By Diane Krakora, CEO
Don't just take it from us. More perspectives abound.
In my last post I discussed what we believe are the top 10 mistakes vendors make when it comes to working with their channel partners. It’s a topic everyone in the industry tends to ask me – so I expanded the discussion to a recent webinar with Stephanie Sissler (at right), Senior Research Director, Channel Sales Strategies at SiriusDecisions. During our hour-long discussion, Stephanie took on each of the 10 mistakes, as well as a few anecdotes on what some of her clients are doing to help smooth the often bumpy road for their channel partners.
Check out some highlights below of Stephanie’s perceptions on each mistake (in reverse order, á la David Letterman). These comments are by no means complete, so I encourage you to watch the webinar to get the full depth of her insight.
Mistake #10. Set It and Forget It
[Stephanie Sissler] One of the things I’m most amazed by is around this issue of recruitment – I don’t know why, but we all just accept that 80/20 is the rule, but 80/20 tells us a lot of things, one of them being that we have a lot of the wrong partners. I’m amazed by how many organizations don’t take the time to sit down and prepare a partner profile based on the solution they’re trying to sell in the marketplace.
Mistake #9. Measure Partners on Volume
Volume is important, but sales is a lagging indicator. [Companies should] focus also on leading indicators – those activities that are going to help drive channel revenue. Things like training, certification, number of qualified leads through marketing campaigns. … What’s interesting is more mature companies are adding other kinds of activities [to move up the tiers], so it’s not just about sales or metrics. … Based on the change in the buyer’s journey, a lot of organizations are looking to marketing more in terms of qualification. It’s not just about revenue anymore, but activities are also now important.
Mistake #8. Treat All Customers the Same
It’s kind of that old, one-size-fits-all, isn’t it? I know when I go to a store and I try on a dress and it says one size fits all, it’s going to fit everybody but me. … The delineation [of partner types] is getting murky. We shouldn’t be building a program based on what somebody calls themselves. We really should step back and start thinking about building programs based on how they do business with us, particularly as it relates to the cloud.
Mistake #7. Treat All Products the Same
In the early stages [of a product] it may not be the channel [that is most appropriate for selling the product]. Partners are not going to go out and make a market for you. That’s why we’re seeing a delay in partners catching on to cloud and a lot of organizations going direct. Now I think we’re getting out of that stage and believe we are in that growth stage, so we’re seeing more and more folks pushing this out to their channel partners. But there are a couple of mistakes folks make. One is assuming all their existing partners are the right ones to sell cloud. The other is they haven’t fixed the issue of their direct sales force—they had them out selling cloud wherever they wanted, and they’re still doing that, and so we’re seeing channel conflict increase because of this.
Mistake #6. Prioritize Discounts
Discounts are important but what partners really care about is profitability. As channel professionals, we need to keep in mind that partners are getting pretty savvy and there are other things that they consider—things that are going to impact their costs. Are you making them go to a thousand hours of service training that they’re going to forget? Can you articulate what their services return is going to be? Or channel conflict—there’s a cost to a partner for that. They’re looking at the big picture, and so should we.
Mistake #5. Expect Partners to Market for You
It’s still up to the vendors to make the market. The strength of our businesses depend on enabling partners to do a better job when it comes to marketing. This is based on the changes in the buyer’s journey—searching the web is their first course of action. If customers can’t find the partner, they’re not going to find us. So there is a place that the partners have to fill for us.
This becomes more important in the cloud. High-volume, low-cost customer acquisition is critical to their economics. Successful cloud partners … need to generate four to six times more leads than they did when they were marketing on-premises. We have to help them along if we want them to succeed.
Mistake #4. Hold on Tightly to Your Internal Processes
Broken processes impact partners’ bottom lines. But ease-of-doing-business-with is a subset of a bigger issue: It really is about the total partner experience. That includes things like the cadence and clarity of your communications, the people they’re dealing with, even the internal culture—Are you channel-friendly? Are your executives committed to channel?
Mistake #3. Drive Partners to Sell as Soon as They Are Signed Up
In the onboarding process, there need to be other priorities. The priority should be about information-sharing, building strong relationships and making sure that [partners] get enabled to go out there and deliver sales.
We need to remember that training isn’t learning. We get so caught up in the big course that we forget basic facts. I read a statistic that the maximum attention span for learning is about 20 minutes. So we need to start thinking in terms of shorter, modular training. And not everyone learns in the same way, so we need to think in terms of different mediums. And if they don’t remember what they’ve gotten through the course, we have to have tools out there that are for just-in-time learning. But the most important point is that we don’t really learn until we do. So this makes activities that we don’t really have formalized important—coaching, shadowing … those things are critical to success.
Mistake #2. Stopping Enablement at Technical Certification
We’ve gotten used to self-sufficiency, we have begun to understand how important it is with service delivery. We've even begun to understand how important it is in sales. We need to still do the same thing related to marketing. One client put together a formal marketing training and enablement program for their partners that included certification; their year-over-year results were 70 percent of their partners are now actively marketing and they had a 47 percent increase in revenue contribution. That’s on their side. On the partner side, on average they realized a 51 percent increase in marketing pipeline. My point is: Self-sufficiency is not just about sales and service.
Mistake #1. Focus on Driving Sales
Focusing on sales is important, but it is impacting our relationships and our ability to grow. One client survey we did showed the only time partners hear from their channel managers is when they need a forecast. We need to be having the conversations around how we work together to grow the business. And those conversations just aren’t happening. It’s a lot in how we manage and pay our channel managers—it’s still transactional. But we need to start thinking about the big picture.
What do you think? Do you agree with Stephanie? What are the mistakes you’re seeing with your channel program and how are you trying to fix them? Leave a comment below.
Diane Krakora is CEO of PartnerPath with two decades of experience defining the best practices and frameworks around how to develop and manage partnerships.
