A major data point driving home MAKE FEWER MISTAKES is the list of open-responses from partners* detailing mistakes vendors make as they are engaging a solution provider organization. Direct from partners, the submissions center around three themes again this year:
This month, CEO Diane Krakora attended the Cisco Partner Summit in Las Vegas. In this short video, listen to her chat about Cisco DevNet, the developer program that delivers APIs, SDKs and sandbox to developers. It's critical that partners have the ability to build solutions and create customer outcomes.
Topics: Industry Perspective
This month, CEO Diane Krakora attended the Cisco Partner Summit in Las Vegas. On day two, she listened to numerous roundtables where the terms customer experience, customer success, customer satisfaction and customer lifecycle were used interchangeably. AHHHH! Listen to her short video explaining why these are all different and then focus in on the critical element of customer success.
Topics: Industry Perspective
This month, CEO Diane Krakora attended the Cisco Partner Summit in Las Vegas. On day one, she attended the keynote from CEO Chuck Robbins and found several of his key points interesting, in particular the idea of engaging different types of partners and examining unique partner value. Listen to her quick take on the day.
Topics: Industry Perspective
The primary goal of vendors focused on recruiting and onboarding partners is to identify and engage new types of partners. These are organizations that aren’t traditional IT solution providers and yet have influence in cloud-based technology solution purchases. Jay McBain of Forrester calls them shadow channels as they aren’t engaging with customers or vendors in the traditional way. We at PartnerPath take a bit more positive nomenclature and call them next-generation channels.
Enablement is a key tenet to partner success. Both the vendors* and the solution providers* want to invest in enablement. The better trained a partner is the more they design effective solutions to customer needs, produce differentiated marketing campaigns, accurately position the products and troubleshoot issues. Enablement is really a win-win for all sides – vendor, partner and customer.
To capitalize on the growing cloud market and drive solution providers to resell cloud solutions, leading vendors are investing heavily in empowering their current partner ecosystem and finding new cloud-focused partners.
The vendor respondents’* top priority for growing and managing their partner ecosystems is to recruit and onboard new partners. Of the vendors eager to recruit, over 50% of them are looking for born-in-the-cloud solution providers and on average, they’re hoping to recruit and onboard about fifty of these partners in 2019. Systems Integrators and Managed Service Providers also top the list of the types of partners prioritized to recruitment and onboarding in 2019.
The vendors* changing the role they expect partners play in cloud offerings aligns with the solution providers’ indication of their changing sales. 60% of respondents indicated they’re generating more than a quarter of their sales from activities they weren’t engaged in 24 months ago. That’s nearly double the number from the 2015 report. And 75% of the solution providers indicated this would increase in the coming years. Not surprisingly, more than 40% of the solution providers indicated those new sales activities were focused on the high gross margin managed service offerings.
The benefits of a Partner Advisory Council (PAC) are abundant. At first blush, your executive team will be enthusiastic about connecting with key partners and provide broad buy-in. But to execute a successful PAC initiative valued by both sides – your organization and the partners involved – appropriate planning is necessary. You’ll need to consider questions like which partners to include, who on your team should attend, event length, location, timing, frequency and the list goes on. (See our guide on 10 questions to consider when designing a PAC program.) But before getting mired in the details, start with the fundamentals. No matter how you design your PAC program, remember these 7 essentials in developing a great partner advisory council.
Topics: Featured, Industry Perspective
For the last decade, an agent model has been the easiest way vendors had to engage solution providers in cloud offerings. The shifts a cloud business model demands in marketing, sales, compensation methods and customer success are difficult for both vendors and solution providers. Thus, a simple referral or an agent model was a quick win for vendors looking to gain awareness of their cloud offerings. There isn’t enough margin available in a referral deal for the solution providers to be profitable long-term so we've seen growth in other solution provider roles in cloud models.
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