Creating successful partner programs is a key enabler of growth. A well thought-out partner program can contribute significantly to both brand and revenue.
To improve the chances of success, here are 3 mistakes to avoid as you embark on and scale a partnership program,
Mistake 1: Ignoring which type of partners you want
The right partners are determined based on the stage of the journey you’re in and the type of product. Partners come in different flavors:
- Those who make commissions when they sell or refer your licenses (resellers)
- Those who make money from providing their services (consulting or software implementation partners).
- A combination of the two – those who sell AND provide services – which is an ideal scenario for complex B2B technology and software.
For companies who are in early stages of scaling, it is critical to set the right expectations to ensure successful partner programs.
Not doing so and trying to follow a cookie cutter program would mean that you’ll have a lot of a 4th kind of partners – dormant. Lots of logos but very little revenue impact.
As a result, most earlier stage tech companies should look for partners who would genuinely consider the product as a key enabler of the transformation they want to drive for their clients. They should also consider you an important enhancer of their own client life time value. These partners would help you rapidly achieve your reach targets as well as drive quality implementations contributing to a faster moving flywheel overall.
Such a partner could be small (most of the times) or large (if you’re lucky). A common mistake is to prioritize scale over affinity, i.e. pursuing a large partner with thousands of clients. Unless such a partner takes to what you are selling like fish to water, it’s best to leave them for later. Their time will come as you gain traction.
Successful partner programs are built one successful partner at a time. Soon, you will scale to a stage where only a few contribute disproportionately to results. But that is not what needs to happen when starting out.
Mistake 2: Not being clear about what’s in it for them?
Sign up a partnership, tell them how great your offer is, and expect the revenue to start rolling in.
Except that doesn’t happen in most cases.
The hard reality is that all companies are looking to grow their own revenue, and you are just one way for them to make that happen.
In addition, partners who are primarily services based are likely to sell different kinds of tech and data transformation services to clients once they start a relationship.
It’s critical to work out exactly what motivates them.
It follows that for most enterprise partners, referral or resell fee incentives generally prove to be weak motivators by themselves. And so do tools like MDF (market development funds – marketing budget you will share with partners) and early access to product features.
In fact, what most enterprise partners would want to know is the level of client access they will get. That’s because their primary motivation is to position a multitude of services and a rapid increase in their client lifetime value over time.
So, it’s critical to ensure alignment and work out a joint value proposition that takes into account both sides of the revenue – licenses AND services.
In order to do this, you need to develop a clear understanding of what the client’s transformation roadmap looks like and how a partner fits in with that. This may take the form of a business process analysis viz. what is needed before the product deployment, what’s left to be desired after, what else would make this even better, and so on. Armed with this blueprint, the foundation of a partnership becomes very tangible.
A product or service centric view (aka. one sided view) limits the field of view. The business process view expands the horizon. and helps you build stronger joint value propositions.
Mistake 3: Not creating a tailored go-to-market plan
Now that you have evaluated fit and developed a joint value proposition, the next big hurdle to a successful partner program is also the most complex one – demand generation or getting in front of clients.
It’s tempting to run an “intel inside” campaign and expect your partners to do the actual implementations. While that is very much needed, it’s not enough. Otherwise you wouldn’t need a partner program. Pesky things such as the competition also get in the way.
A cohesive go-to-market with partners should be executed systematically on 3 fronts:
- Product enablement – technical trainings, certifications if any, solution or joint client offer development
- Co-marketing – tapping into and expanding the client base with activities such as webinars, meetups, industry events, outreach, etc.
- Sales collaboration – sales trainings, account mapping, and getting sales teams to generally work and communicate with each other regularly
In the initial stages, this sounds like a lot of hard work. But like any initiative, we have to do things that don’t scale at first in order to reach scale.
In addition, your channel partners are likely to invest on return, so not all of the above can be done at the same time. Partners can be motivated using an incremental approach. e.g.
- Joint solutions may start with a set of slides and then evolved into working demos based on client feedback.
- We may also map friendly clients first and then move to the net new prospects.
- Sales meetups may precede doing a marketing webinar to ensure more support.
- And so on.
Executing systematically and proportionately will get your partner program going in an excellent direction.
What’s next?
Successful partner programs are sustained if each partner can speak (or at least understand) the other’s language.
The 3 mistakes or best practices above will help you create a successful partner program and establish on a strong foundation. That will result in strong relationships at all levels based on mutual trust and delivery of results.
Successful partnerships are almost always a win-win situation. Anything else does NOT work out.
Connect with me to help set up or monetize your partnerships with strong execution. I specialize in making partner programs successful.
PS: Here’s a partner maturity model that based on my overall partnership framework. It helps you benchmark where your partnership is on a maturity curve.