Awesome Partner Account Managers are critical to channel success.
By Diane Krakora, CEO
I was a Channel Account Manager two, maybe three, decades ago. Way back then, the role was primarily reactive and somewhat administrative. I recruited new partners into my territory, harangued them to a sales goal, ate a ton of bad pizza during “lunch and learns,” and chased stocking orders through distribution. Although the role of the Partner Account Manager has changed to a more pro-active business adviser to your set of partners, the underlying traits of a successful PAM haven’t changed much.
Our industry doesn’t have a formal Partner Account Manager training program or certification. If you want to be a PAM (or CAM, CSM, CDM or any channel-facing role) you pretty much learn the needed skills on the job. But skills and traits are very different. The traits of a rock star PAM remain constant and can be boiled down to the following:
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A power of persuasion. (And not for the reasons you think.) A PAM’s ultimate responsibility is partner success. Think of this as a Customer Success Manager for the partner. The future PAM will need to not only persuade the partner to include your company’s product into their solution, but in many instances will also need to persuade their own company to support the partners. Partners tell us the #1 reason they regret joining a vendor’s channel program is “the vendor failed to deliver on their promises.” The PAM needs to use the power of persuasion to ensure their own company does what they said they were going to do – on product roadmap, services and support, demand generation, sales teaming and conflict resolution.
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Incredible organization. A PAM has between 10 and 100 partners to manage, support and grow. If a PAM is not really organized, it will be impossible to remember everything about every partner and every sales rep and every SE within each of your partners. A fantastic PRM system can help you know their profiles and remind the PAM who to call, but they’ll need to be very organized to know who is running what marketing campaign, what sales people have demo-ing coming up and which distributors are leveraged by each partner.
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The gift of the gab. People buy from people they like and that holds true in the partner ecosystem as well. Part of the PAM’s role is to be social. That means breakfast, coffee, lunch, coffee, drinks and dinner (I’d recommend not all the same day). Building relationships with individuals in each of your partner companies accelerates trust and leads to increased engagement. More engagement means more sales. When I was a PAM, I travelled 4 days a week, 3 weeks a month, breaking bread with my partners. It may not have been good for my waistline but these relationships made me the top PAM every year.
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Business smarts. One of the by-products of hanging out and being social with your partners is that you learn about their business. Such as: How many sales people they have. If their systems engineers drive the product and solution decisions. What other products they carry. What they love about your company and what they hate about doing business with your company. The greatest lesson I learned as a PAM (thank you, Bill Botti) was understanding my channel partners’ business models. If you know how they make money, and how much they make on your products, you can focus your efforts much more effectively.
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Ability to shut up and listen. The best way to learn what motivates your partners is to buy the beers, ask a few questions and then listen. Everybody loves to tell stories and channel partners are no exception. A great PAM should be curious and engage in dialogue, but not dominate the conversation. If a PAM can shut up and listen, not only around the bar, but in training sessions, on sales calls or in QBRs, they will not only learn more, but also honor partners with their attention.
I’m not saying I was a perfect PAM or that I have all these traits (particularly #5 if you’ve ever been in a bar with me), but time and thousands of interviews with channel chiefs, PAMs and partners have shown me that most successful channel managers do. The role of a PAM is critical and, even with these traits, great skills and hard work are needed. But truly, a great PAM is one of the keys to channel success.
Diane Krakora is CEO of PartnerPath with decades of experience defining the best practices and frameworks around how to develop and manage partnerships – and she started it all as a Partner Account Manager. Check out the flashback photo!
Did we miss any traits? Do you know any good PAMs who embody this list? Leave a comment below!
