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Diane Krakora

Diane Krakora is CEO of PartnerPath with two decades of experience defining the best practices and frameworks around how to develop and manage partnerships.
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Recent Posts

The Transaction is Overrated – Focus on Influence

04.30.19

Your biggest influencers are your partners. Do you track them?

By Diane Krakora, CEO

I realize it’s silly to declare a sales process overrated or worse, irrelevant. But the acquisition of the purchase order (which ignites the operational processes to ship product and book a sale) is meaningless. In days when revenues are paramount, the act of transacting business with customers seems to be the most relevant action within the sales cycle. However, I assert the sale actually happened long before the quote was created or the contract signed.

Topics: Industry Perspective

Channel Partners Expo – 3 Last Day Learnings

04.14.19

Final Takeaways from Partner Discussions

This week CEO Diane Krakora attended Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas. On the last day of the conference, the crowd thinned a bit and but there were still plenty of channel conversations to be had. Diane recorded this video highlighting three topics from these discussions. Spoiler, the three things are (1) specializations, (2) customer success and (3) next generation programs. What is their significance? Take a look.

Topics: Industry Perspective

Channel Partners Expo – Channel Transformation with Jay McBain

04.11.19

3 Top Trends from Jay McBain of Forrester

This week CEO Diane Krakora is attending Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas. Jay McBain, principal analyst, global channels at Forrester Research, gave the keynote on April 10. He shared ten trends in channel transformation that are disrupting business. Diane shares three of those trends and what they mean for your business (in less than three minutes!).

Topics: Industry Perspective

Channel Partners Expo – 5 Takeaways in 5 Minutes

04.10.19

Behind Closed Doors in a Partner Advisory Board

This week CEO Diane Krakora is attending Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas where she sat in on a vendor’s partner advisory board with master agents and agents. Their primary topics of conversation revolved around how they see their businesses morphing and evolving and what vendors can do to help support those changes. Watch Diane's 5-minute video running down the 5 biggest takeaways from the dialogue.

Topics: Industry Perspective

10 Things I Learned at Channel Partners Expo

04.23.18

Content is king

By Diane Krakora, CEO of PartnerPath

As I was winging my way back from a week in Las Vegas at the Channel Partners Conference and Expo, I reflected on several insights from the event. In addition to the ever-present life lessons you gain at a large conference like: drink lots of water (seriously, lots), wear comfortable shoes (but still look good) and don’t mix hard alcohol and red wine (this is key) I came up with ten takeaways from the event. In no particular order:

Topics: Industry Perspective

Enablement in a New Era

03.02.18

New types of partners force new methods of enablement

By Diane Krakora, CEO of PartnerPath

In my 2018 predications webinar with Jay McBain of Forrester and Chris Cleary of Sirius Decisions, we discussed what enablement is needed for the rapidly changing IT partner ecosystems in 2018 and beyond. Since customers buying behaviors are changing (more on-demand and cloud-delivered) and the partners that serve these end-customers are changing (new influencers are emerging), how vendors enable partners also needs to change.

Topics: Channel Best Practices

Tech Channel Video Cast: Cloud Transitions

02.08.18

This week Diane Krakora, CEO of PartnerPath, summarizes the cloud discussion from our 2018 channel programs predictions webinar.

Topics: videocast

Measuring Partner Performance: Metrics That Matter

11.30.17

For the better part of a year now, I’ve been banging the drum about partner experience. Much of that is because of what we’re seeing among partner ranks—an evolution into true “solution providers” as they address customer needs with a more solution-centric rather than vendor-centric approach.

Vendors, meanwhile, now find themselves working doubly hard to remain relevant to this new breed of partner. Where it once didn’t matter as much how easy it was—or not—for channel partners to access sales tools, for example, today vendors are being judged by their partners on this and other seemingly innocuous metrics.  

Topics: Channel Best Practices

Renew Your Focus on Channel Conflict

11.16.17

It’s one thing for partners to not have the ideal experience with a vendor. There’s always room for improvement (hopefully we’ve informed and advised your improvement). But it’s another thing entirely for partners to regret having joined a vendor’s program in the first place.

Topics: Channel Best Practices

Are Your Program Policies Helping or Hurting Your Channel Partner Relationships?

10.31.17

A lot of our discussions in the channel of late have focused on the changing demographics of the channel partner and how vendors must respond to accommodate these changes. Everything from partner program models  to sales enablement motions and even what we call channel partners these days is evolving—and mostly for the better, in my opinion.

Topics: Featured, Channel Best Practices