How our partnering community can help each other.
I believe in karma. What you put out into the world comes back to you. ‘Do unto others’ and all that. However, I’ve become concerned about a general trend towards ‘taking’ versus ‘giving’ in our global economic, political and social environments. We’re hearing fewer stories about unqualified generosity and more about wars, dictators, and selfishness.
In the partnering ecosystem, solution providers are telling us the ‘taking’ is increasing on both sides, from customers and vendors. Customers are asking for more free services, cutting into the solution providers’ primary source of revenue. It’s the old, “I have just one quick question,” where the customer asks for an opinion or recommendation for which the solution provider would typically charge. Partners also being squeezed by vendors who want/need to increase sales. They are asked to increase their referrals, recommendations, and influence in the customers’ buying decisions – often without any compensation.
But it’s not all doom and gloom.
In my sour mood about all the ‘takers,’ I’m inspired to see people going out of their way to help others. I’m a consultant and it’s my essence to help – so these stories warm my heart. I think the air of positivity and good karma helps everyone.
I appreciate our three summer webinar series guests, John Schwan, Beth Glasstetter and Bob Skelley, and their willingness to share leadership insights. If you missed the conversations with these leaders, go back and have a listen. Be inspired.
And I was thankful to see our roundtable participants openly collaborating during our quarterly events. The commitment to helping each other means they all received feedback on four key topics keeping them up at night:
- Retiring old programs while launching new ones
- Integrating portals and partnering systems with Salesforce.com
- Managing the growing conflict between partners and internal sales and services resources
- Throwing a partner summit
For my part, I will keep putting good mojo out into the ecosystem, helping where I can. I enjoy providing recommendations and references for recently laid off colleagues. I believe the partnering community is special and good people do good work. (Reach out and let me know if I can help you.)
Have you seen people doing good works in the partnering community? Perhaps the negativity we hear is because it makes better news. Tell me the good things you see happening. And perhaps do a little good of your own.
To start, here’s an opportunity to rack up some karma points. Take 10 minutes to complete our partner program benchmark survey now. It feels like a bit of a selfish ask on my part, but we work hard on this research and share all our findings to the community at no cost, so really – you’re helping ALL of us in the long run. Click here to get started.
Diane Krakora is CEO of PartnerPath with over two decades of experience defining the best practices and frameworks around how to develop and manage partnerships. She's been conducting research and turning it into partnering reports for 15+ years and while the survey is a struggle, she loves the data and diagnosing what the partnering world is up to.
