Blog

There are so many moving parts in a channel program. How do you know if your partner program is performing well? Do you just look at sales? How do you know if your partners are successful with your products or their businesses? Do you ask them? Just like we collect data every year on the State of Partnering, you should be collecting data on your channel program. The trick is, figuring out what is the best data to collect. We surveyed vendors to see what they typically measure and we also asked partners what's important to them.

No matter the product or solution, all companies must perform marketing activities and so must their partners. How are vendors helping their partners create successful marketing campaigns and how do co-marketing activities function? The answers vary from company to company and year to year. Take a look at the trends emerging from 2017 and evaluate whether any changes to your partner marketing processes might be beneficial in 2018 and beyond.

All channel professionals care deeply about partner program elements. Perhaps you're one of the channel professionals who spend weeks, months and years designing and re-designing programs. You benchmark the industry, assess your programs against your competitors and plot enhancements and updates years in advance, aligning training and certification with co-marketing, deal registration, co-selling activities and metrics of success.

We've all heard this question thrown around in meetings, video calls and Slack chats. Whether you're discussing ROI, KPIs, MDF or G.O.A.T., folks always want to know how they compare to the other gal. The partnering world is no exception. Knowing what your channel competitors and compatriots are doing with their partner programs may help guide your own programs.

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.

We invited Jay McBain, Principal Analyst for Global Channels at Forrester and Chris Cleary, Practice Director, Channel Sales at Sirius Decisions to join Diane Krakora, CEO of PartnerPath in a 2018 predictions discussion. Our first question was: will we ever stop talking about cloud? After seven years, we’re all getting little tired of this word. When is it going to become the norm, and we're not actually going to call it cloud or on-demand or subscription model?

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.  

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.

Top athletes know to get the best results you need to regularly measure performance. In this year’s State of Partnering study, we asked partners all about the elements affecting their experience with vendors. Although Performance Metrics ranked lowest of the partner experience pillars, both vendors and solution providers need metrics to gauge improvement. Plus, everyone likes to know whether they’re doing well.