Partnering is All About the Data

Dive into the 2017 State of Partnering Report

By Amanda Hawkins, Marketing Director

If you've ever met our CEO Diane Krakora, attended our webinars or watched our video blog Tech Channel Video Cast, you've probably heard her self-description as a "data girl." I am not a data girl, I'm more a design gal. Every year Diane gets excited about all the data assembled in our State of Partnering study and I get excited about designing the resulting report. But of course, it's not as easy as gathering data and designing a report. Hours and hours (and more hours) go into the research, writing, editing, designing and publishing of our annual State of Partnering report and I'm glad to say, "It's finally done!"

Take a look at some of the data behind the data or jump straight to the good stuff. 

It starts with a survey

1. before the survey went live, 43 hours (in the shower, on walks, reading through past studies) were spent coming up with the topic (Partner Experience) and the right questions for vendors and partners
2. the survey was online for 36 days in late 2016
3. each survey respondent received a $5 coffee gift card
4. the survey closed with 134 vendor responses and, with promotional help from Channel Partners, 212 partner responses
5. 138 partners answered the open-ended non-required question, "what mistakes do vendors make?" (that's 65%)

Then comes the meat and potatoes

1. 77 hours were spent compiling data and writing the first draft (there were 7 drafts)
2. 44 hours were spent in the editing process, not including time spent hand-wringing over just the right words to use 
3. the phrase "partner experience" appears 74 times (it's THAT important)
4. roughly 22 curses were lobbed at Word, Macs, PCs, Outlook, Wifi and printers
5. It rained for 40 days and 40 nights while we worked on the report. No, wait. That was Noah. But it did rain a lot in January! (especially for California)

Followed by lots of design

1. 8 hours designing charts and graphs, 1 hour staring at them, 3 hours making changes
2. 50 hours spent designing in 3 major programs
3. 3 font families, 17 images and 20 charts included in 38 pages of partnering goodness
4. 15 words like PRM, MDF, SaaS, SSO manually skipped in 7 different iterations of spell check
5. number of major freakouts including a call to Apple, emergency use of a backup drive and driving from work to home and back to work: 1

Et voilà!

Which brings us to now! You can expect over the coming months:

1. 1 star-studded panel at Channel Partners Conference & Expo discussing the report and Partner Experience
2. 7 great webinars with special guests breaking down the pillars of partner experience (we started in January, find them all here)
3. 12 blogs to identify some of the top takeaways from the report (38 pages is a lot to read at once)
4. 1 fantastic infographic (and hopefully 6 more pretty good ones) providing even more charts and storytelling than you find in the complete report
5. 628 social media reminders to download the report (give or take a few)

I hope you enjoy all our hard work and the great data. Let us know what you think! 

Amanda Hawkins is Marketing Director at PartnerPath and she and CEO Diane Krakora spent many walks to downtown Palo Alto talking about Partner Experience and the right way to convey how important, exciting and timely it is for your channel. It was worth it.