leverage, doing more work with fewer people, and leveraging the least amount of internal resources as possible to get as much externally as you can. In the channel space, we have to be extremely data-driven and aware of what collateral is being consumed, which assets and training are helping partners and what’s not working. Channel chiefs don’t want to dig for information, they want to easily see what is on the menu that will benefit them. With Channel Intel+ you have the ability to organize visuals into personalized dashboards and reports. These reports are useful to schedule on an interval that you specify to send to internal stakeholders or even easily serve your partner a plate with no garnishes.
Allocate Your Resources
In the channel, you’ve most likely seen a numerator at best, we don’t ever see a denominator in terms of evaluating a partner’s performance. We tend to prioritize our time and allocation of resources based on which partner makes the most noise. Stop actions like handholding and babysitting partners by making data-driven decisions and truly optimizing your decision on who should get the resources. Who should be getting these important leads and who will turn those leads into major sales? Human-driven decisions can be replaced by data-driven decisions with Channel Intel+, enhanced partner data helps you clearly find the best and most effective partners in your program.
Understand the Journey
You’ve got to understand the path that your partners are taking and truly understand the effectiveness of the tools being given to them. You’ve built a large digital presence for them and the follow-through for that is key, you have to see what path they’re following, and which paths lead to the most successful results. Everyone’s goal is to provide partners with a path to success, the fewer paths you provide to your partners, the less navigating and less confusion. When partners enter your channel, every door should be locked except for the one they’re supposed to go through; no need for partners to plan their own strategy, their own game plan, and assemble their own tools. Leverage our BI tools to reinforce the partner journey, remove any unnecessary noise, and reroute your partners so that they are provided a path that’s proven to succeed.
Leave it to the experts at Impartner and our new business intelligence tool, Channel Intel+, to truly drive partner revenue, profitability, and actionable and crucial insights into partner performance – all through an easy-to-use user interface. Our solutions are not only our customers’ most powerful secret weapon, they are easy to adopt, quick to deploy, and fully customizable for your brand. If you’d like to learn more about how Impartner can strengthen and transform your channel today, visit impartner.com/demo.
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]]>During this everchanging COVID-19 era, we are seeing an abundant need for a new balance of human and digital interactions to make our channel programs more successful. Strategies, tactics and nearly every aspect of the way we run our businesses have changed amid COVID-19. The channel is changing faster than ever and the same is true for partner relationships. The Spur Group’s Managing Director, Dan Overgaag, and channel management technology giant Impartner’s CMO, Kerry Desberg, discusses how to create that magical combination of digital and human touch to build partner relationships and to create successful channel programs.
Summarized from a recent webinar hosted in April, Dan Overgaag and Kerry Desberg discuss that while technology has made it possible to automate operational basics, using those technologies to free up time for more strategic conversations that truly build personal relationships is the most powerful combination – especially now in this time of worldwide uncertainty. They discuss and offer five strategic solutions that focus on why PRM solutions are vital during the COVID-19 crisis and how these PRM solutions can help companies stand out by creating indispensable relationships with their partners.
Protect and preserve your position as the vendor-of-choice during this time of uncertainty
In the last 18 months, Overgaag has seen a re-prioritization for partners. Partners are looking for a clear and strong partner value proposition instead of focusing on a powerful customer value proposition. A large number of companies fail to develop a core competency around partner value proposition and Overgaag believes that it should be an essential element to any channel effort. A solid partner value proposition provides the competitive filter a partner uses when determining which vendor they will sell and support with their customers. According to Overgaag, companies need to create partner value propositions based on three key elements which are momentum, relationships and economics. With momentum as the first key element, this is composed of customer demand, market share and leadership positioning. Making sure your products or solutions are innovative, making sure there is enough buzz generated around your product and evaluating your position in the field. With relationships as the second key element, partners will align to vendors that they see long term value in, based on their strategic objectives and engagement. Work on creating quality relationships with your partners and providing them with quality experiences. With economics as the third key element, partners want to see the financial return and what they can gain from vendor relationships. Work on sharing information, collaborate on business planning efforts and be thinking about the partner halo benefits.
Adapt and empower to better position yourself in a competitive marketplace
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything, including business models and selling motions. Now is the time to separate yourself from other vendors in the minds of your partners. Avoid costly missteps within your channel management efforts by understanding your unique strengths and weaknesses while evaluating the competitor’s business proposition. Understand your partner value proposition, finetune your competitive position and conduct regular assessments to drive effectiveness with your channel efforts. Now more than ever, it is important to solidify those relationships and focus on delivering the three key elements. Empower your field and telesales teams with vital information needed to drive partner performance. Simplify your remote transactions with partners and invest in proper training. Focus on partner activation, provide structured onboarding and partner recruitment efforts to help partners stay focused and proactive.
Immediate changes you need to make now to ramp up your channel
Overgaag stresses that the steps companies take now to provide a good partner experience will define which vendors they favor for the next several years. Steps like focusing on partner experiences, doubling down on the partnership part of partnering and concentrating on channel efforts. Focus on partner experience by training your channel on new expectations, being magnanimous with program requirements and increasing partner communications around best practices. Double down on partnership by increasing your contra-revenue spend, making any services available more broadly and temporarily removing barriers around protected content. Concentrate on channel efforts by knowing all about your partner’s business, focusing on having and leveraging data and bringing capabilities in-house into your channel organization. Show your commitment and partnership during this time and reap the benefits for years to come.
Utilize channel management technology to handle the operational basics of your channel
Desberg explains that automation gives you time for that personal touch your partners are looking for. Without automation, your channel will not be able to scale, pivot and capture the revenue during these challenging marketing condition. Automation helps run your business without hiring additional staff. By automating these processes, easily provide a first-hand experience to customers in your channel ecosystem and capture every marketing opportunity. Desberg recommends automating the following seven processes: partner recruiting and onboarding, optimized training and certification, deal registration, performance tracking, marketing and communications, engagement, and capturing the showdown channel revenue. Taking care of the operational basics of your channel helps focus on the partner experiences and conversations that truly drive value. Treat PRM as your new employee, an employee that decreases administrative costs by 29% and saves $10 in labor for every $1 invested.
Outperform your competitors and engage your partners using PRM solutions
PRM solutions provide world-class partner experiences and can easily provide content and next steps needed to get partners up and running and delivering what the market needs. Enable partners from the safety of your own home, train and empower new partners with better access to training materials and certifications, deal with less channel conflict and gain partner loyalty, track performance and provide visibility to your partners with accurate reporting, and having the marketing and communication abilities all in one compact and effective solution. PRM solutions provide flexibility in this everchanging market by helping vendors communicate effectively to their partners, reduce 80% of channel conflict and provide contemporary automation tools that increases partner engagement by 41%. According to Desberg, if 75% of your revenue goes through channel, make sure to invest in channel management technologies like PRM to accelerate the performance of your channel.
Packed with essential advice and bursting with expert insights, find out how Impartner can help your business find the right solutions and accelerate growth during these unprecedented times. The best place to start this conversation is with our award-winning channel management platform. Impartner’s solutions are not only our customer’s most powerful secret weapon, it is easy to adopt, quick to deploy and fully customizable for your brand. If you’d like to learn more about how Impartner can strengthen and transform your channel today, visit impartner.com/demo.
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]]>The post Impartner Coronavirus (COVID-19) Business Continuity Plans appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>At Impartner, we are closely monitoring the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) as it continues to affect various areas of the world. We are committed to providing a safe environment for our employees and ensuring business continuity to you, our customers and partners. Our commitment to our global community of users and the Impartner platform is unwavering. Thank you for your continued trust in us.
With the rise in diagnoses, we are taking increased measures to maintain business continuity and protect the health of our employees.
We are currently taking the following measures of precaution:
We will continue to meticulously monitor news from the World Health Organization, among other sources and guidelines, and are committed to reassessing the situation and adjust our plans accordingly.
We wish you all good health and thank you for continuing to place your trust in us. Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions or inquiries.
Last update: March 16, 2020
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]]>The post Fintech’s Revolution AND Evolution: From Competition to Collaboration to Referral Partner Programs appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>“The digitization of businesses has heightened B2B customers’ expectations of deliverables. “
Tornadoes, whiteouts, hurricanes… we can usually see signs of their impending arrival, but even so, we are never quite prepared for the effects they bring. One day, we see a well-known and understood the landscape, and next, everything has changed and we must learn how to navigate new territory.
Thus was the fintech revolution.
But while this shift of the financial landscape may have seemed sudden, there were signs. Once the financial meltdown removed the guarantee of banks being a stable financial choice, the idea of alternatives to the traditional banking model suddenly became a viable option. And with the technological boom, digitalization of finance operations was logical business innovation. Disruptive and transformative, a wave of financial technology (fintech) startups formed from these two coinciding developments. While new B2B fintech business models targeted several different facets of the financial world, the majority have focused in on payment and lending. These startups brought the finance industry into an age of technological innovation by infusing automation, real-time payments, and better loan offerings through peer-to-peer lending platforms into the financial ecosystem.
From this, the finance world got much more snug. Suddenly, banks’ dominance of financial markets wasn’t a given, and the financial industry was overrun with the competition. The status quo was no more. But the fintech revolution didn’t stop there. This revolution has undergone an evolution. And competition was just the first step in an evolving chain of transformations that allows not only fintechs to benefit but banks and clientele as well.
The recent boom in the fintech industry reaches across the globe as people become more comfortable managing their money and business online. These B2B fintech startups are offering tech-enabled payments, currency exchange, crowdfunding, online lending, and wealth management services. These companies are competing and beating out traditional banks and financial services firms. Why?
The digitization of businesses has heightened B2B customers’ expectations of deliverables. Fintechs offer companies agility, speed, transparency, and integrations that banks have only ever offered businesses on a superficial level. According to Business Insider, 82% of customers said that a primary value proposition of these products is that they are easy to use, 81% said faster service and 80% said good customer experiences.
There is a large frustration with big banks which allows fintech companies to fill the demand. Goldman Sachs estimates that fintech start-ups could steal up to $4.7 trillion in annual banking revenue, and $470 billion in profit, from established financial services companies.
But competition isn’t solely a worry for banks. Other fintechs also face their own competitors. Like any disruptive business innovation, disruption of industry standards only get you so far. Fintech startups are flooding the industry, and because of this banks won’t be the only ones who disappear in the coming years. And while these FinTech startups may have changed the financial structure for good, when the dust settles, and the new landscape is set, the financial world is going to get much more hostile for these pioneers. This is especially true for fintechs that only have a niche offering and lack the long-standing experience and insight many investors are looking for. But don’t get me wrong, the fintech industry is still growing. So what does this mean overall? While the fintech industry has amazing potential to overtake banks, it also has its own challenges from within. With fintech lacking the long-term success and wider offerings needed to dominate the financial market and banks lacking the agility to compete head-to-head against fintechs, the realization has occurred that continued survival does not lie in competition, but rather collaboration.
As fintechs grew in abundance banks tried to compete, but their established internal structure lacked automation, was restricted by regulations, and couldn’t adopt anything that would come close to the agility of fintechs’ SaaS products. On the other side, fintechs found it extremely difficult to garner industry respect and trust without the historical experience that banks have. In this way, fintechs and banks have become two halves of a whole, and thus came about the inspired idea of collaboration.
So it’s settled, fintechs and banks collaborate to create disruptive new offers. Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as that. How to go about designing a beneficial partnership requires more thought. This hang-up is felt throughout the industry. In fact, according to Business Insider, 46% of banks plan to collaborate with fintechs, but only 13% believe their core systems can handle the technical demands of partnerships. The financial industry believes partnering with these companies is the best way to stay afloat. This makes sense since banks are set up to maximize security and minimize their costs, not to innovate. Reliance on fintech companies for innovation will be critical. And for fintechs, to gain expertise in regulatory matters and create stronger offerings they need to be able to set up an equal partnership with banks. But in order to do this, it is crucial that fintechs and banks find a way to automate and scale this type of collaboration. Thus enters automated referral partner programs.
Fintechs and banks both have different strengths that allow them to accomplish a certain level of success, but they each also have challenges that hold them back from growing further. A partnership removes the need for either to have to overcome these challenges internally. But in order to create long-term sustainable partnerships, banks and fintechs need to be able to automate that relationship. Referral partner programs do this by facilitating a seamless referral partnership that is low friction. Referral partnerships are at the core of many fintechs’ success. OnDeck, Funding Circle, and Lending Club and TSYS are just a few that have developed referral partner programs in order to establish greater trust, provide a wider offering and reach new customers. This is because referral partner programs can create deep partnerships with banks and fintechs that fill offering gaps to increase the value they can provide customers. Referral partners understand the pains of the target customer and can extend the trust they have previously developed to encompass the referred company.
Fintech and banks can go about referral partner programs in three different ways:
1. A company can build a referral partner program for their many different individual partners, small businesses and agencies. These will usually be for unmanaged partners.
2. A company has a major partner entity, for which they create a dedicated referral program. This type of referral partner program would be based off a deeply integrated offering on the technological side and the ideological side. One example of this type of referral partner program is Funding Circle and H&R Block. In this referral partnership, H&R Block made Funding Circle the preferred lender for all their small business customers.
3. A company builds a program for one or many major partner entities and their sales teams. This is a more advanced and requires the ability for partner entities to have the ability to keep track of, manage, and increase their advocate pool while having greater capabilities to incentivize and manage partner activity. OnDeck has found great success at using a more advanced referral partner program to increase customer acquisition.
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]]>The post 12 Reasons PRM is the Single Most Powerful Lever You Can Pull to Accelerate the Performance of Your Channel appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>“Users report improvements on everything from deal registration, sales enablement, onboarding, training and marketing that help accelerate performance.”
Author: Dave R Taylor, CMO, Impartner
As a business executive, you know how rare it is to find a single business “lever” that, when pulled, will deliver 5% or 10% growth. You work hard to find process enhancements that will yield even a 1% or 2% increase in revenue. Everyone is looking for the most powerful lever to accelerate their performance.
For the second time in the last few years, Impartner conducted a Customer Success Survey of our global customer base. In the anonymized survey, using the Qualtrics analytics platform, we asked our over 300 customers to share the business results they have experienced from using Impartner PRM. In one surprising statistic after another, the power of this solution to accelerate channel revenue and optimize the partner experience at every step of the partner journey is unparalleled.
Based on the results of Impartner’s second, bi-annual global Impartner customer survey in which responses are anonymized, THE lever is clear: Partner Relationship Management. In one surprising stat after another, the power of this solution to accelerate channel revenue and optimize the partner experience at every step of the partner journey is unparalleled.
Consider these statistics from our customers and the impact Impartner PRM could have on YOUR business:
For the full whitepaper detailing these results, click here for your complimentary copy. If you’re making PRM decision and want to learn more about how Impartner can help you drive these results for your business, share 15 minutes and let us show you a demo and see we can increase your revenue by an average of 32.3%.
We’ll pull back the curtain and give you the additional insights you need to make this investment decision with confidence based on the proven value it will deliver for your business.
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]]>The post Shadow Partners Step into the Mainstream appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>Impartner Acquisition of Amplifinity Helps Companies Optimize Revenue from Referral Partners
“Companies using an intentional versus ad-hoc process like Amplifinity see an average yearly increase in revenue of more than 30.”
In 2019, a stunning 72 percent of all tech purchase decisions now go through business unit buyers versus purchasing or IT teams. This change in purchasing behavior has caused a seismic shift in the channel partner landscape as these buyers increasingly turn to disparate groups such as industry-based consultants, service providers, and independent software vendors to help implement technology given their role as trusted advisors. What’s emerged, is a powerful ecosystem of “shadow channel” partners, similar to the Shadow IT phenom of recent years, as these same buyers circumvented traditional IT processes to more nimbly secure technologies of their choice in the manner in which they chose.
Like shadow IT, however, shadow channels are emerging into the mainstream and traditional and non-traditional partners, now typically called referral partners, are the new normal for corporations everywhere. What’s needed in today’s market, are new, performance-based tools designed to manage all types of partners, business models, and various customer technology consumption preferences. This week, with Impartner’s acquisition of Amplifinity, (press release here) the leading referral partner management solution, our customers now have a complete toolset to maximize their business relationship with every type of partner and accelerate revenue for everyone. The impact of that technology is significant. Companies using an intentional versus ad-hoc process like Amplifinity see an average yearly increase in revenue of more than 30.
The emergence of shadow channel partners is one Forrester’s top channel analyst, Jay McBain has long forecast. In his Forrester blog, What I See Coming For The Channel, one of his predictions was that “vendors will put formal shadow-channel programs in motion,” noting one vendor who has since replaced “its traditional, compliance-based programs with new performance-based programs designed to reward all types of partners…Most programs will follow suit in 2019.”
If you’re ready to follow suit with your company, click here for demo and see how formalizing your referral partner program can help you accelerate revenue from this new generation of partners.
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]]>The post The Art of Recruiting the Perfect Channel Partners appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>“Many of the new players like accounting firms, marketing agencies, and consultants do not even know what the IT channel is.”
By now, the fundamentals of channel development are common knowledge. At Impartner’s customer conference, the channel experts talked about this in great detail. Of course, there are different requirements for each type of vendor, but with experience and effort, you could build the right channel programs, tools, and partner portals.
Will these details be enough for them to come and stay? The key is to attract the right partners, and if you are still not finding the right-fit partners, this may force you to build your own partners (BYOP).
The DNA of the new channel partner is a mixture of various species – traditional VAR, MSP, ISV, Telco, POS etc. As these companies collide or merge, all sorts of hybrids are emerging. Many of the new players like accounting firms, marketing agencies, and consultants do not even know what the IT channel is. It is your job to inform them and create the best fitting partners.
The basic key to unlocking the perfect-fit partners is to know the persona, target markets, and skillset of the partners you need to sell your products. If you can narrow in on this, you will enable yourself to search for near-fit prospects and work with them to build out the channel difference that you need. As we work towards finding our best-suited partners, it is crucial to never forget to build loyalty to protect your ongoing investments. Click here to schedule a demo.
This content was originally presented by Julian Lee, CEO at TechnoPlanet, as part of a Lightning Round presentation on the “Top 9 Things Channel Chiefs Must Do in 2018 to Transcend the Performance of Their Channel.” To watch the entire presentation featuring a host of top channel strategists, CLICK HERE.
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]]>The post 5 Things Channel Vendors Need to Know to Prepare for the GDPR appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>“Given the immense amount of partner data vendors manage – it’s critical that they follow these new regulations closely.”
Today, one in four US companies don’t know if they’re prepared to meet GDPR compliance standards, which are set to take effect in May of this year. These new security rules affect any business that stores data on EU citizens, even if the company is based in the US.
Those that fail to comply will be fined up to $20 million or 4 percent of global annual turnover for the preceding financial year, whichever is greater. These penalties are so severe that they could put a company out of business in the EU.
Worried? You should be. But, it isn’t too late to prepare. Here’s what channel vendors need to know to get ready for the May 25th deadline:
The GDPR was designed to ensure that there will be more transparency between the organizations who collect the data (the ‘Data Controllers’) and the individuals whose personal data is being collected (the ‘Data Subjects’). This means vendors will need to secure consent before collecting data from their partners or their partner’s customers.
Vendors that collect data from partners will be limited to only what is relevant and clearly disclosed to the individual. Data stored by a vendor which is deemed excessive such as personal contact information or social media handles could be considered non-compliant.
Vendors will need to ensure data is stored in accordance with the security provisions of the GDPR. This means vendors are required to use “appropriate technical and organizational security measures” to safeguard personal data. Depending on what data is being collected and how it is being used, companies should consider encryption and use anonymization or pseudonymization methods to protect it within their systems.
Partners will have the legal right to request a vendor update their data if the information is no longer accurate. If the partner requests at any time that their data should be deleted, the vendor has to comply with that request and confirm the deletion, not only from their own systems but from any downward systems who were processing that data on behalf of the vendor.
Vendors can only hold on to a partner’s data for as long as is necessary to fulfill the intended purpose of collection, and to comply with any other regulatory commitments. This means, if a partner leaves a vendor’s program, they will need to ensure they have a data retention policy that specifies how long they will retain the partner’s data for and the justification for holding on to the data for the said period.
Given the immense amount of partner data vendors manage – it’s critical that they follow these new regulations closely. If you’re still using a spreadsheet or homegrown solution to manage your partner data, now is the time to make a change.
With Impartner PRM, vendors can establish the level of transparency required to ensure compliance with the GDPR. The contemporary partner portal makes it easy to maintain partner data while achieving a heightened level of security through pseudonymization.
Worried your current PRM solution isn’t compliant? Don’t worry — Impartner can have you up-and-running with Impartner PRM in less than two weeks, so you can be ready for the May 25th deadline.
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]]>The post 3 Ways to Change Your Selling Point of View appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>“Building a foundation solidified on trust and mutual commitment ensures successful partner/vendor relationships.”
Getting your organization to shift to a partner-centric management mindset will require a change in the way you train your team to interact with partners. Pay special attention to those on the front line like channel account managers. You will have to train (or retrain), CAMs how to engage with your partners and the best ways to practice partner-centric management.
Challenger selling is a thing of the past, we are no longer asking our customers to challenge the norm. Collaboration is the future. When selling aligns with your partner-centric management philosophy, your partner programs are bound to succeed.
Below are a few factors to consider when shifting your teams to partner-centric management:
This means buying decisions are now directed by the consumer. Everything from measured business outcomes to vendor loyalty is all stemming from consumer requirements. Collaborating with your partners and consumers gives you the competitive edge you need.
Technical skills and marketing are not as common at the partner level, which means your partners don’t have the infrastructure, skills, and knowledge to fully support the end-users. This puts an even larger emphasis on collaboration. Servicing your consumers properly means your partners will rely on you for some of these resources. This collaborative element will drive the relationship forward and upwards to a much more entangled, strategic level.
Building a foundation solidified on trust and mutual commitment ensures successful partner/vendor relationships. Once you sharpen your skillsets and commit to working in unison, you will undoubtedly build strong long-lasting relationships within your own team and that will transfer to your partner/vendor relationships.
ISO recently released a new standard model for collaborative business relationships: ISO 44001. From that model, and from our research, we determined that collaborative selling – where trust is at the core of a mutually beneficial relationship, is the way forward. Collaboration creates something larger than the sum of the parts and it is what today’s partners require.
This content was originally presented by Jessica Baker, Chief Program Officer at Achieve Unite, as part of a Lightning Round presentation on the “Top 9 Things Channel Chiefs Must Do in 2018 to Transcend the Performance of Their Channel.” To watch the entire presentation featuring a host of top channel strategists, CLICK HERE.
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]]>The post How to Build Partner Trust and Avoid Fake News appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>“Trust is one of the most important things in any relationship, and this foundation is crucial for success and growth. Partner trust starts with your programs and your products.”
Building partner trust is the key to successful channel programs. Take a moment to consider if you have delivered on all the promises you have made to your partners in the last 6 months and if they have belief in your products and programs. A strong foundation for partner programs is built with their best interests in mind, and then yours.
Fake news kills partner trust. Trust is one of the most important things in any relationship, and this foundation is crucial for success and growth. Partner trust starts with your programs and your products. If they can’t go to market and trust that your solution is going to perform, they’re not going to do business with you. Your programs must deliver on the expectations you present.
Putting the requirements and benefits of your partner program on your partner portal is a great way to hold your organization accountable. This holds you responsible and reliable to your commitments. To avoid confusion from either party you will need to implement processes to manage all the commitments and expectations.
Here are the top 4 things we recommend when building trust with your partners.
Start by having an honest representation of your program offering. It is best not to embellish, be upfront and truthful about what you can deliver. If you are not ready for an element don’t communicate a commitment to it. It is easier to add things later, then to overcommit and underdeliver. Your partners will thank you and they will be happier with your program if you commit and execute well.
Put processes in place to ensure nothing gets left behind. Consistency exists when processes are not only strong but followed. Your partners will follow the processes you expect if you hold them accountable. This applies internally as well. If you say a deal registration will be approved within 24 hours, approve it within 24 hours. If partners are expected to register deals within your portal, don’t accept them via email. Follow through on your processes and you will build trust and set expectations for both sides of the relationship.
Provide your partners an opportunity to communicate with you and offer feedback. Listen to what your partners have to say about your program and products. Compile the data you receive and act on it. Proper follow up will create an environment of trust and foster long-term relationships.
Trust is a two-way street. Look for opportunities to trust your partners, and acknowledge them when they follow through. Provide partners with opportunities to trust you as well. Building trust takes time and dedication, showing your partners your dedication to them will build long-term successful relationships.
Quit creating fake news within your partner program. Take action on the steps above to build a lasting relationship with your partners. Strong, solid, well-executed programs ensure the trust of your partner programs and benefit you both in the long run.
This content was originally presented by Raegan Wilson, Chief Channel Officer at Channel Squared Consulting, as part of a Lightning Round presentation on the “Top 9 Things Channel Chiefs Must Do in 2018 to Transcend the Performance of Their Channel.” To watch the entire presentation featuring a host of top channel strategists, CLICK HERE.
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]]>The post 7 Characteristics Required to Build a Billion-Dollar Software Company appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>“All iconic companies start with great leaders. Great leaders share many characteristics, but the most noteworthy is, Vision, Conviction, and Integrity.”
New software companies are popping up left and right. Acquiring certain characteristics in this type of industry can ensure you don’t get lost in the shuffle. We found the most significant type of qualities amongst the most successful companies and how you can apply them when planning and building your billion-dollar software company.
All iconic companies start with great leaders. Great leaders share many characteristics, but the most noteworthy is, Vision, Conviction, and Integrity. Vision is the foundation of your idea and will bring direction and ‘why’ to your organization. As Brian Jacobs, Founder of Emergence Capital said, “Conviction is a belief about the future, and that’s how you change the future.” Integrity is the anchor in building an iconic business and the difference between right and wrong. Great leaders with integrity are consistent and clear with their actions, methods, expectations, and outcomes.
You cannot do this alone. A great leader brings together the team and with that, they bring a playbook. Once you’ve combined a great leader with their team and an exceptional playbook, it’s time to execute.
The team and playbook have been brought together, now is the time to focus. A great leader is following one course until they have reached extreme success. When you stay focused and own a market or industry, the success of your business has no ceiling.
Opportunity depends greatly on market size. The larger the market, the greater opportunity to build billion-dollar companies. These opportunities allow organizations to transcend business models and deliver new value to existing and new customers.
The deeper you penetrate your market the more successful your company will be. Market penetration is a key component to the overall success and growth of your company. As Doug Landis mentioned in his presentation, “market penetration is a great indicator of needing to refocus, so you can execute well on one thing.”
Analyze the opportunities for others to provide what you provide. Defensibility is having the skillset to stay ahead of everybody else. Having the ability and focus to leverage your defense will make your company unique and show everyone else you are the best at what you do.
The worlds best companies have a go-to-market strategy. A go-to-market strategy means creating clear customer profiles and knowing your buyers. Make sure your message is resonating with customers. Know how to find your customers and fill your funnel. Lastly, distinguish what metrics are most important and concentrate on them.
The worlds best companies have focused on and measured themselves on these characteristics. Take a moment to measure yourself. Determine your level of leadership and if you have kept your focus. Realize where you resonate with these characteristics and where you can make improvements.
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]]>The post Where SaaS is Taking the Channel in 2018 appeared first on Impartner PRM.
]]>” When it comes to SaaS in the channel, the biggest trend and threat for 2018 and beyond is verticalization.”
SaaS/cloud adoption was very strong in 2017, reaching $46.3 billion by year’s end, Gartner predicts. As adoption increased, the IT services channel has been forced to move quicker in its own adoption, service creation and sales of SaaS/cloud products. I expect to see an even faster rise of SaaS/cloud adoption next year as channel companies continue to tool their business models to SaaS/cloud, which will drive adoption in the SMB space to new heights.
As in any industry, there are always going to be naysayers touting SaaS/cloud as the last nail in the coffin for the IT services channel. I believe it will be just the opposite; we are seeing the evolution of the IT services channel into the SaaS/cloud world, as well as the rise of a new channel.
Despite a fair number of IT service providers who’ve been resistant to change, the channel as a whole still comprises many engaged, growth-minded entrepreneurs who thrive on meeting their customers’ ever-changing demands. Remember the death knell predictions of break-fix companies? I do. Many of them didn’t just throw in the towel and walk away. They evolved and flourished by changing their business model and structure to adapt to new technologies and changing customer needs. We are now seeing the same thing happening today as IT applications and infrastructure moves to the cloud.
SaaS is enabling a new service provider business, whether it’s via the evolving traditional IT services channel (e.g., retail VARs, managed cloud services providers) or from nontraditional companies such as PR firms, CPAs, marketing/SEO consultants, and business consultants. All of these firms are enjoying additional revenue from SaaS applications and will have a great impact on sales growth for ISVs who know how to cater to them.
In a recent study conducted by Carolyn April, Senior Director of Industry Analysis at CompTIA, titled, “Software-as-a-Service in Today’s Channel,” April reveals several insights on the future of SaaS. “Three quarters of the channel respondents in the CompTIA study say their cloud-based sales included SaaS-related activities,” she says, “and the number one reason channel partners say they have added SaaS to their portfolio is customer demand. Partners report most of their SaaS-related revenue is coming from customization and integration services.”
Correlating these statements, we have an idea of where SaaS is headed in 2018 — up! Add in the services opportunities for the channel, and a perfect storm, where SaaS is the eye, is created. Considering the channel is the place SMB customers get their services and products and considering CompTIA’s finding, SaaS in the channel is going to be explosive. If 2017 is the year of SaaS, then 2018 will be: “The Year of SaaS in the Channel!”
When it comes to SaaS in the channel, the biggest trend and threat for 2018 and beyond is verticalization. Many SaaS applications are verticalized around broader vertical categories like retail, medical, or financial. However, most SaaS vendors are specialized within a subset of the vertical. So, the SaaS app may be a fit for the whole vertical (e.g., healthcare), but it is especially good at a particular subset of that vertical (e.g., long-term care facilities).
Many service providers who’ve been used to selling managed/break-fix services across a number of markets in the past, struggle with honing their services and marketing messaging to the sub-verticals where SaaS really differentiates itself.
Every day new SaaS products are being introduced to the market making the ISV market more competitive. Can an ISV afford to go head-to-head with each competitor simply by growing its in-house sales team? Many ISVs may not have the cash to grow their teams. So, how can they reduce their attrition rates?
An ISV might think it has the best product on the market. Even if it does, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is how an ISV can scale and how fast it can capture a sufficient revenue stream to grow to the next stage and outpace the competition.
ISVs utilizing the channel properly will have a competitive advantage and, eventually, a lower acquisition cost than those that do not.
As the trend toward verticalization continues, at SaaSMAX, our platform is adding more SaaS apps within a diverse mix of verticals every week to satisfy this need for our channel community. We are a go-to distributor of SaaS products that provides customers with all of the resources and tools they need to be successful. When it comes to ChanTech, solutions like Partner Relationship Management (PRM), from vendors like Impartner are a critical part of the technology stack for vendors, SaaS or any other type of company, selling through the channel. Learn more about us at saasmax.com and Impartner’s PRM solution at impartner-prm.com.
This article by Clinton Gatewood, VP Partner and Reseller Development at SaaSMAX Corp., originally appeared at DevProJournal, December 20th, 2017.
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