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In this year’s State of Partnering study, we asked partners the six primary elements affecting their experience with vendors. These elements sorted into six pillars, with program policies coming in fifth. Your policies have less effect on partner experience than you may think. As channel enthusiasts and experts, we get very excited about the details of partner programs. While these elements are not unimportant, but they’re mostly transparent to partners. 

In our recent channel chief roundtable the Partner Engagement Lifecycle was one of the many topics we attempted to tackle and wrestle to the ground. Our goal was to collaborate across the 15 channel chiefs in the room – from Google, SAP, IBM, Westcon, Cylance, Avaya, F5 Networks, DocuSign and additional well-recognized companies – to develop some answers or at least establish best practices across several areas.

We've talked about the first three pillars of partner experience, People, Enablement and Infrastructure. Now, using the responses from our annual State of Partnering study, we're closing on the final elements. Coming in fifth place is (drum roll) channel model.

Moving Beyond Email

We recently held another of our infamous channel chief roundtable events where a dozen channel leaders across company size and channel maturity gather to discuss trends, opportunities and challenges they’re facing in growing a partner ecosystem. The topic for this session was driving the partner experience – why, how and where vendors can enhance the partners experience, increasing engagement and ultimately leading to more channel sales.