Recently, I had the pleasure of going ‘on tour’ in Europe to help Impartner host three Partnership Leaders Meetup events. PartnerPath is the Impartner Partner-of-the-Year for 2024 (what a mouthful) and I jumped at the chance to meet partnering enthusiasts on my side of the pond. The ‘tour’ was more networking and finger food than guitars and trashed hotel rooms, but still a very cool experience.
Topics: Partnering Tips, PRM
05.14.24
Change management is leading to sleepless nights. More than 80% of the attendees at our last partner programs roundtable indicated it’s keeping them up at night (yowza). After two decades of partnership model and program consulting experience, we’ve seen all the warning signs of failure. Without organizational change management, your new program, compensation plan, or portal initiative is pretty much worth the paper it’s printed on.
Topics: Partnering Tips, Industry Perspective
“We must consider the complex inputs to get to the desired output.” This quote from our webinar guest Lisa Stifelman-Perry, Director, Global Partner Experience Operations at Splunk, A Cisco Company, sounds so simple and yet so many companies don’t properly plan ahead before selecting and implementing partner automation tools.
Topics: Partnering Tips
04.17.24
Your PRM, known as the Partner Portal to your partners, should hold all the sales tools, automated processes, and enablement necessary to help partners sell your joint value proposition (and deliver on it). That’s easy to write, but in reality, it’s more complex. Anyone who has been through the experience of solution evaluation, implementation, change management and ensuring post-launch success has at some point asked themselves whether “the juice is worth the squeeze.”
Topics: Partnering Tips, PRM
A participant in our recent partnering executive roundtable asked the group: “Are you in favor of or opposed to creating compensation neutrality for your direct field team?” Without missing a beat (and to my surprise), almost half of the roundtable participants said they were against ‘comp’ neutrality. How could anyone be against something with the word “neutral” in it? If you’re not familiar with the term, compensation neutrality means a salesperson gets paid, or their sales quota is retired, at the same rate if the product is sold by a partner or themselves. How compensation is defined for your direct sales force can help or hinder your partnering efforts and there’s no clear consensus on the right answer.
Topics: Partnering Tips, Industry Perspective
03.15.24
At the 2024 Impartner customer event Multiply, we assessed the PRM/partner portal of attendees in a service called ‘Check your PDX’. My co-worker and I conducted these checks in tandem, back-to-back, in 30-minute segments for six straight hours. It was interesting to see the wide landscape of different partner-facing systems but by the end the meagre snacks and prolonged period in front of the screens had us running for the poolside to talk through our findings. One thing that became obvious was how many vendors face the same PDX roadblocks. From lack of focus to partner program alignment, navigating these roadblocks is essential for optimising collaboration and driving mutual growth.
Topics: Partnering Tips, PRM
Here's a checklist of 10 mistakes we see people make in designing and running a partner program. For context, details, possible fixes and some friendly banter, watch the video here.
Topics: Partnering Tips
We’ve been beating the drum about the importance of partner experience for a while now (if this is the first you’re hearing of it, grab a cup of coffee and start here). Every step along the partner journey is critical. The experience must be good to attract new partners. The experience must be good to win over and onboard new partners. And the experience must be good to engage and grow your partners.
Topics: Partnering Tips
The new generation of partners are digital-first. They want to self-serve partnership information online – not pick up a phone and make a call (do phones still do that?) to then be emailed a fuzzy scanned PDF (which is probably out of date). From onboarding and enablement processes to opportunity registration and marketing, all partner information should be easily accessed from your partner portal/PRM (Partner Relationship Management) solution. However, a basic implementation of a PRM (where you throw every document you have every created online behind a gated login) isn’t going to cut it anymore. Purchasing and deploying a partner portal is not enough to drive success with your partners. An effective partner portal follows the same design principles as the partner program and the user experience should be designed for maximum partner engagement.
Topics: Partnering Tips, PRM
10.04.23
You would be shocked to know the variety of partner portal and PRM systems I’ve worked on, but one thing remains the same: the need for organization. There are many components to a PRM system: the back end, the front-end, the bi-directional sync to multiple other systems. On top of that, there are different individuals, business units and management levels that must come together to ensure a well-updated, easy-to-use, one stop place for partner engagement. Maintaining a successful PRM system may feel like a moving target, but with some organization, you can be a hero to partners and give them a good experience. Here are my top 3 tips for a successful PRM:
Topics: Partnering Tips
