• PRM software platforms require buy-in from vendor channel sales and operations departments.
• PRM software platforms should be incorporated into provider partner program onboarding processes.
• PRM software platforms need dedicated resources from supplier partner programs.
• PRM software platforms need to have solid user experience (UX) and correlate to business outcomes for partners to adopt them.

6 Best Practices for Using a PRM Software Platform in Your Channel Partner Program

Congratulations! You’ve just made an important investment in your channel partner program by implementing a new partner relationship management (PRM) software platform. Now, it’s time to sit back and watch the deals flow and your pipeline grow, right?

Not quite. While deploying the PRM platform is a major demonstration of your company’s commitment to your channel partners, work is still required to ensure adoption. To cover best practices for leveraging a PRM software platform, we interviewed six channel experts to get their insight. Our panelists include:

• Nicole Steele, Director of Channel Marketing & Enablement for Cloud-First WAN and security company Aryaka Networks
• Helena Marsikova, Senior Channel Marketing Manager for deep observability company Gigamon
• MeiLee Langley, Senior Director of Worldwide Channel Marketing for cloud-based customer service and digital engagement tools provider LiveVox
• Rachel Turkus, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing for mobile cloud-based firewall provider CyberReef
• Khali Henderson, Senior Partner for channel consultancy and technology marketing firm BuzzTheory
• Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer for partner relationship management (PRM) and channel management platform provider Zift Solutions

Want to jump ahead? Check out six best practices for using a PRM software platform in your channel partner program:

1. Get Buy-In on Your PRM Platform from Program Sales & Operations Staff
2. Optimize Your PRM Platform for an Ideal User Experience
3. Incorporate the PRM Platform in Your Partner Program Onboarding
4. Dedicate a Single Owner to Manage the PRM Platform
5. Keep Partner Business Outcomes Top of Mind
6. Evangelize Your PRM Platform to Top Partners to Maximize Engagement

Why do Channel Partner Programs Use PRM Software Platforms?

Our latest blog covered the main reasons partner programs need a PRM software platform. Our survey concluded:

1. PRM Software is a Single Source of Truth

PRM platforms operate as the basis of partner programs. Your PRM platform is the face of your company and culture to your partners. In the same way your website is your identity to your customers, your PRM platform is your identity to your partners. Plus, you can literally operate your entire partner program business processes out of the PRM platform, providing visibility into every meaningful interaction of your program staff and your partner community.

2. A PRM Platform is the Path to Partner Program Scalability

Scaling in a post-Covid economic environment requires online methods for partners to engage with your program, which PRM software enables. Additionally, not all partners work 9 to 5, so PRM software provides access to resources 24/7.

3. PRM Software Protects Your Partner Program from Staff Turnover

Channel account managers switch companies every 18 months in the information and communications technology (ICT) channel. A PRM platform prevents this turnover from crippling your program into disarray, with processes and operations continuing per the status quo, despite key members of your team needing to be replaced.

4. PRM Software is Customizable to Fit Your Partner Program Model

The conforms to different partner program models, from affiliate programs to distributor and technology services brokerage (TSB)-focused programs to white-label programs and everything in between. Some of these program models require the process and communication automation enabled by a PRM software platform to operate successfully at scale.

5. Your CRM Software Can’t Take the Place of a PRM Platform

While they’re a crucial component in your tech stack, a CRM isn’t purpose-built for partners and can’t stack up against a PRM platform’s capabilities. A PRM solution is more than a contact repository and sales tracking system; it provides enablement, demand generation, deal registration, content libraries, partner recruitment functions, business management, and more.

6. A PRM Platform Provides Indirect Sales Pipeline Visibility and More 

Track your channel sales pipeline by requiring partners to register deals in your PRM platform to qualify for commissions, SPIFFs, sales contests, and other incentives you’ve built in your program. Plus, with the analytics capabilities of a PRM platform, you can track ROI on full program initiatives and resources, including your marketing materials and campaigns.

6 Best Practices for Using a PRM Software Platform in Your Channel Partner Program

We got the inside track from our panel of experts on six key best practices channel partner programs should follow when using a PRM software platform.

1. Get Buy-In on Your PRM Platform from Program Sales & Operations Staff

While this may seem obvious, the most important best practice identified by our panel of experts is to get sign-off and buy-in from your program’s channel account managers (CAMs) and partner success managers (PSMs) before you make a PRM investment.

CyberReef’s Turkus explains: “The biggest difficulty I’ve seen is getting buy-in from the program’s CAMs, PSMs or salespeople so that they, in turn, go and train their partners to use it. This is the single biggest struggle of any marketing or sales leadership when using a PRM platform; internal adoption of the platform once it’s in place.”

She cautions not to wait until after you’ve picked a platform to have this conversation. “I’ve learned the hard way that your first step is getting the channel sales team’s input and feedback in how they want to use the PRM platform in order to select the right one they’ll want to use,” she says.

LiveVox’s MeiLee Langley concurs. “Gain a firm understanding of the internal resources it will require within your company … to implement the portal successfully,” she says, noting that often these resources include CRM specialists that don’t sit on your team and have their own priorities. “Ensure you have a commitment from that department to prioritize the implementation of the portal.”

BuzzTheory’s Khali Henderson also cautions about the tendency to have “pie in the sky” expectations for internal PRM platform adoption right out the gate. “Just like any SaaS platform, your internal teams have to get into the routine of using the PRM platform every day, especially if they’ve never used one. Make sure to set that expectation with your leadership team as well. You don’t want to be on the hook to meet unrealistic milestones.”

LiveVox’s Langley drive this point home. “I have learned that the implementation of any PRM will take much longer than expected, so just be prepared for that,” she says.

2. Optimize Your PRM Platform for an Ideal User Experience

According to research from Forrester, on average, every $1 invested in user experience (UX) brings $100 in return. That’s an ROI of 9,900%. It stands to reason that UX extends to partner experiences as well, and our panel agrees that PRM software platforms need to be set up for the most optimal experience if you want partners to make use of them.

“For partners, the biggest problem is that PRMs aren’t intuitive,” says CyberReef’s Turkus. “Oftentimes, this can be the fault of the marketing team that is setting up the PRM. The provider’s marketing team has to take time to map out flow.”

LiveVox’s Langley agrees, adding that vendors need understand the partner’s perspective and daily routines. “Remember that partners have multiple PRMs/partner portals to navigate each week – one per supplier and oftentimes one per TSB,” she says. “Thus, make it very quick and easy for them, upon logging into your portal, to find the most commonly used and important tools and resources. If you have something to highlight – an event, promo, etc. – have it pop-up or highlighted upon login, so partners don’t have to ‘uncover it.’”

Turkus advocates for vendors to get partners involved from the beginning to ensure the ideal UX for the PRM platform. “Get field questions together and survey your partners on how they’d prefer the platform to flow for them,” she says.

Gigamon’s Marsikova advises vendors to take the time to do it right. “Initial setup is the key. Don’t rush. It’s better to launch later with thorough integration than to have to fix errors in production,” she says, adding that the keys to success are:

• Investing sufficient time in building the initial structure of the platform
• Training both internal and external users on how to leverage the platform to its fullest
• Enhancing based on the feedback from these users

Langley adds that partner utilization of your PRM software is an obstacle that comes with the territory and encourages vendors to rise to the challenge. “Utilization will always be a challenge for any partner-facing software platforms and tools, including PRMs,” she explains. “If your platform isn’t easy to learn, use, and manage, the partners simply won’t have the time and bandwidth to try and learn it.”

That said, there are steps you can take to improve the use of the PRM platform. Langley explains: “If you notice a low utilization rate of your PRM/partner portal, look at your navigation menu and primary CTA buttons – are the names of each section clear? Is it easy to find the most commonly used modules, such as deal registration? If so, perhaps put together a webinar series showcasing the tools available and how quick and easy they are to use, or create short, snackable ‘video tours’ or guides that a partner can use when learning to navigate the portal.”

3. Incorporate the PRM Platform in Your Partner Program Onboarding

Our experts’ extensive experience has shown that PRM platforms need to be part of the partner experience from step one of the onboarding process to drive adoption.

“Always have the PRM platform as part of your onboarding program and process,” says CyberReef’s Turkus. “Have it house all of your education, training, certifications, etc. If your program model has a lead-registration program, run it through the PRM platform. If your program model offers self-serve and partners can quote themselves, again, do it through the PRM platform. It needs to be go-to-place once they start working with you at all times.”

Turkus suggests using the PRM even before onboarding begins. “Start the partnership paperwork and electronic document signing inside of the PRM platform from the very beginning,” she says.

Aryaka’s Steele is a proponent of using the PRM platform to segment and categorize partners throughout their onboarding process to further customize how your program is training partners. She recommends vendors “provide proper onboarding [and] share only content which would be relevant to the partner dependent upon their stage in the onboarding journey.”

Steele also reminds suppliers that partners need to be educated and trained on using the PRM platform in the onboarding process. “Ensure a clear communications journey to walk partners through the PRM solution,” she says.

Zift Solutions’ Heather Tenuto emphasizes how onboarding with the PRM platform can open up more revenue pathways for programs. “The best PRM platforms will include the capabilities of a full-blown learning management system (LMS),” she says. “This creates the opportunity for your program to onboard partners that fit multiple program types through multiple courses and training tracks. Now, your program can support training and onboarding of white-label partners, direct agents, TSBs and their subagents, VARs, MSPs and more – simultaneously. That not only frees up your staff but enables you to get more partners up to speed quickly, which in turn, will increase adoption.”

4. Dedicate a Single Owner to Manage the PRM Platform

Management of your program PRM platform needs to be prioritized with dedicated personnel.

CyberReef’s Turkus asserts that as a primary hub of your partner program, company identity and culture, your PRM platform needs full-time attention. “Don’t assume that sales enablement teams or the marketing department can pull double duty and manage the PRM platform on their own,” she says. “Your company needs someone who is solely responsible for managing the PRM platform.”

BuzzTheory’s Henderson agrees that someone needs to own PRM platform management for it to be successful. “Vendors, especially those with newer programs, may skimp on dedicating staff to manage the PRM platform because of the added expense of salary and benefits. That mindset is like stepping over a dollar to save a dime. The PRM platform will more than pay for itself over time provided that investments are made upfront to ensure it’s up to date, working properly and used by the team and partners.”

5. Keep Partner Business Outcomes Top of Mind

Outcomes. Outcomes. Outcomes. How your PRM platform delivers real-world business results for your partners will drive its adoption and, ultimately, its success for your organization.

LiveVox’s Langley says the onus is on the supplier to make the business case for the PRM platform to their partners. “If you haven’t ‘sold’ the partners on the tools available within your PRM and how they will benefit a partner’s business, don’t be surprised if they don’t take advantage of them,” she says.

Aryaka’s Steele agrees. “Adoption is a key problem for PRM tools,” she says. “The problem is vendors make this costly investment and think, ‘build it, and they will come.’ This is not the case [as] partners are expected to leverage many different tools with each of the vendors they engage. As a vendor, you need to ensure you educate partners on the benefits of the new tool and simplify it as much as possible.”

Steele notes that a tried-and-true tactic for driving adoption by partners is gating sales incentives, rewards, contests, prizes and other perks behind deal registration and interactions within the PRM platform. She also recommends using “gamification techniques to help drive desired activities and adoption.”

6. A PRM Platform Provides Indirect Sales Pipeline Visibility and More

One of the ways to drive greater traction and results from your PRM platform is to ensure that your top partners are taking advantage of the resources your PRM platform offers.

“Most partner programs have top performers who drive the majority of indirect sales. It’s the 80/20 rule; 20 percent of the partners bring in 80 percent of the deals,” says BuzzTheory’s Henderson. “Converting your most engaged sellers to use the PRM platform bumps up the activity so that you can begin to see useful metrics for sales forecasting. Plus, you can begin to see usage trends that will help your team to improve the PRM platform content or functionality.”

Henderson adds, “Pulling together an elite squad of beta testers from among your best partners also can help to get them invested in the success of the platform. Plus, they can provide vital input on features and functionality that they’ll actually use.”

LiveVox’s Langley also encourages vendors to evangelize the platform to their most engaged partners.  However, she recommends targeting and personalizing your training for their needs. “Not every partner will need to take advantage of every tool and resource you have available in your portal,” she says. “Use email campaigns, office hours, or webinars to uncover which partners within your ecosystem want to utilize your marketing and enablement tools, and then set aside one-on-one time to help them send their first campaign, complete their first training or create their first dashboard.”

Early adopters’ successes can help you promote the platform’s value to your partner base. “Showing partners how their peers have used the platform to secure new business is a sure-fire way to increase the use of your PRM platform, says Zift Solutions’ Tenuto. “In the same way you must use case studies to demonstrate how your solutions benefit end customers, it’s important to show how other partners have used your PRM to reach a revenue-producing or revenue-saving business outcome.”

Zift is honored to be ranked a leading provider of Partner Relationship Management by G2, the largest software marketplace with unbiased, validated buyer reviews.

With ZiftONE, you can align your channel marketing, sales and operations like never before.

We’d be happy to show you how our platform and team can help your channel partner program. Contact our team to learn more today.

• PRM software platforms represent a vendor’s partner program operations, solutions and culture to their partners
• PRM software platforms are key to scaling partner programs.
• Experts expect PRM software platform use to increase this year.
• PRM software platforms enable channel sales leaders to have indirect sales pipeline visibility.

6 Reasons Your Channel Partner Program Needs a PRM Software Platform

PRM software platforms can set your partner program up for success. They bring a comprehensive suite of scalable capabilities that enable you to operate your entire program, whether you have 100 or 10,000 partners.

Making a PRM investment, selecting the right PRM platform, or switching platforms is a major milestone for any partner program; it indicates that you’re serious about dedicating resources and technology to engage and scale your indirect sales channel.

But why do partner programs actually need a software platform? To cover this subject, we interviewed six channel leaders for insight into why they or their clients have used PRMs in their partner programs. Our expert panelists include:

• Nicole Steele, Director of Channel Marketing & Enablement for Cloud-First WAN and security company Aryaka Networks
• Helena Marsikova, Senior Channel Marketing Manager for deep observability company Gigamon
• MeiLee Langley, Senior Director of Worldwide Channel Marketing for cloud-based customer service and digital engagement tools provider LiveVox
• Rachel Turkus, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing for mobile cloud-based firewall provider CyberReef
• Khali Henderson, Senior Partner for channel consultancy and technology marketing firm BuzzTheory
• Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer for partner relationship management (PRM) and channel management platform provider Zift Solutions

Want to skip ahead? Check out six reasons your channel partner program needs a PRM software platform:

1. PRM Software is a Single Source of Truth
2. A PRM Platform is the Path to Partner Program Scalability
3. PRM Software Protects Your Partner Program From Staff Turnover
4. PRM Software is Customizable to Fit Your Partner Program Model
5. Your CRM Software Can’t Take the Place of a PRM Platform
6. A PRM Platform Provides Indirect Sales Pipeline Visibility and More

What is Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Software?

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software is an application used to manage partnerships between organizations and their indirect sales channel partners (e.g., affiliates, agents, brokers, dealers, distributors, value added resellers, managed services providers, etc.)

PRM software streamlines and strengthens partner program business processes to deliver mutual sales growth for providers and their indirect selling partners by:

• Organizing and orchestrating data
• Storing and sharing assets
• Tracking indirect sales transactions
• Qualifying indirect sales partners for program incentives and promotions
• Facilitating ordering and provisioning of provider solutions to partner-sourced end customers

The most common capabilities of PRM software platforms include:

• Storing shared resources in a content management system (CMS)
• Integrating with customer relationship management (CRM) software and popular third-party applications
• Distributing provider-sourced and partner-sourced leads
• Tracking allocation and use of marketing development funds (MDF)
• Tracking and attributing promotions for select partners, partner types and product lines
• Analyzing financial performance, such as detailed pricing and sales data
• Enabling (TCMA)
• Housing a library of partner sales and marketing materials, such as:
  • • Flyers and data sheets
    • Battlecards
    • Blogs
    • Case studies
    • eBooks
    • White papers
    • Presentations
    • Videos
    • Podcasts
    • Webinars
    • Events
    • Digital campaigns
    • Social campaigns
• Centralizing KPIs, partner data and administrative functions on a dashboard
• Enabling deal registration for partners to claim leads
• Training and certification on how to sell, order, provision and procure provider services akin to a Learning Management System (LMS)
• Processing and fulfilling orders

6 Reasons Your Channel Partner Program Needs a PRM Software Platform

We got to the core of why channel partner programs should use a PRM software platform with our experts and uncovered six key reasons.

1. PRM Software is a Single Source of Truth 

Our expert panelists across the board viewed PRM platforms as the basis of their partner program.

LiveVox’s MeiLee Langley says, “Our PRM (Partner Portal) is the foundation upon which we have built our Partner Program. We use the PRM or Partner Portal as the one-stop shop for our partners to engage and do business with LiveVox, including deal registration, account management, training, collateral, demand-gen campaigns, MDF and more.”

Gigamon’s Helena Marsikova echoes this sentiment, “PRM platforms are a one-stop shop for vendors and partners to be successful together. They provide a solid foundation for channel programs and offer partners all the tools they need to be enabled and go running.”

Langley elaborates that the best PRM software offers utility and convenience that are vital to partner engagement. “As we suppliers strive to be ‘easy to do business with,’ it is imperative that we aggregate as many systems, tools and platforms into a single location, so partners don’t need to remember multiple URLs and logins.”

Rachel Turkus of CyberReef extends the impact of the PRM beyond the partner program, explaining that the PRM represents your entire company to partners. “A good PRM system will create your partner program culture and your company culture will be communicated through it. The PRM effectively [provides] a baseline understanding to partners of how your program works, how your products work and how your company works.”

BuzzTheory’s Khali Henderson points out that a PRM instantly communicates the breadth and depth of resources behind your partner program. “In the same way your website is the face of your business to end customers, your PRM is the face of your program to partners. It’s your identity. If your partner program is without a PRM platform, it’s like your company being without a website. Can you make indirect sales and function without the PRM platform? Yes, but much like not having a website, you’ll likely lose out on revenue opportunities.”

Zift Solutions’ Tenuto also says not having a PRM is a competitive disadvantage in today’s marketplace. “If you’ve not invested in a PRM, you risk looking ‘small,’ especially if market-leading competitors have had them for several years. Appearing ‘small’ and under-resourced brings up a host of uncomfortable questions from partners about your capacity to serve customers, the size of your staff, your geographical reach, the reality of your 24/7/365 support commitment and how you’re reliably tracking partner deals if no partner management system is in place.”

2. A PRM Platform is the Path to Partner Program Scalability

Our panel repeatedly pointed to digital transformation, mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as a driving force in PRM software adoption for partner programs. Scaling a partner program in a post-Covid economic environment requires online and digitally focused methods for partners to engage with your program. PRM software meets this new requirement.

Aryaka’s Nicole Steele also points to the need for providers to offer accessible systems for partners to engage at times outside the standard ‘9 to 5′ workday. “With the work from anywhere or anytime, partners will require the use of tools that fit their own schedules and priorities,” she says.

LiveVox’s Langley adds that partners are looking for online self-service options to engage with providers. “As partners get busier and they sign with more suppliers, they seem to want more freedom to self-serve requests instantly,” she says. “Partners seem to want to access training, create marketing campaigns or co-branded collateral, and even see and manage their pipeline and booking reports on their own schedule.”

Langley also attributes the need to compete in a digital-first selling environment as another driver of PRM software use for partners. “Marketing and demand-gen tools [are] a big benefit of many PRMs, [and] as the demand for digital engagement increases in this post-Covid environment, partners seem to want to increase their utilization of these tools and are turning to suppliers’ PRMs,” she says.

CyberReef’s Turkus also points to the pandemic as having forced vendors’ partner programs online to scale. “COVID-19 increased the use of PRMs. Looking back at last year in 2021, if partner programs didn’t already have a program strategy using PRMs, they’d have developed it. This year, in 2022, we see an increase in the reengaging of previous PRM systems used in years past.”

Zift Solutions’ Tenuto notes that scalability is critical for partner programs, especially for partners selling volume-based services. “Most partner programs aim to scale and recruit a high number of partners to keep the pipeline full,” she says. “There are some exceptions depending on vendor business models and target accounts, but generally, it’s a numbers game at play, especially since not all partners will be productive. You can’t scale at a reasonable pace to service hundreds or potentially thousands of partners without a PRM software platform in place automating program processes for you.”

3. PRM Software Protects Your Partner Program From Staff Turnover

It’s no secret that the information and communications technology (ICT) channel is rife with constant personnel turnover, especially with channel account managers switching companies every 18 months. While you want to replace these front-line positions as quickly as possible, short-term vacancies won’t make or break your program if you have a high-quality PRM platform in place.

CyberReef’s Turkus identifies that PRMs should enable partners to get core sales process components, like quoting, without needing to engage a supplier employee. “A good PRM allows a quote to be made without involving a salesperson, channel manager or partner success manager (PSM). Ideally, the PRM will create a funnel for a channel manager or PSM on its own, provided [the channel team has trained] partners on quoting, deal registration and order processing.”

Additionally, Turkus cautions vendor channel sales teams against underestimating the importance of the PRM and advises them to use it to create program continuity. “Channel salespeople may believe they’re the missing piece of the partner program that can unlock newfound indirect sales success for the company,” she says. “Salespeople change; a good PRM does not.”

She adds that vendors should require channel teams “to take the time to learn the program channel management systems, like a PRM, and then evangelize and train on it with partners. The channel is a relationship-based business, but it’s not just relationships the channel manager brings to the table; they need to bring a willingness to learn new systems like PRMs.”

4. PRM Software is Customizable to Fit Your Partner Program Model

Partner programs have various business models for all types of partners, some of which include:

• Affiliate Partners – Affiliate partners have cultivated access to an audience uniquely invested in a specific topic and follow them to understand and keep up to date with that subject. Alliance partners typically will earn commissions.
• Referral Partners – Referral partners typically send a prospective customer to a vendor and receive a one-time commission for each closed deal.
• Agent Partners – Agent partners receive recurring commissions for sold deals. They typically perform all sales and marketing functions while the vendor performs the deployment and provides the service to the end customer.
• Distributors – Distributors and technology services brokerages (TSBs) aggregate partners for vendors and vendors for partners. This takes away administrative headaches for vendors in managing with partners, and partners typically get higher compensation and greater protection than they would on their own.
• Value Added Resellers (VARs) – VARs, or solutions providers, get a vendor product at wholesale, add a profit margin and sell it to end customers with their own value-added services or solutions over the top.
• Service Delivery Partners – A service delivery partner enhances the value of a vendor solution by providing presales consulting, installation and management of services to customize them to end customers’ unique needs.
• Technology Alliance Partners – Technology alliance partners offer complementary technology to the provider’s solution. This partnership combines two (or more) products or services as a solution for the end customer.
• Fulfillment Partners – Fulfillment partners help providers manage administrative and contractual needs of selling products at scale. These partners primarily manage order fulfillment of a high volume of transactions at a low rate.
• Cloud Service Providers – Cloud service providers offer an element of cloud computing (IaaS, SaaS or PaaS) through hosting a vendor solution in the cloud to improve speed, security, flexibility and other forms of optimization.
• Managed Service Providers (MSPs) – Managed service providers will proactively remotely manage end customer IT infrastructure, typically under a monthly or annual subscription model. MSPs frequently function as a form of outsourced IT and would layer a vendor solution into the tech stack they offer the end customer.
• White-label Resellers – Also called wholesale partners or private-label resellers, white-label resellers will take a wholesale provider solution and sell it to their customers as their own solution under their brand. White-label resellers typically encompass a partner profile of traditional resellers, VARs and MSPs – so they can fit into more than one partner type.
• Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) – OEMs embed provider products into their own solutions and sell them to end customers under their own brand, just like white-label partners.
• Global Systems Integrators (GSIs) – GSIs build computing systems by combining vendors’ hardware, software, networking, and storage products and solutions.
• Strategic Partners – Strategic partners will fit the role of multiple partner types listed above, but these will typically be partners that deliver the most revenue and provide the most direction and input to vendor strategies.

“PRMs, at least the good ones, can conform to several different partner program models,” says Zift Solutions’ Tenuto. “With some types of models, the program almost literally can’t function without a PRM system of some kind in place. Take a wholesale program, for instance – a white-label partner needs to be able to order services at will and then immediately communicate timelines for deployment to an end customer as if it’s their own service. You can only get fast turnarounds at scale like that through the automation that technology like PRM platforms provide.”

Our panel agrees that quality PRMs are customizable for different program business models and cater to how you work. Keeping this in mind, they also say it’s essential to be discerning in selecting a PRM that actually fits your program model, as not every PRM platform is the same.

CyberReef’s Turkus’ extensive experience with PRMs at various types of providers has made this top-of-mind, “Matching the partner program culture with the correct PRM out the gate is often the first and biggest hurdle,” she says. “If you choose a PRM that doesn’t match how you operate, then the needs of your program and the capabilities of the PRM won’t match. Some PRMs don’t allow for funneling at the distributor or TSB level. If your program revenue relies entirely on engaging with TSBs and their subagents, and a major TSB can’t log in and see what’s going on, then there is no sense in using that PRM for your program.”

Turkus argues this extends even to features you may believe are helpful but won’t actually be utilized by your team. “If you choose a PRM to use its mass emailing function for channel salespeople, but your channel sales team doesn’t do mass emailing, then that’s an issue,” she says.

Turkus also points out that simply because one PRM was effective at your previous company doesn’t mean it will be a great fit for your current employer. She says, “Marketing may bring in a PRM platform from a prior company where they had a great experience, but if the partner sales models between those two programs don’t quite match, then you can run into obstacles getting your internal team and partners to use the platform.”

5. Your CRM Software Can’t Take the Place of a PRM Platform

A common hang-up for newer partner programs entering the channel and considering whether to adopt a PRM software platform is that they already have a CRM. Decision-makers may wonder why their company’s partner program can’t simply use their CRM to track deals, email to recruit and manage partners, etc. The problem is that a CRM isn’t purpose-built for partners and is not on par with a PRM platform’s capabilities.

Aryaka’s Nicole Steele explains, “Many companies try and leverage their CRM as a PRM…and there are so many more aspects of a PRM than a contact repository. True PRM solutions will provide enablement, demand generation, deal registration, content library and much more. Most importantly, PRM solutions can provide the data necessary to showcase which partners are leveraging the tools so you can adjust to ensure partners take the right actions at the right times.”

Gigamon’s Marsikova concurs. “CRM software only offers a fraction of all the capabilities a PRM software brings to the table,” she says. “If built properly from end to end, it helps with new partner recruitment, ramp up and enablement, provides means of communication, sales and marketing support, business management and if sprinkled with gamification features, it also motivates and rewards.”

CyberReef’s Turkus agrees. “CRM is for your salespeople to manage their funnel, commissions and deals. PRM is for partners to manage their funnel and access marketing materials,” she says. “[They are] two completely different audiences with different aims.”

That said, Steele, Marsikova and Turkus advocate the PRM you’re looking for needs to integrate with your CRM, here’s why:

Steele says, “Data! Good data in – good data out! By syncing the information from your PRM with your CRM, you can gain deeper insights into your partners’ activities.”

Marsikova points out that PRM-CRM integrations offers a 360-degree view of your entire operation. “It just perfectly connects the three vertexes of a triangle – the vendor, the customer and the partner,” she says.

Turkus adds that both the CRM and PRM need to map to each other to reflect sales commissions and deal attribution correctly. She explains: “If all sales are going through your CRM, then having them map into PRM is important, so the entire sales process is automated. There is no manual data entry from CRM to PRM. The source of truth between both systems needs always to be your CRM when it comes to sales figures as the CRM is often where commissioning is done.”

6. A PRM Platform Provides Indirect Sales Pipeline Visibility and More

How do you determine whether your partner program is successful? There are many factors, but sales and pipeline are at the top of the list.  However, partner programs face a high hurdle of tracking deals, proposals, prospects, leads and each stage of a sales funnel from hundreds or thousands of partners. Tasking channel managers to manually monitor and track these metrics isn’t efficient.

PRM software platforms are the key to providing your program with the information you need for proper sales and pipeline forecasting. PRMs are equipped with analytics dashboards and report generation functionality that makes it easy to gauge the success of your partner program. The PRM software delivers sales pipeline visibility across your partner base.

Zift Solutions’ Tenuto elaborates: “Let’s be honest, your partners don’t necessarily want to log into yet another vendor’s partner portal and register their deals. But you both have something the other wants – you want their deals and their sales data to forecast pipeline and revenue accurately, and they want credit for deals won to get SPIFF payouts, earn MDF, qualify for President’s Clubs, and enter the running for your quarterly or annual sales contests. A PRM platform can be the way you make all that tracking happen by building it into your program structure.”

BuzzTheory’s Henderson adds that it’s more than just pipeline, “Entire program initiatives and resources, including marketing materials and campaigns, can be tracked inside the PRM. Some of these sales enablement resources can take months and tens of thousands of dollars to develop. The PRM can give you the visibility you need to see how your partners are using them and determine whether there’s ROI on your efforts.”

Below is an example of a dashboard showing analytics from ZiftONE:

All in, it’s clear that PRM software platforms are a vital tool for any partner program looking to automate, scale and take their indirect sales revenue to the next level.

Zift is honored to be ranked a leading provider of Partner Relationship Management by G2, the largest software marketplace with unbiased, validated buyer reviews.

With ZiftONE, you can align your channel marketing, sales and operations like never before.

We’d be happy to show you how our platform and team can help your channel partner program. Contact our team to learn more today.

• Through-channel marketing is vital to sales partner relationship development and revenue generation.
• Like many areas of digital marketing, through-channel marketing can be enhanced, scaled and customized through automation.
• Experts expect through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) use to increase this year.
• Simplicity is a dominant theme in TCMA for both vendors and partners.
• TCMA faces many of the same challenges as other marketing and channel initiatives (strong content, partner engagement, etc.).
• In addition to ease of use, flexibility and reporting are key TCMA platform attributes.
• Even simple TCMA programs require at least some level of partner training.

8 Fundamentals of Through-Channel Marketing Automation

Through-channel marketing automation delivers significant benefits to your company and your partners. It builds trust between your teams, helps you and your partners generate revenue, and its importance is on the rise. Predictions of greater through-channel marketing activity this year, originally detailed in our 2022 partner program predictions, were proven in our March Customer Event. This event revealed that companies are investing more in through-channel marketing than in to-channel and for-partner marketing combined. 

You can dig deeper into the benefits of through-channel marketing in our article 6 Best Practices for Through-Partner Communications.

Like all areas of marketing, through-channel marketing can benefit significantly from automation. To dig into this vital subject, we turned to eight channel marketing leaders for insight into through-channel marketing automation fundamentals and some best practices. Our expert panelists include:

• Amy Bailey, Senior Vice President of Marketing for technology solutions brokerage Telarus
• Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer for partner relationship management (PRM) and channel management platform provider Zift Solutions
• Khali Henderson, Senior Partner for channel consultancy and technology marketing firm BuzzTheory
• Kris Blackmon, Chief Channel Officer for channel consultancy JS Group
• Kristine Stewart, founder and CEO of channel consultancy The Lexington Group
• Marie Steyl, a longtime marketing and channel expert with leading tech companies
• McKinley Thompson, Senior Global Partner Marketing Manager for communications and risk insights provider Smarsh
• Rich Long, Vice President of Channels for unified call and conversation recording platform Dubber

Want to skip ahead? Check out our eight fundamentals of TCMA:

1. Ease of Use is a Top TCMA Platform Requirement
2. Speed to Market Drives TCMA Usage in 2022
3. Attribution is a Critical Function for TCMA
4. Lack of Time and Training Are Barriers to TCMA Adoption
5. Content is Key to TCMA Success
6. Reporting Is Vital to TCMA Selection
7. Make MDF Claims Easier with TCMA
8. Get Feedback

What is Through-Channel Marketing Automation?

Through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) applies marketing automation’s scale and customization power to the indirect sales channel. Through TCMA, technology vendors and service providers can develop and deploy turnkey messaging and digital campaigns that help their partners go to market with their products and services.

McKinley Thompson of Smarsh defines TCMA this way: “Through-partner marketing is the enablement of your partners to communicate your message to prospects and customers through various marketing tactics. A TCMA platform is a tool that enables these partner marketing initiatives at scale and makes it as easy as possible for partners to promote your products and solutions on your behalf.” 

Kris Blackmon of JS Group defines TCMA similarly while emphasizing the ability for vendors to leverage the local strengths of agents in their markets without suffering messaging confusion or brand dilution.

“TCMA is a SaaS solution that enables vendors to distribute a cohesive value proposition, brand persona and marketing message through indirect channels,” Blackmon says. “Partners have strong voices in their local markets but often lack robust marketing skills. And vendors work hard on their messaging and don’t want it diluted or have their message lost somewhere along the way. With TCMA, vendors make it easy for partners to represent their brands, deploy marketing campaigns, generate leads and track those leads through the funnel.”

That focus on lead and customer lifecycle management is essential to developing a successful channel partner engagement plan, says BuzzTheory’s Khali Henderson. “It’s true that sales partners are often better on their feet, face-to-face with customers, than they are at marketing,” she says. “TCMA can provide them with turnkey programs they can use to generate more in-person opportunities, but it also empowers those partners to compete on equal footing in the digital realm without becoming experts in digital marketing tactics and platforms. Partners value that, and vendors that get it right win on two fronts— the direct sales they generate from those efforts and the uptick in overall engagement and mindshare they gain when they help partners grow their businesses.”

Channel marketer Marie Steyl details the pros and cons of TCMA for the vendor and the partner. “Brands benefit from TCMA because it enables their local partners to create brand-compliant marketing materials and effectively manage their co-op dollars,” she says. “Brands include manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and providers of services with a distributed network of partners (dealers, agents, franchisees, operators, sales reps, retailers or whatever the industry label demands). These partners have a significant impact on the brand’s ability to sell products and services in a given local area. Because many brands have hundreds or thousands of local partners across the nation or even the world, it can be challenging to execute cohesive corporate marketing campaigns at scale without a TCMA platform

Steyl adds that partners benefit from TCMA because it empowers them to easily create brand-compliant marketing materials at a subsidized cost. “Because local partners are often small business owners or managers with a lot on their plates, they don’t have a lot of time or resources to devote to marketing,” she says. “Therefore, brand compliance isn’t a high priority for many partners, especially those that sell competing products and services simultaneously, such as telecommunications dealers. Through-channel marketing automation solves for that by providing simple, scalable and cost-effective marketing solutions. The platform provides marketing templates and resources that match the current corporate campaign and can be customized for increased relevancy within their local market.”

 

 

8 Fundamentals of Through-Channel Marketing Automation from Top Channel Partner Programs

We dug into the nuts and bolts of TCMA with our experts and came out with eight fundamentals that you can use in your through-channel marketing plans.

1. Ease of Use is a Top TCMA Platform Requirement

Our expert panelists emphasized that a key requirement of TCMA platforms is easing campaign execution for partners.

Sales partners don’t have the time to decode complicated tools and systems, says Steyl. “As a seasoned user of various multinational vendor TCMA systems, I rate ease-of-use as the top requirement for any TCMA system,” she says. “If a TCMA system is too complicated to use, a channel partner with multiple other business priorities will simply not bother to use it.

“Partners want a one-stop-shop where they can easily complete essential channel marketing tasks, such as accessing logos, templates, promotional material and visibility of MDF (or co-op funds).”

Steyl’s list of typical components includes:

• A simple, step-by-step streamlined workflow
• A library of compliant and customizable marketing assets
• Governance, including brand and co-branding guidelines
• Robust analytics to track and measure performance and fund usage
• An efficient portal from which marketing programs can be launched, tracked and measured

The Lexington Group’s Kristine Stewart agrees, noting that a TCMA platform should provide sales partners with:

• The ability to easily operationalize asset delivery 
• A simple way for partners to see and spend their marketing funds
• An option to get localized/translated content
• Access to analytics and customer insights such as predictive modeling

2. Speed to Market Drives TCMA Usage in 2022

As we discussed earlier, through-channel marketing is on the rise in 2022. And so is automation, according to our experts. 

Heather Tenuto from Zift summed it up: “Any time you have increasing demand for a multistep or complicated process, the demand for automation rises with it,” she says. “Partners need platforms that enable them to go to market quickly and easily. And so do vendors. They need to deploy and update assets across their entire partner base easily. Given the speed of innovation in our space and ongoing talent shortages, TCMA fills a vital business need for vendors that will only grow over time.”

Thompson from Smarsh agrees with Tenuto about the importance of time-to-market for vendors and their partners. “The ability to rapidly customize and execute brand-compliant marketing activities that resonate with the market versus completely starting from scratch saves both parties time and money, allows for scale and helps you demonstrate partnership success quickly,” Thompson says. “A new and promising partnership can quickly be put at risk if processes, asset creation and approval cycles cause delay. TCMA can aid in the speed-to-market and ensure you stay top of mind with partners and demonstrate your commitment to them and their success from the beginning.”

Henderson from BuzzTheory notes that time-to-market is also vital for channel programs to hit their numbers. “Delayed market entry is the greatest threat to any growth projection,” she says. “Channel programs aren’t immune from that reality. TCMA gives you instant scale across your indirect channels for accelerated product rollouts, ramp-ups and promotions.”

3. Attribution is a Critical Function for TCMA

Smarsh’s Thompson also sees TCMA as a valuable attribution tool. “Channel marketing attribution is something that every company has struggled with at one time or another, given the breadth of marketing tactics and limited budget dollars. If you can’t demonstrate the success of a channel-based marketing or sales approach to leadership, budget will go elsewhere, and the channel will never reach its full potential. The ability to report on marketing activities with partners from a centralized place and attribute the impact of these activities to achieving your overall marketing objectives is a central benefit of TCMA.”

Attribution is critical for partners as well as vendors; TCMA should deliver both, says Dubber’s Long.  “[Partners] should be able to use the engine to track effectiveness and capture leads. A TCMA tool should be able to sync with the partners CRM tools for greater efficiency and visibility,” Long says. “If the TCMA tool is hosted by a supplier, that supplier should be able to … track the usage by the partner community to track effectiveness themselves, especially tied to MDF/co-op requests and program structures.”

4. Lack of Time and Training Are Barriers to TCMA Adoption

When discussing the challenges of TCMA adoptions for partners, JS Group’s Blackmon observes that time – or a lack thereof – is make or break.

“For partners, it’s really a matter of truly taking advantage of these offerings and putting them into action in their practices,” Blackmon says. “Lots of partners are small businesses where one person can be the CEO, head of sales and head of marketing, and sometimes it can be hard to carve out time for marketing no matter how easy vendors make it.”

Dubber’s Long agrees. “Time and interest will always be a challenge for partners adopting TCMA,” he says. “It’s helpful for marketing teams at a supplier to spend [one-on-one] time with the key partners to help design initial campaigns and social media outreach to foster ongoing adoption.”  

Lexington Group’s Stewart also blames low usage on a lack of training on how to use TCMA platforms, which are often not intuitive or even difficult to use.

Henderson agrees, “Untrained partners can waste valuable time, becoming frustrated and unwilling to use the portal and less invested in the vendor partnership. Partners will always choose the path of least resistance.”

Long adds, “If the partners are not using the tool, the supplier’s investment isn’t realized. Wherever possible, making the use of TCMA part of a program’s requirements or rewarding for its usage is key. This way, a supplier’s field sales team can then begin to adopt the usage of the TCMA and its results into conversations they are already having and make it a strategic part of the engagement.”

Training on TCMA may need to start with marketing 101. Many sales partners are novice marketers and might need training in basic marketing concepts like multitouch campaigns. “Consistency is key,” says Bailey from Telarus. “Many times, we see partners send an email and think the leads will just come rolling in. They don’t realize a successful campaign needs to touch the reader on a consistent basis.”

5. Content is Key to TCMA Success

Dubber’s Long notes that TCMA is, like all marketing, about content, and content challenges can impact TCMA results. “Keeping the content fresh and relevant for partners is a challenge,” he says. “Suppliers must constantly make the partners aware of the new content and often take the lead with key partners to ensure they are using the tool often. …Creating content that is industry-specific, vertical-specific helps usage and isn’t always just about one supplier.” 

Bailey from Telarus says vendor-neutral content is critical for partners who position their firms as unbiased advisers. “Channel programs want to push their message to the end-user,” she says. “Partners want to send more generic content about the topic at hand, not the specific supplier pushing their solution. For example, partners want to push a cybersecurity email to their customer base, not an email from a specific supplier about what they do in the world of cybersecurity.”

6. Reporting Is Vital to TCMA Selection

When selecting a TCMA platform, Thompson from Smarsh says reporting is vital. “Having the ability to report on marketing performance and provide in-depth analytics that demonstrate ROI should also be a top consideration when selecting a tool,” she says. “Measurable results are important to the success of any partnership, and marketing activity is no exception. Being able to analyze the success (or failure) of a campaign can provide both parties with invaluable insight into if your joint offerings, messaging, and value proposition resonates with customers and prospects and can inform larger strategic areas of the partnership if leveraged properly.” 

Thompson says that reporting can help drive partner engagement. “You should be consistently monitoring performance, discussing results, and refreshing the content available to partners to keep them coming back. I would recommend frequently looking at trends in new and repeat users, activity execution, and MDF claims and setting KPIs attached to the use of your TCMA tool as a way of measuring success in addition to the results of the individual marketing activities themselves. Look at partner engagement and success indicators as a result of your TCMA tool, in addition to marketing results tied to prospects and customers. The two are equally important.”

7. Make MDF Claims Easier with TCMA

Executing campaigns and tracking leads are critical capabilities for TCMA platforms, but our panelists say they also should take some of the headaches out of MDF programs for both the vendor and their partners.  

“There needs to be robust capabilities to support MDF initiatives, including an easy way for partners to supply proof of performance data for MDF reimbursement,” says JS Group’s Kris Blackmon.

The Lexington Group’s Stewart says ideally, a platform also would make it “easy to access funds for purchase and specifically for claims.”

“If simple and easy to use, [TCMA is] a great way to spend their all too often underspent MDF,” says Stewart. “In particular, for those partners that can’t afford much in the way of their own marketing resources.” 

She adds that vendors can make an impact by enabling partners to spend MDF for “access to a creative service team or even a virtual marketing concierge end-to-end service.”

8. Get Feedback

Zift’s Tenuto encourages vendors to gather partner feedback on their TCMA initiatives during their channel partner program QBRs. “It’s important to know how your partners perceive your TCMA platform,” she says. “Find out what your partners do and don’t like about it and dig into why some partners are successful with it and others are not. Take what you learn to improve your program internally and develop best practices for partners externally.”

Zift takes feedback seriously and is pleased that the ZiftONE platform was ranked No. 1 for TCMA in the Spring 2022 report by G2, the largest software marketplace with unbiased, validated buyer reviews.

With ZiftONE, you can manage all channel marketing materials in one place and create customized marketing campaigns – emails, co-brandable collateral, social media posts and microsites – with no coding required.

All of us at Zift are thrilled that channel marketers told G2 they love ZiftONE’s capabilities and we’re especially gratified to hear that they can count on our people-powered support. Here’s just one example: 

“The people at Zift are always eager to hear how their platform can better improve to serve your company best. The platform is continually growing with new valuable features, and the reps will always take time out of their day to ensure you have the training and detail needed to maximize the resources.”

We’d be happy to show you how our platform and team can help you reach your through-channel marketing goals. Contact our team to learn more today.

• Partner communications should build trust between the provider and sales partner organizations and facilitate revenue generation for both parties.
• Through-partner communications, while centered on the revenue-generation aspect of the partnership, also help with goals of building partner trust. 
• In this new era of revenue marketing, feedback and collaboration between channel partners and their suppliers is as vital as internal collaboration between sales and marketing teams.
• Understanding your partner’s business can inform your through-partner messaging as much as it does your to-partner efforts.
• Simplification – structurally and through automation – is essential to through-partner communications messaging success.
• Both broad market data and analysis of individual campaigns can help partners close business.
• Integrating to- and through-partner communications is essential to program success and requires content planning and engineering.

6 Best Practices for Through-Partner Communications

As with all business partnerships, communications form the backbone of your relationships with sales partners. Those communications should be clear, accretive to the partnership, and, ideally, bring your organizations closer together. Ultimately, if you strip away all the nuance and complexities of individual communications tactics, products and deliverables, they should meet two overarching objectives:

• Your partner communications should build trust between your organization and your partners. From core messaging on products and revenue opportunities to problem-solving, education and advice, your communications should strive to build confidence with your sales partners and build trust between your teams. 
• Your partner communications should also facilitate revenue generation for both parties. After all, that’s what brought your organizations together. Your communications should help your partners spot and seize opportunities with your products and services and should help them prospect and close business.

To-Partner Communications vs. Through-Partner Communications

Of course, the objectives we’re discussing – building trust and generating revenue – are interrelated. Partners won’t sell your services if they don’t trust your organization to take care of them and their customers. Conversely, your organization won’t invest in partners it can’t rely on to generate revenue from those investments.

In terms of communications tactics and strategies, however, a dividing line exists at the point of sales enablement. Some communications are designed for consumption by your sales partners, and others for those partners’ prospects and customers. Short-hand terms for this divide are “to-partner” communications and “through-partner” communications. 

For a sample list of each, check out our article on best practices in to-partner communications, which we developed with the help of an all-star team of partner communications experts.

Meet Your Partner Communications Experts

Those same experts provided invaluable advice on through-partner communications as well. Their collective experience includes building channel communications programs from the ground up, running large-scale global channel communications operations and advising leading channel organizations on their communications strategies. Our brain trust includes:

• Bill Steen, Director of Channel and Field Marketing for cybersecurity and cyber resilience provider OpenText Security Solutions
• Danielle Flannery, Senior Manager of Global Partner Marketing at edge cloud network provider Fastly
• Heather K. Margolis, Senior Vice President of Marketing at channel technology provider 360insights
• Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer here at Zift Solutions
• Khali Henderson, Senior Partner of channel marketing firm BuzzTheory
• Lauren Coltrane, Senior Enterprise Partner Marketing Manager at hardware, graphics, computing and AI company NVIDIA
• Lauren Morreale, Channel Account Manager at email security and cyber resilience firm company Mimecast
• Ollie Whitfield, Growth Marketing Professional at sales engagement technology firm VanillaSoft

Benefits of Through-Partner Communications

Through-partner communications are vital components of any channel partner engagement plan. Like to-partner communications, they help you meet core relationship objectives of:

• Closing gaps — Like your channel team, the sales teams at your partner organizations are perpetually pressed for time. Additionally, many partners excel at sales but struggle with marketing and communications. They’ll turn to your solutions and your team more frequently when you arm them with marketing materials that:
  • Save them time
  • Make them look better to their prospects and customers 
• Building trust — At the end of the day, your indirect sales arms are businesses, too. Nothing builds sales partner loyalty more than helping them grow their companies. 
• Driving revenue —You need to grow your business, too, and you’re competing with other firms for your partners’ attention and sales. The easier you make it for your partners to grow their businesses with your services and solutions, the easier you grow your firm by extension. 

As we learned from our March Customer Event, through-partner communications is largely the most popular delivery option for channel partner programs to invest in. With the benefits of closing gaps, building trust, and driving revenue, it’s easy to see why this is the case.

6 Best Practices for Through-Partner Communications

Our discussions with partner communications experts revealed six best practices you can adopt in your organization to develop or refine your through-communications game.

1. Learn Your Partners’ Businesses to Customize Through-Partner Marketing

Knowing your partners’ businesses is essential in to-partner marketing. That much is apparent. Less obvious but equally important is leveraging this knowledge in your through-partner marketing efforts.

“Similar to to-partner comms, successful through-partner communications also require a deep knowledge of your partner base,” says Lauren Coltrane from hardware, graphics, computing and AI company NVIDIA. “Without this knowledge, your marketing teams are likely creating content that, ultimately, is not helpful to your partners.”

She also warns against the pitfalls of directly repurposing internal marketing materials without customizing them for customer needs. “I’ve seen several examples of companies simply taking content from their existing corporate marketing campaigns and pushing them directly to partners to use. This rarely, if ever, is effective. By taking the extra time to establish a baseline of what your partners’ needs are and how they typically market to their customer base, you’ll be rewarded with much higher engagement.”

Khali Henderson from channel marketing consultancy and agency BuzzTheory agrees. She notes that customization often doesn’t require reinventing the wheel so much as which type of wheel you’re producing. “Where corporate marketing teams go wrong in their content repurposing is they don’t make adjustments for the context of the partner’s involvement. Some aspects of the value proposition to end-users are the same, but not all. A good content team can repackage your solutions in ways that resonate better with end users who work with partners while making your partners look good through targeted messaging and custom branding options.”

2. Seek Feedback and Collaboration to Improve Through-Partner Communications

BuzzTheory’s Henderson adds that bridging gaps between sales and marketing, which is essential to successful revenue generation, applies to indirect and direct sales teams alike. This need was emerging before the pandemic but has become paramount now that so much of the sales cycle is driven by online activity. It’s so vital to success, in fact, that it’s line-itemed in our 2022 channel partner program predictions.

“We’re in a revenue marketing world, now,” she says. “Most of a buyer’s journey – even in B2B – happens online before a salesperson is contacted. That means that your partners need to synchronize with their vendors in the same way companies sync their internal sales and marketing teams. Collaborate with your partners by discussing the challenges they’re facing generating prospects and closing deals, and then address them in the campaigns you provide.” 

She says an easy way of collaborating is to build it into your channel partner program QBRs. “The best way to make something important happen is to build it into your established schedule. QBRs occur at an ideal cadence for planning, testing and refinement, and you don’t have to scramble to find additional time on already busy schedules.”

3. Simplify Through-Partner Communications with Automation and Customization

Our own Heather Tenuto here at Zift Solutions points out that if arming partners with good content is one half of the battle in through-partner marketing, automation is the other. It’s vital enough that it’s essential to have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of through-channel marketing automation.

“In terms of execution, there are two prongs here,” Tenuto says. “It’s a given that the content you provide to partners has to resonate with their prospects. But it’s also important to make it easy for your partners to use that content. Many partners don’t have the scale for big tech stacks. Providing them with turnkey programs they can easily deploy simplifies management for you and your partners and makes both firms more successful.” 

Danielle Flannery from edge cloud network provider Fastly agrees. “For partners, this needs to be easy to execute. For customers, this needs to be valuable. Partner marketers have a difficult task because they need to ensure that partners are equipped with actionable resources to help them sell, and at the same time, ensure that the content they are providing is ultimately relevant for customers.” 

Flannery also recommends brandable assets, which fit within the broader scope of automation and making it “easy” for partners to leverage the materials you provide. Effective practices that drive revenue include “high-value assets packaged up into a ‘campaign-in-a-box’ format that’s brandable by a partner are usually the most requested asset type from partners,” she notes. “Before that, however, sales enablement assets should be the cornerstone for ensuring partners understand the joint value and how to make those campaigns most successful.”

NVIDIA’s Coltrane also promotes complete campaigns but also resource timing. “It’s less about the individual materials and tactics and more about providing the right content, to the right people, at the right time,” she says. “Ideally, your channel teams are able to provide insights that can be used to create a full end-to-end campaign that is aligned to their customer journey.” 

Bill Steen from cybersecurity and cyber resilience provider OpenText Security Solutions advocates simplicity as part of the turnkey process. “Make it short, sweet, relevant and interesting to the end-customer,” he says, adding that it’s also important to promote the partner’s business. “Make sure any call-to-action is routed back to the partner to capture leads and new opportunities. Design it for use in social channels such as LinkedIn.”

4. Leverage Data to Help Partners Close Business with Through-Partner Marketing

OpenText Security Solutions’ Steen also advocates using market data mixed with social proof to help partners provide their prospects with essential context for decision-making. When asked for what materials are most effective at driving revenue, he pointed to a full spectrum of assets to help customers make data-driven purchasing decisions. “Trends, analyst insights, case studies,” he said, “and customer success stories that help the partner generate new opportunities.”

Our experts also referenced data derived from marketing suites and partner relationship platforms (PRMs) to further partner and program success. Steen pointed to the value of standard metrics like “number of partners sharing social content, open rates, and click-through rates.”

Lauren Morreale from email security and cyber resilience firm Mimecast also referenced key performance indicators (KPIs), including “number of downloads, unique/returning viewers to the website, clicks on hyperlinks and partner/customer registrations.”

Fastly’s Flannery notes that metrics can also help demonstrate the value of channel programs internally. “This is where having a tracking mechanism that is separate from your own company’s lead-generation programs is important,” she says. “Being able to see which leads were sourced or influenced by your partners is critical. That allows you to acknowledge and reward your top-performing partners while also communicating the value of partner programs internally.”

Tenuto from Zift notes that market-leading partner sales enablement platforms can simultaneously help channel departments meet all these needs. “Ideally, you can quickly identify which assets, partners and campaigns are best performers. With this data in hand, you can share best practices and improve performance across your partner base, identify which partners to invest in and trust with leads, and provide the data your management team needs to demonstrate channel program ROI.”

5. Integrated To- and Through-Partner Communications is Essential

According to our experts, to- and through-partner communications may diverge at the enablement line, but they should be carefully coordinated.

Mimecast’s Morreale stated that, in her view, to- and -through partner communications integration is “extremely important. These work hand-in-hand, and one cannot really be done without the other.”

Steen from OpenText Security Solutions agrees. “Both partners and customers are looking for solutions to their problems,” he observes. “Effective communication is critical to our partner experience and overall satisfaction.”

Coltrane from NVIDIA is also in agreement and notes that the stakes are high given the volume of transactions in the channel. “With such a large contingent of business being conducted through the channel, it’s crucial to ensure that your teams are effective in these areas,” she says.

Heather Margolis from channel technology provider 360insights stresses integrated teams and learning opportunities. “We feel it’s important that the to-partner and through-partner teams are integrated,” she says. “What you’re saying to your partners should carry through to their communications or demand generation including product releases, promotions that impact them, and news and events. More importantly, though, is that when you are communicating to partners, whether through email, social, or at an event, they are taking notes. They are learning from you and should be able to emulate those best practices in their own communications out to clients and prospects.”

6. Integration is Best Achieved through Content Planning and Engineering

When asked the best practices for achieving to- and through-partner communications integration, Margolis from 360insights, said, “Certainly, leveraging a platform that truly understands the channel is clutch. Also, it’s important that your education teams understand best practices around communication so they can teach partners. You also want to tap into your to-partner communications teams to ensure they’re engaging the partners the way the through-partner comms teams want to train partners to drive engagement.”

Morreale from Mimecast emphasizes developing interest in your products and services first via your to-channel communications, so your partners want to take them to market via your through-channel enablement. “It’s easy to get wrapped up in wanting to reach the customer [and] close business. However, if vendors do not properly enable their partners, partners will not properly sell to their customers. It’s important to create a common link between to-partner and through-partner communication so that the partner believes in the product and then becomes eager to sell it.”

BuzzTheory’s Henderson emphasized careful content engineering. “As marketers, we’re aware that content is what’s moving the needle. That equation has two parts—the first is the messaging itself, which has to be on-point. The second and equally important part is content engineering around events, product releases, and, yes, even your drumbeat messaging. The more you can get your content shop to develop content thematically synced for your internal, partner and end-user audiences, the more success you’ll have.”

Steen from OpenText Security Solutions also emphasizes design—both in content and the platforms you leverage to deliver that content. “Think both ‘to’ and ‘through’ as you design messaging and the tools you use to push comms out or to make it easy to find,” he says.

Zift’s Tenuto agrees. “A good content team can spin gold in the channel,” she notes, “but you need to make sure that gold makes it into the bank for you and your partners. When selecting technology, it’s important to think past what you need at the moment to what you might need in the future. The more flexibility in your platform, the better.”

NVIDIA’s Coltrane notes that successful integration of to- and through-partner efforts can guide you to better results in the future. She advocates “using results of to- and through-partner communications to inform your business strategies.”

Continuing the Conversation on To-, Through- and For-Partner Communications

Can’t get enough of partner comms? We don’t blame you. For a full dive into all three parts of partner communications, please check out this video presentation from the Zift Solutions team:

• Channel communications (particularly to-partner communications) are vital to developing relationships, building trust, and generating revenues with sales partners.
• Capturing and retaining partner mindshare is a competitive endeavor.
• To-partner communications should focus on delivering value to partners and partnerships.
• Experts advocate providers speak to solving partner pain points and how they help partners grow their businesses.
• Brevity and relevance of to-partner communications are all-important to cut through the noise.
• The timing of to-partner communications is often overlooked and can substantially impact the efficacy of through-partner campaigns.
• When it comes to metrics, traditional engagement metrics matter but sometimes overlook meaningful relationships and soft measurement metrics like loyalty.
• Centralizing your metrics helps you respond to trends and quickly improve your “to-partner” communications.

9 Best Practices for To-Partner Communications

Talk with an expert in the channel about partner communications, and they’ll tell you it’s essential to relationship development, trust-building and revenue generation. All are true, but those communications don’t happen in a vacuum. You must compete for sales partner attention with:

• Competitors that also work with your sales partners. Many sales partners have portfolios of service providers – including your competitors – upon which to draw.
• Competitors that want to work with your sales partners. Your sales partners – especially the most active and productive – are aggressively recruited by many of your competitors.
• Everything else in your partners’ email boxes, SMS messages, social accounts, voicemail boxes and event calendars. Your partners face the same onslaught of communications overload that you do.

To help you get the most from your partner communications efforts, we interviewed eight industry experts:

• Bill Steen, Director of Channel and Field Marketing for cybersecurity and cyber resilience provider OpenText Security Solutions
• Danielle Flannery, Senior Manager of Global Partner Marketing at edge cloud network provider Fastly
• Heather K. Margolis, Senior Vice President of Marketing at channel technology provider 360insights
• Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer here at Zift Solutions
• Khali Henderson, Senior Partner of channel marketing firm BuzzTheory
• Lauren Coltrane, Senior Enterprise Partner Marketing Manager at hardware, graphics, computing and AI company NVIDIA
• Lauren Morreale, Channel Account Manager at email security and cyber resilience firm company Mimecast
• Ollie Whitfield, Growth Marketing Professional at sales engagement technology firm VanillaSoft

What Are To-Partner Communications and How Do They Differ from Through-Partner Communications?

Our experts had lots to say about partner communications—so much so that we’re running their advice in two blogs: this blog on to-partner communications and another forthcoming blog on through-partner communications. The line between these two terms is drawn at sales enablement.

When discussing to-partner communications, we’re talking about communications expressly created and sent to sales partners for:

• Recruitment
• Engagement
• Enablement
• Retention

Common to-partner communications include information, such as:

• Partner program benefits
• Compensation and incentives
• Company news and events
• Product information
• Industry updates
• Training
• Partnership management meetings like channel program QBRs

Through-partner communications usually refer to communications designed to be passed through partners. (Don’t overlook distributors. Two-tier distribution models are not going anywhere, according to our 2022 channel partner program predictions.)

Through partner communications, then, include marketing:

• Through sales partners to end-users
• Through distributors to their sales partners
• Through distributors and sales partners to end-users

Benefits of To-Partner Communications

To-partner communications are essential to your channel partner engagement plan and help you achieve several strategic objectives within the larger umbrella of partner communications we touched on earlier. Here are some concrete examples:

• Bridging the gap between partner organizations and yours. You likely have plans and programs in place to engage your partners and grow your partnerships. Those all require to-partner communications, often in multiple layers. Let’s say you’re holding a webinar for your sales partners. You need to communicate to partners as follows:
  • Invite them to register and attend the webinar.
  • Deliver the webinar content.
  • Follow up with emails after the webinar.

• Building trust with partners. Communicating with your partners helps you establish trust. That’s because you’re demonstrating:
  • attention, investment, and commitment to the partnership.
  • knowledge, leadership, and understanding of your partners’ challenges.
• Generating revenue. Communicating to partners and capturing mindshare dramatically increases the likelihood that the partnership will generate revenue, which is what brought you together in the first place.

Nine Best Practices in To-Partner Communications

Digging into our discussions with experts, we found nine noteworthy best practices your team should consider.

1. Make to-partner communications about your partners

Our experts expressed a range of preferences regarding the frequency and format of partner communications (see point 4). However, they agree on the nature of the content; it must focus on providing value to partners rather than promoting you and what you need from them.

“All to-partner communications should demonstrate that you understand your partners’ businesses, what they need and how you can help,” says BuzzTheory’s Henderson. “Even when you’re communicating about your company, your products, or an award won, present the information in ways that benefit your partners, e.g., how this can help them prove your joint value to their client, close the sale and grow their revenue.”

NVIDIA’s Coltrane agrees and advocates for creating a “help first” mentality. “To do this effectively, there needs to be a deep understanding of your partners’ needs,” she says. “This requires not just marketing at them but having a path for true dialogue. Request feedback often and show that you’re listening by putting that feedback into action.” 

2. Tailor to-partner communications for partner types and titles

Tailoring content by business model and individual roles is another way to deliver information that resonates with your partners.  

“There’s no ‘one size fits all’ strategy when it comes to communicating to channel partners,” Margolis says. “[T]hey’re constantly being bombarded with information from vendors. It’s important to ‘cut through the noise’ and communicate to partners based on their preferences and specializations. At the end of the day, relevancy and authenticity are key to successful to-partner communication.”   

Tenuto at Zift Solutions notes that best-in-class partner relationship management (PRM) suites can simplify the process of creating relevancy by role and company type. “The challenge with customizing your communications is scaling them,” she says. “Your PRM should be able to manage your segmentation and unique messaging so your communications team can focus on delivering the right message at the right time to the right party.”

3. Get to the point in to-partner communications

Another tenet our expert panel agreed on is that brevity is a virtue when delivering to-partner communications

“Keep it brief and to the point!” says OpenText Security Solutions’s Bill Steen. “Partners, like all of us, have way too much information being pushed at them. Email, newsletters, blogs all need to be consumable very quickly with an eye to how you are solving a partner problem. 

Flannery from Fastly echoes these sentiments. “Now more than ever, partners are inundated with information,” she says. “To be effective, partner communications need to be clear, concise and focused on what’s meaningful from a partners’ perspective. It’s about providing value for partners. If your communications don’t offer real-world value, they will ultimately be ignored. They also need to be actionable.”

Mimecast’s Morreale also focuses heavily on brevity and relevancy. “Partners are inundated with vendor emails daily,” she says. “Keep to-partner communications frequent but short, sweet and to the point to remain top-of-mind.”

Margolis of 360insights advises: “They need to understand what’s in it for them in the first few seconds or they will tune out.”

4. Be purposeful about frequency and format of to-partner communications

Given the universal state of content overload, our experts expressed concern about to-partner communications fatigue. How to solve it, however, is a matter of debate. 

Margolis of 360insights recommends that vendors “aggregate your content into a newsletter, so you’re not sending too many one-off emails.”

Whitfield from VanillaSoft concedes that channel marketers are “treading a fine line between frequent comms [and] actually adding value.”

“We avoid regular, routine emails so that when our partners hear from us, they know it’s something useful, not a routine weekly newsletter which they may not care for,” Whitfield says.

However you choose to communicate with partners, it pays to be purposeful.

5. Timing is everything with to-partner communications

Whitfield also points out the importance of timing in to-partner communications, especially if you’re expecting action or results by a certain date.

“True partners are worth the extra time and thought, but we often forget to give them enough time to actually execute a campaign or promotion,” Whitfield says. “For example, your Valentine’s sale. Tell them on New Year’s, clearly and effectively. Follow up. Don’t tell them on Feb 1st.”

6. Mix it up when planning to-partner content

Sending the same communications over and over is not only boring but fails to activate all roles – sales, technical and support – within your partner audience.

“Partners want variety,” says Fastly’s Flannery. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, and if you have a large partner ecosystem, they’ll be looking for different things. Whether it’s education, SPIFFs, communications, programs, campaigns, etc. – partners need to see the value in what you’re providing. And it’s important to listen to your partners to understand what their specific needs are and how you can help them be more successful.”

OpenText Security Solutions’s Steen says, “A good mix for to-partner communications should include company updates, new incentives, research/market trends and materials for ‘through’ communication to the end-customer.”

Morreale from Mimecast advocates for regular updates that touch on multiple areas, including “end of week updates, partner action items/deadlines (i.e., compliance), upcoming events/activities, new trainings/certifications, partner SPIFFs, enhancements to partner programs.”

7. Vary delivery channels for to-partner communications

“The medium is the message,” a phrase and philosophy espoused by Marshall McLuhan, resonates in the context of to-partner communications. The idea is that the form of the message –  book, white paper, email, text, webinar, audio, video, social, etc. – changes how it’s perceived. Each signifies something different, perhaps urgency, education, entertainment, etc.

Additionally, the delivery appeals to different targets. Gen-Xers, for example, are notoriously averse to phone calls and emails but seamlessly move across multiple text and chat platforms.

The lesson here is that along with a variety of content, try a variety of delivery options. “Email isn’t the only way to push content to partners,” says BuzzTheory’s Henderson. “Since the pandemic, partners have gotten more adept at social media. Engage them through your social channels with video, blogging, downloads, etc. And, now that partners are in the field again try business texting for reminders about promotions and incentives deadlines or training times.” 

8. Measuring the success of to-partner communications is an art and a science

“Communication metrics are always a bit of an art and a science, but I believe it boils down to engagement,” observes Flannery from Fastly. “If your partners aren’t engaged, then that means they aren’t seeing joint revenue opportunities or value in partnering with you. On the surface, engagement can be measured by things like open rates, click-throughs, portal sign-ups, etc., but I think it’s more important to ask partners what’s working for them and what else they might need.”

Margolis from 360insights puts it this way: “There’s a short answer to [the question of measuring to-partner communications success] and a long answer. [The] short answer is increased opens, clicks and responses. More important [than those metrics] is a bit challenging because it’s loyalty. How do you measure loyalty? Over the long term, it’s revenue increase per partner, but it’s also how they talk about doing business with you. We all know how hard it is to measure anecdotal information.” 

Henderson from BuzzTheory agrees, noting that it’s not unusual in the channel for some of the most loyal partners to engage with their channel contacts inside an organization outside of the digital communications stream.

“Of course, you want to measure opens, clicks, views, downloads, portal logins, and so on,” Henderson says. “But there are partners who, when they see an interesting email, pick up the phone and call their channel manager or remember to follow up with a prospect. Oftentimes, these are loyal, high-producing sales partners that view your team as their team. Overall, you want your numbers moving in the right direction and your program growing. But you also need to recognize that your dashboard doesn’t show a complete picture of how your growth is happening.”

9. When it comes to hard metrics, the usual suspects apply

“[At a] base level, [you have] the usual suspects,” says VanillaSoft’s Whitfield. “Open rates, replies, general engagement metrics. Beyond that, revenue per partner.”

“Typically, we focus on the traditional metrics such as… open rates, click-through rates and asset downloads,” says OpenText Security Solutions’s Steen. “We also do partner satisfaction studies for how partners rate our communications for what they need.”

Surveys are valued by Coltrane at NVIDIA as well and are in her list of success metrics, which include “typical marketing metrics (opens, clicks), survey results; activation of campaigns as a result of to-partners comms.” 

Mimecast’s Morreale mentioned many of those same metrics, including “number of downloads, unique/returning viewers to the website, clicks on hyperlinks, partner/customer registrations.”

Finally, Zift’s Tenuto points out that centralizing activity and reporting can provide a clearer picture than cobbling together data from multiple sources. “Ideally, you’ll want to integrate all data sources into your PRM to provide a holistic dashboard,” she says. “The easier it is to see your data and the less time you spend trying to patch it together with spreadsheets or other measures, the easier it is to spot trends and improve partner engagement.”

• QBRs remain highly relevant in 2022 as essential, multidimensional tools in channel programs.
• QBRs nurture partner relationships and maintain the health of those relationships for both providers and partners.
• Providers and sales partners often view participation in QBRs as an indicator of the other party’s commitment to the partnership.
• For providers managing new sales and distribution partner relationships, QBR participation is one of the leading indicators of future partner performance and ROI.
• Goal setting, KPI review, and performance by both parties are essential components in well-run QBRs.
• QBRs with distributors and agents alike can reveal the influence of external forces (e.g., competitors) on your channel partner base.
• Qualitative and quantitative data are vital to successful channel partner QBRs.
• PRM-driven data and engagement centralization can help companies focus more on partners and outcomes, and less on making apps and technology work.

7 Reasons Your Channel Partner Program Needs QBRs in 2022

Meetings suffer the scorn of many and lay at the heart of known productivity drains – but, in the channel, quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are a noteworthy exception. If anything, today’s decentralized way of doing business and recent pandemic-driven challenges to meeting with partners in person have increased the importance of QBRs for numerous channel programs. That’s because of all that can be packed into QBRs and what they reveal about partner relationships. In our ongoing series of interviews with leaders in the channel, the humble QBR has surfaced countless times in different contexts as an essential tool for channel program success.

With 2022’s marketing and channel plans unfolding, we took a deep dive into QBRs, including interviews with channel leaders on 2022 QBR trends, to help your program benefit from this essential tool.

What is a Quarterly Business Review (QBR)?

Quarterly business reviews (QBRs), as the term suggests, are reviews of business performance, often in the context of a business relationship, held every three months, or quarterly as the name implies. Traditionally, QBRs have been associated with client servicing or, more to the point, checking in with key customers to ensure that business objectives are met.

What is a Channel Partner QBR?

In the channel, QBRs are employed in relationships with sales and distribution partners, collectively known as “channel partners,” to set goals and ensure that partnerships are on track. However, since channel partner relationships are a complex, two-way street involving incentives, revenue generation, and support, the nature of those QBRs is more complex.

For channel-driven or channel-only companies, QBRs with channel partners are arguably more vital to a technology service provider’s success than are QBRs with customers. And given the unmatched ability for channel sales to drive massive revenue growth, they’re more important for businesses with an indirect sales channel.

Why the Best Channel Partner Programs Use QBRs

The best channel partner programs use QBRs to guide, level-set, and develop relationships with partners. Among the biggest ones, QBRs are used in the channel for the following reasons:

QBRs keep channel partner relationships warm

You grow what you nurture. All relationships require ongoing contact to thrive or perhaps even survive; business relationships are no different. In the channel, that goes for relationships with distributors and with customer-facing sales partners alike. QBRs, at the most basic level, help you develop and drive relationships.

QBR attendance is an early indicator of partner commitment

Partnerships with distributors and customer-facing partners take time to reach full stride. Since not all sales partners perform equally, it’s challenging for providers to navigate the potential chicken-and-egg paralysis of knowing which partnerships to invest in before a meaningful history of revenue generation has developed. Positive indicators might include matching an ideal partner profile (IPP) or completing training modules. Conversely, it’s a red flag for partners that don’t show up for – or actively participate in – the first QBR.

Channel partners may view QBRs as an indicator of your commitment to the relationship

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If you view attendance at a QBR as an indicator of your partners’ commitment to the relationship, then it stands to reason that sales partners view it as a sign of yours. That’s particularly the case with partners that take their own operations most seriously.

For this reason, as well as the indicators on your side mentioned above, many channel executives view the first QBR as the most important contact point and an essential component of partner onboarding practices. That first check-in meeting can set the tone for the relationship and expectations of both parties going forward.

Beyond the first QBR, ongoing participation in QBRs can flag waning interest in the partnership, particularly when combined with a reduced quote and deal volume.

QBRs deliver feedback on your programs and team throughout channel partner lifecycles

In all relationships, key contact points are moments of truth. With customers, the first bill is the most important as they evaluate billing accuracy, expected expenditures or savings, and reflect on their experience in getting services up and running. Key customer QBRs are designed, in part, to identify any issues or factors that might cause customer dissatisfaction. And then ongoing QBRs make sure issues are uncovered and resolved.

Similarly, first QBRs with channel partners offer essential moments of truth. They’re evaluating how both they and their customers fared in your company’s hands as well. Once established, ongoing QBRs remain an important gauge of the health of your ongoing partnerships.

QBRs uncover external forces that impact your partnerships

While channel partner QBRs focus on the relationship between the two partners, they also can uncover the impact of external forces, including your competitors. If a competitor is upping the ante – delivering programmatic benefits or offering an irrational SPIFF to woo partners in the near term – you’ll likely uncover it in a QBR. Digging a little deeper and you might find distributor-only overrides that are driving deals to competitors.

Sales partners get essential feedback on performance from QBRs

Partnership is a two-way street. When you’ve invested in a sales partner and set relationship goals, it’s essential to review the expectations against outcomes. This, more than anything, sets channel partner QBRs apart from traditional, customer-focused QBRs. In sales partner relationships, revenue flows in both directions, and so does accountability.

Channel partner QBRs can deliver quantitative as well as qualitative feedback

QBRs, by their very nature, facilitate qualitative feedback—especially early in relationships with sales partners and distributors. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be anchored in quantitative information.

Early in a partnership, important KPIs to either review or guide conversations include items like:

• Logins to the partner portal
• Downloads of sales materials
• Interactions via email or messages with your team
• Participation in training
• Quotes and requests for sales support
• Deals in the pipeline

Common ongoing QBR metrics for review include all the above, plus:

• Deals closed
• Quote velocity
• Total MRR
• Performance with provider-supplied leads
• Leaderboard positions and other incentives aimed at revenue generation

Seven 2022 QBR Tips and Trends in the Channel

We interviewed five channel leaders for insight on where channel program QBRs are headed in 2022. They include:

• Christian Alvarez, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channel Sales for hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) provider Nutanix
• Shawn Berry, Senior Vice President of Global Channel Sales, for Jenne Cloud Services, a leading Cloud Services Brokerage and Value-Added Distributor
• Khali Henderson, Senior Partner of channel consultancy and technology marketing firm BuzzTheory
• Denise Sangster, President & CEO of Global Touch, partner ecosystem strategy consultancy and builder of transformational and predictable partner revenue. 
• Heather Tenuto, our own Chief Revenue Officer here at partnership relationship management (PRM) provider Zift Solutions

Overall, they predicted the following QBR trends for this year:

1. Channel Partner QBRs are more relevant than ever
2. Channel Partner QBRs are the rule, but with exceptions
3. Channel Partner QBRs pay off with all stakeholders present
4. Channel Partner QBRs are investments in partners most likely to succeed
5. Metrics matter in channel partner QBRs
6. PRM enables data-driven channel partner QBRs
7. Channel partner QBRs are essential to the overall partner experience

Channel Partner QBRs are more relevant than ever

The ability of QBRs to facilitate organizational and outcome alignment between providers and partners remains highly relevant across the channel. QBRs allow both entities in the partnership “to keep aligned on the annual targets set and have a 360- degree view of the partnership’s performance,” notes Christian Alvarez from Nutanix.

Global Touch’s Denise Sangster agrees. “Lack of alignment between the IT company and partners is a chronic problem in the IT industry,” she says. “Few IT companies appreciate their priorities are not necessarily aligned with partner priorities and mutual customers’ priorities. A quarterly QBR should be focused first on understanding each other’s priorities and then move into the execution, investments and goals.”

With providers introducing next-generation solutions, QBRs also serve as a progress report to identify and resolve partners’ gaps in technical understanding or go-to-market approach.

“QBRs are an extremely important exercise with a partner that highlights the success but also where there needs to be improvement,” said Jenne’s Shawn Berry. “This is especially important when trying to help a partner evolve into newer, more advanced technology solutions.”

Channel Partner QBRs are the rule, but with exceptions

Despite their well-established value, our experts observe that while the overall trend is an increase in QBRs, some vendors are letting them slide.

“[QBR usage] has to increase because we are all evolving in this industry,” says Jenne’s Berry. “On my end, it’s very important to watch trends and areas we can help partners with specialized dedicated support to help them grow their cloud practices with their individual clients.”

Nutanix’s Alvarez also sees them increasing “to assure [both organizations] that we are focusing in the right areas with our managed and emerging partners.”

Despite the clear benefits of QBRs, Sangster from Global Touch sees them decreasing among providers going through the motions. “I see [QBRs] decreasing because the channel is managed the way it has been managed for the last 15 years,” she says. “Time for a big wake-up call!”

Channel Partner QBRs pay off with all stakeholders present

Doing QBRs right starts with who’s in attendance. “It’s important that all stakeholders invest the time and are able to be involved,” says Jenne’s Berry, noting that including the sales teams as well as executives is key.

Zift’s Heather Tenuto agrees. “Any time you get internal and external sales teams together to exchange information about what they need to be more successful, you can drive revenue increases. When we’re talking channel relationships, that’s often focused on co-selling or sales engineering. But an open exchange of that kind of information makes each sales unit better just through the osmosis of knowledge exchange.”

Khali Henderson from BuzzTheory also sees QBRs as providing opportunities for revenue generation that may not be immediately obvious in the meeting itself. “We’ve entered an era when most buyers research solutions they’re considering online fully independent from the sales reps calling on them,” she says. “Takeaways from QBRs – especially in aggregate – can help to inform both to-channel and through-channel marketing communications activities in ways that can significantly boost conversions.”

Channel Partner QBRs are investments in partners most likely to succeed

In theory, providers should meet with every partner, but that’s not always practical. Providers with large volumes of partners may need to prioritize scheduling and staffing QBRs. Choosing partners to invest time into will depend on where you see your growth trajectory and which partners can get you there.

Global Touch’s Sangster recommends using an old-school rule of thumb for established partners. “QBRs must be a requirement of each partnership or at least the top-tier partners,” she says. “The 80/20 rule can also apply or prioritize QBRs with the 20 percent of partners that deliver the bulk of the revenue.”

That said, Sangster says providers should also nurture relationships with partners most likely to deliver revenue in the future. “You also have to include the up-and-coming transformational partners that might be delivering the bulk of your next-generation revenues,” she adds.

Metrics matter in channel partner QBRs

Zift’s Tenuto emphasizes the importance of metrics in QBRs. “You need reliable metrics for performance reviews on both fronts,” she says. “They can be enormously motivational for everyone involved.”

Along this same vein, Sangster from Global Touch says that the process of developing and refining QBRs can reveal misalignments between providers and partners. When working with clients, she looks at historic QBRs and current plans, including investments, incentives, sales goals, etc. “We generally find a massive disconnect,” she says,

PRM enables data-driven channel partner QBRs

“Application and data sprawl are huge issues for sales and marketing teams,” says Zift’s Tenuto. “Flexible PRMs that – either natively or through integration – provide enablement and analytics are helping firms deliver better, data-driven QBRs.”

BuzzTheory’s Henderson agrees, noting that the ability to centralize partner engagement and analytics also helps channel content teams deliver a better partner experience across the board. “The less your team is thinking about how to work this tool or that tool, and the more they’re focused on messaging, outcomes, testing and refinement, the more successful your programs will be for you and your partners. QBR reviews are a natural part of that experience.”

Channel partner QBRs are essential to the overall partner experience

QBRs with clear agendas drive conversations productively and positively and lead to more transparency, closer working relationships and crystal-clear goals. There’s plenty of room for improvement across the channel on all these fronts.

“The lack of disruptive innovation applied in the QBRs continues to leave IT company executives frustrated with partners and partners wishing IT companies would learn how to really work well with partners, as most IT companies don’t do it well,” says Sangster of Global Touch.

Henderson of BuzzTheory expressed similar sentiments, noting that “there’s always room for improvement. That goes for nearly any complex business process but is especially poignant when managing partner relationships. But just as customer experience is the competitive battlefront at the retail level, partner experience is where companies are pursuing competitive advantage in the channel. QBRs are an essential part of that equation.”

• Some traditional channel challenges – access to talent, smart budgeting, finding the right mix between live-event and digital recruitment, etc. – will continue in 2022.
• Partner incentives will become even more strategic, diverse, and outcome-oriented.
• Despite widespread water-cooler musings in the channel, distributors will remain power players.
• Tiering will continue. Or it won’t. It depends on what your definition of “is” is. (What exactly is tiering?)
• Through-channel marketing is becoming more collaborative and customized.
• Certifications may be optional, but partner training is not.

6 Channel Partner Program Predictions for 2022

2021 was another whirlwind of a year—for the world, of course, not just the channel. Still, amid all the uncertainty the pandemic has invited into our lives and work, resilience emerged in the channel, with programs advancing, competition stiffening at both the distributor and partner levels, and live channel events returning.

 As we head into 2022, what’s in store for the channel? To answer that question, we interviewed six channel leaders about their predictions for the year ahead.

Looking Back on Channel Partner Program Trends in 2021

Before we dig into 2022 predictions from our brain trust, let’s look at some carryover trends from last year that influence our year ahead. Throughout 2021, we checked in with industry leaders to get a beat on everything from onboarding practices to ROI metrics and everything in between. Two pieces, in particular, are pertinent to the year in front of us because of their focus on channel sales and marketing.

Channel Partner Sales Trends

In the blog “How To Recruit Channel Partners: 10 Strategies From Channel Leaders To Recruit Partners That Produce,” we discussed recruiting productive sales partners. Key tips included:

• Develop ideal partner profiles so you can target best-fit partners from the get-go.
• Don’t overlook “soft” partner attributes, such as attention to serving customers and not just selling, a collaborative mindset and a strong work ethic.
• Appeal to prospective partners as business owners by focusing on their needs, not your company or its products.
• “Fish where the fish are” and build your brand, develop your leads and build your community where your partners meet.
• Embrace relationships with distributors to screen for – and reach – high-performing partners.
• Follow up with partner leads quickly.
• Lean into your unique value proposition for partners.
• Build trust and mindshare by focusing on fast quotes and sales engineering, and quick problem resolutions
• Assess, assess, assess. Test, refine and meet with your partners quarterly.
• Focus ongoing investment on best-fit partners instead of spinning your wheels on wrong-fit partners.

Channel Partner Marketing Trends

In “11 Channel Marketing Best Practices to Engage Partners and Earn Mindshare,” our expert-sourced insight and advice included:

• Look at leading and lagging indicators when measuring channel marketing efficacy.
• Track metrics and ensure they point in the right direction toward ROI.
• Leverage your high-value assets across your direct and indirect sales organizations to boost revenue, underwrite “soft” marketing and make the C-Suite happy.
• Create customizable content that partners can leverage for marketing automation.
• Track partner-specific metrics.
• Evaluate to-level and through-channel marketing individually; they’re not the same and shouldn’t be lumped together.
• Always seek improvement in both your to-channel and through-channel marketing.
• Keep partners engaged with advisory councils, training, turnkey campaigns, quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and other initiatives.
• Offer consulting and marketing-as-a-service solutions to high-value partners.
• Seek partner input in your marketing activities. They know what they need better than anyone else.
• Ask partners for their marketing plans in exchange for resource support. It’ll focus their efforts and increase your ROI.

6 Channel Predictions for 2022 from Top Channel Partner Programs

With this sales and marketing data trending from last year serving as our contextual backdrop, let’s dig into what the channel has in store for us this year. Experts we turned to for insight have broad visibility into channel trends—from expert advisers who serve multiple channel firms to individual operators who fully embrace channel initiatives.

Our brain trust includes:

• Theresa Caragol, Founder & CEO of partner performance consultancy AchieveUnite
• Khali Henderson, Senior Partner at channel marketing consultancy and agency BuzzTheory
• Ed Pearce, Director of Channels-North America for Cloud-First WAN and Security company Aryaka 
• Valerie Richards, Director of Partner Marketing for image and video management firm Cloudinary
• Heather Tenuto, our Chief Revenue Officer here at partner relationship management (PRM) software firm Zift Solutions
• Larry Walsh, CEO, founder and chief analyst of Channelnomics, a channel strategy, research, and professional services firm

Here are their predictions:

1. Partner incentives will become more strategic and sustainable.

“Incentives are under intensive scrutiny and pressure,” says Walsh from Channelnomics. “As more offerings are transitioned to a services model, vendors are asking more of what partners are doing to earn their margins and incentives. More vendors are moving to true earned performance incentives, favoring partners with proven performance records.”

Walsh adds that he’s also “seeing more vendors building referral programs, in which they compensate companies and individuals that supply warm opportunities that convert to paid sales with monetary and nonmonetary rewards.”

Taking the long road

AchieveUnite’s Caragol says that increased scrutiny leads to incentives that drive greater success over time. “As vendors put more emphasis on long-term partner success, partner incentives will focus more on rewarding and enabling partner competency and specialization development,” she says.

Incentives for ongoing customer support throughout customer lifecycles and renewals also will become more commonplace. “Incentives are also being spread out along the customer journey – especially in recurring revenue models,” Caragol adds. “Vendors are asking and incentivizing partners to stay connected past the initial sale to ensure the products and solutions are implemented, and there is wide-scale adoption and expansion on the journey to renewal.”

Repeat-deal incentives

Some emerging incentive programs are designed to ratchet up sales partner engagement as relationships mature, says Richards from Cloudinary. Those include “commission rate … accelerators for bringing in multiple deals (in a 12-month period),” she says. “The more deals you bring in, the more compensation you get on each subsequent deal.”

A broader mix of incentives

These trends mark a shift toward a wider array of incentives rather than a wholesale change. To be sure, the upfront SPIFF is alive and well. “In today’s marketplace, we are seeing the traditional upfront bonuses (SPIFFs) based upon product, revenue and term,” says Aryaka’s Pearce. “Some additional trends regarding these SPIFFs also include offers for first-time [sellers] and/or win-back incentives for inactive sellers. [Additionally], obtaining an overall revenue goal within a specific timeframe is rewarded in some cases.”

Outcomes matter

Zift’s Tenuto says the more nuanced approach at compensation makes sense given the maturity of the channel. “There’s been plenty of talk that some of the intense, upfront SPIFFs that emerge – often with new entrants or product launches – are the channel’s version of ‘irrational exuberance,’” she says. “It makes sense for some of those incentives to migrate toward business outcomes and not just fast sales.”

Two outcomes, one incentive

BuzzTheory’s Henderson agrees with Tenuto, noting that incentives that encourage long-term retention encourage ongoing engagement along the way. “If you’re incentivizing longer-term outcomes at the customer level, you’re also creating more ongoing collaboration with your partners, which is good for maintaining mindshare, building a stronger working relationship with partners and driving more sales.”

2. Distributors aren’t going anywhere soon.

“The ‘death’ of distribution is grossly exaggerated,” says Channelnomics’ Walsh. “The channel is not uniform globally, and distribution does and will continue to play a significant role in supporting vendors and partners for many years to come. Even in mature markets, distributors are contributing to vendors’ go-to-market operations by taking on roles such as partner management, marketing, technical support and services administration.

“While vendors are increasingly skeptical of distribution value, they haven’t found an answer to how to replace distributors without incurring operational replacement costs. In many cases, vendors don’t have a firm understanding of the deferred costs absorbed by distributors. For these reasons, the great distribution debate is largely moot.

“As for the partners formerly known as master agents, they’re on the ascent. Whether we call them technology services brokerages [TSBs], technology services distributors, or professional sales facilitators (that debate isn’t settled), they are proving increasingly important for their ability to transact services with regularity. These partners will continue to rise not as an alternative to distributors but traditional resellers.”

Central to success

To Walsh’s point, Aryaka’s Pearce says his company is leaning heavily into distributor relationships. “Distributors and TSBs will always be an important ingredient in the recipe for success. In fact, at Aryaka, we have moved to a 100 percent channel-led model. Our relationships with our distributors and TSBs are the cornerstone of our company’s future, and everything we build is based around our channel relationships.”

Partners need them, too

BuzzTheory’s Henderson points out that distributors offer value on both sides of the vendor-partner relationship. “They don’t just simplify life for vendors,” she says. “They simplify life for partners, too, and their partners trust them with mission-critical functions like negotiating airtight vendor contracts and auditing commission payments. Pre-sales engineering and post-sales support increasingly offered by distributors are becoming critical to winning complex deals and ensuring successful implementations and adoption, which are vital for subscription-based services.”

Here to stay

AchieveUnite’s Caragol also sees distributors as well-seated in their roles. “How much the channel relies on distributors will not change significantly. What they rely on them for will continue to become more strategic, enabling long-term partner success and aggregating multivendor products to offer a business solution.”

3. Relationship status with tiering: “It’s complicated.”

“At face-value, tiering is very arbitrary,” says Cloudinary’s Richards. “A ‘Gold’ partner for one company could – and probably has – a different meaning for another. Plus, let’s be real, a customer doesn’t purchase from a partner because they are Gold or Platinum or doesn’t buy because they are Bronze, even if they know what the levels [or] tiers mean. The customer buys from a partner who is best suited to meet their needs [and] solve their specific problem(s). In order to win the deal, a partner must earn the customer’s trust by providing a customer-focused solution at a price point the customer sees the value in.

“On the other hand, tiering does make a difference in the vendor-partner relationship. Vendors do need to be able to identify, segment and prioritize their partners in order to best work with them. This [segmentation] could be based on customers served, markets served, commitment to the relationship (revenue commitment, training commitment, marketing activity commitment), etc., and this is what drives the partner tiering [relative to] the level of support a vendor would provide. Whether this is done in a true Gold/Silver/Bronze way or a points-based way, you are always going to have to ‘tier’ your partners so vendors can most effectively work with their partner base.”

Fading out?

Aryaka’s Pearce sees tiering fading away, at least in a traditional sense. “The industry seems to be moving away from tiering,” he observes. “Most channel partners have settled into their chosen model of standalone, or they operate with the assistance of one or more of the TSBs. Now that that has been established for most, the preferred go-forward structure for most partners is to sell within programs that manage and reward through the ‘carrot’ approach, rather than with a ‘stick’ that traditionally included penalties within a tiered partner model.”

Competency-based?

Caragol from AchieveUnite also sees traditional tiering moving to the rearview mirror. “Partner programs are evolving to focus on developing partners to deliver the best customer experience possible,” she says. “This will result in partner programs moving away from the traditional tier-based structure to one that focuses on competencies, with requirements around training and capabilities.”

Instead of a Gold/Silver/Bronze architecture, she says, we’ll see partners who are accredited to sell your solution or who have cloud migration expertise, for example.

“[What’s] forcing this change is the shift in power to the end client, away from the vendor,” Caragol says. “Increasingly, it is the partner who is owning customer success and delivering professional services around the vendor’s solution.

“Vendors are offering more and more training, enablement, business growth training, accreditations and certifications to ensure the best results with the end-user client. At the same time, partners are changing their mix to offer more and more partner-led services and increase their value position with the client. All these driving forces are pushing back on traditional programs to simplify and focus on the exact needs of the partner and vendor, which is pivoting around complete partner competency.”

Tomato, tomäto

Ultimately, the matter may come down to semantics and how you define tiering. For this reason, Channelnomic’s Walsh sees the channel’s tiering debate as an unproductive “red herring” and dislikes the question because “it assumes the channel is uniform.”

“Not that many vendors have moved away from tiered programs,” he explains. “Many others (the majority, in fact) maintain their traditional multi tiered structure.

“The truth is many vendors say they’re eliminating tiers as a means of simplification. The reality is the complexity in their program has nothing to do with their tiering structure but rather how they write policies and administer program requirements, resources and incentives.

“For some vendors, flat hierarchies work well. For others, it doesn’t. How programs are structured is a matter of context for what works best for their go-to-market strategy. Even many tier-less programs are only that in name; the constituent workings of the program are essentially tiers. What matters is how a vendor structures a program to motivate partners to higher levels of performance and contribution.”

4. Through-channel marketing will become more collaborative.

“Turnkey, cobranded and sharable marketing and sales enablement programs are becoming central to channel and field marketing teams alike,” says BuzzTheory’s Henderson. “The trend toward deeper enablement was already underway, but the pandemic supercharged it, creating the need for assets partners can use in place of calling on prospects and customers in-person. And with decentralized workplaces becoming a permanent norm, that need will only grow moving forward. Already, we see significant demand for these programs in 2022.”

It’s called a “partnership” for a reason

“The term ‘channel partner’ means just that,” says Aryaka’s Pearce. “Partners aren’t looking for just MDF funds. They are looking for suppliers who will truly ‘partner’ with them to assist with identifying, gaining access to, and providing appropriate solutions for right-fit prospects … ultimately turning them into new customers. This is accomplished by providing unique market and customer intelligence, along with additional marketing assets that channel partners desperately need that include campaigns, ABX [account-based sales and marketing] leads, etc.”

Program stage makes a difference

“I think it depends on the vendor’s partner program maturity level [combined with] the partner’s sales and marketing maturity level,” says Cloudinary’s Richards, explaining:

• For newer vendors and partners, there will be a greater emphasis on co-marketing wherein the vendor is working side-by-side with the partner, splitting budget, resources, and work 50-50.
• For more established programs and partners, marketing assistance (e.g., turnkey sales and marketing materials in the portal, concierge programs) will be very well received.
• For fully mature programs and partners, MDF is imperative.

5. Partner training will remain vital. Certifications are less clear.

“Training will always be important, but certification is a wildcard,” says Richards from Cloudinary.

“For training, vendor’s partners are out there selling on behalf of the vendor …, so they must have the same training available that the vendor’s direct teams get if not more because the partner is also carrying seven-plus other solutions or [is] maybe a small mom-and-pop shop [that needs] additional baseline training on sales and marketing tactics. The key is to make training as easy as possible – accessibility-wise and lengthwise.

“Certification…really depends on the offering. Don’t have certifications because you think you need to have certifications. Think about the role your partner plays for the customers and/or your business, as well as the partner’s business model, and really think about what makes sense.”

Undefined value

“Is there value in training and certifications today? That’s a real open question,” says Channelnomics’ Walsh. “Partners consistently say that certifications have little value in their ability to sell to end customers. Vendors can’t define how training adds value to their partners.

“Does that mean training isn’t important? No, but vendors need to redefine the intent, meaning, and value of training and certifications beyond the requirements of their channel programs. Many vendors say training and certification are necessary to ensure a superior customer experience and outcome. However, virtually no vendor has a means or attempts to measure customer experience with their partners.

“Regardless, vendors will continue to use training participation and certifications as a means of measuring qualifications and segmenting partners in their networks.”

Necessary to “keep up”

“Training and certifications will always be important for channel partners to keep up with technology in an ever-changing industry,” says Aryaka’s Pearce. “This need varies by partner [or] seller and can range from understanding how to identify a customer’s needs, knowing how to introduce a solution, all the way to understanding the technical aspects of the product or service being delivered. Finding the right supplier who can train, certify and support partners at any level is of utmost importance.”

Structured development

“The strongest argument for training is that it makes partners carve time out to stay on top of the solutions they offer,” says Zift’s Tenuto. “For many vendors – partners, too, for that matter – whether or not certifications are directly trackable to sales is secondary to ensuring that partners stay ahead of the curve. Ultimately, that process benefits vendors and partners alike.”

6. There will be “not so” new challenges going forward.

When we asked for the channel’s biggest obstacles and blockers in 2022, our brain trust detailed a familiar list of challenges, proving the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Using budgets wisely

“The biggest obstacle channel programs face today is the proper and strategic use of marketing budgets,” says Pearce from Aryaka. “There are endless requests and opportunities for marketing spends and sponsorships; however, there isn’t an endless supply of marketing/sponsorship dollars. With this in mind, both suppliers and channel partners need to collaborate [to determine] where they both will get the best return on these dollars spent. It’s also as important to be able to track and document the ROI for each dollar spent in order to maintain and/or grow this budget in 2023.”

Demonstrating value and ROI

“Demonstrating value and return on channel investment,” says Channelnomics’ Walsh. “As much as the industry talks about data analytics and data-based decision-making, many channel programs are challenged in attributing partner contributions to corporate performance. Even as vendors profess the need and necessity of partners in their go-to-market strategies, the lack of data or the ability to agree on data and its meaning means channel programs are vulnerable to reprioritization in budget and resources.”

Containing application sprawl in partner engagement and reporting

“The lack of centralized data continues to make life harder on channel marketers than it needs to,” says Zift’s Tenuto. “As marketing programs become increasingly complex, centralizing all that activity in a reliable PRM for unified data analytics and dashboards will become essential to confidently funding and managing the surgical, individual-partner-level initiatives that many channel executives would like to pursue.”

Finding the right mix of live-event and digital marketing

“The return of live events and ongoing digital marketing initiatives do not present an either-or proposition,” says BuzzTheory’s Henderson. “You have to walk and chew gum at the same time. Striking that balance was always a challenge; the biggest difference now is which is most important. Before the pandemic, companies generally weighed live events over digital and enablement initiatives. Now, with the pandemic interrupting live channel events and the ability of partners to perform sales calls in person, digital campaigns and enablement are indispensable.”

That pesky (lack of) talent problem

“Attracting, hiring, developing and maintaining staff will be one of the biggest challenges for vendor channel programs,” says AchieveUnite’s Caragol. “Related to this will be the challenge of working with partners who are facing the same challenges. Vendors can help themselves and their partners by investing in ways the individuals in their respective teams are personally engaged and developed.”

Caragol points to “The American Upskilling Study” by Gallup and Amazon, which found that employer-provided upskilling helped solve recruitment challenges, increase productivity, and improve employee satisfaction.

“This [survey result] underscores the need for vendors to help partners and themselves upskill their employees with the training and enablement they can offer and is another proof point for programs to pivot and focus on capabilities to ensure success,” Caragol says.

Matching the right value propositions to the right partners (and their customers)

“[Challenges include capturing] mindshare from partners, engagement with partners, ensuring the right value prop to partners, ensuring the right value prop with partners,” says Richards from Cloudinary.

In other words, stubborn challenges tend to remain stubborn challenges, even as circumstances change.

• Simplified, effective budgeting can be achieved when the right tools power your channel program.
• Key budgeting metrics include all things ROI and pipeline, as well as partner engagement metrics, top-line growth, and behaviors that align with overall goals.
• Categorizing channel budget spend varies significantly from company to company depending on size and goals, but channel leaders can define those categories with detailed specificity.
• As live events re-enter budgeting in earnest in 2022 (assuming the pandemic subsides as forecasted), companies that have developed strong digital marketing and publicity chops will continue maintaining those activities.
• Building room for unforeseen opportunities into channel budgets can help you compete dynamically throughout the year.
• Channel experts use quarterly reviews as checks on budgeting and to fine-tune spending allocation through the remainder of the year.

The fourth quarter is often a mixed bag. On one hand, you have holidays, family, and all the other things that make life – and your hard work all year – worthwhile. On the other hand, you have a mad scramble to hit numbers for the current year and the most tedious of year-end tasks: budgeting for the next.

Fortunately, channel budgeting doesn’t have to be painful. In the words of Marié Steyl from IPFusion, it can be as easy as a “6 step process… Who, What, Where, When, Why & How.” By defining the stakeholders in your budget, doubling down on what’s working, and taking pointers from leading channel experts, you can develop a channel budget that:

• Leverages channel marketing best practices for partner recruitment and your channel partner marketing programs.
• Solidifies your repeatable partner enablement framework.
• Empowers you to explore new opportunities.

Our Channel Budgeting and Marketing Brain Trust

To help you with your budgeting for 2022, we interviewed eleven channel marketing pros to provide some tips to help you along the way, including advisers to many channel companies and proven leaders inside companies with successful channel operations today.

Adviser Experts – These gurus advise many channel players on channel marketing and strategy:

• Channel marketing firm BuzzTheory’s Senior Partner Khali Henderson
• Our own Chief Revenue Officer at Zift Solutions, Heather Tenuto

Operator Experts – Channel marketing and budgeting experts with leadership roles in companies with thriving channel programs: 

• Brent Earlewine, Senior Vice President of Indirect Channels at IntelePeer
• John Macario, Senior Vice President Enterprise and Channel Marketing at Ribbon Communications
• Paul Mora, Global Head of Channel and Enterprise Marketing at Motorola Solutions
• Karen Newnam, Senior Director Americas Channel Marketing at Nutanix
• David Portnowitz, Chief Marketing Officer at Sangoma
• Jennifer Schulze, Vice President of Channel and Field Marketing at OpenText 
• Kimberly Cesena, Senior Director of Global Channel and Field Marketing at Dropbox
• Marié Steyl, Director of Strategy and Marketing at IPFusion
• Julie Garcia, Director of Partner Marketing, Americas at Zscaler 

First Things First: Tools Matter

As with most things in business, you’ll want to keep doing – or even double-down on – what’s already working. That means you must first find out what fits into this category. To know that, you need the right tools. Those include:

• A solid partner relationship management (PRM) platform
• A robust partner enablement framework
• A regular partner communications plan
• Dashboards to measure all of it

The right tool can centralize all this activity, simplifying your job and making it easy to focus on partner and program development. “Your PRM should do the heavy lifting in recruitment, enablement, communications and reporting,” says Zift’s Tenuto. “The less time you spend buried in spreadsheets and disparate sources of information, the more time you can spend building your channel program and nurturing partners to drive revenue.”

The Most Crucial Channel Budgeting Metrics

The beauty of a metric is in the eye of the beholder – just ask any channel executive that’s gone a round or two with the C-suite. Still, there’s value in knowing which metrics experts rely on the most for their budgeting. So, we asked our brain trust which metrics are the most crucial. Here’s what they said:

Anything with a proven return on investment (ROI) is a slam dunk

“Anchor next year’s budgets in this year’s successes,” says BuzzTheory’s Henderson. “Anything with obvious or proven ROI should be at the very top of your budgeting list. It’ll make your forecasting easier and more accurate and will make the entire C-suite more comfortable with your plans for the new year – even if those plans include some softer marketing goals like improved brand awareness in the channel.”

Ribbon’s Macario agrees. “ROI is the primary metric – what revenue are marketing programs generating?” he says. “Aside from that, we measure standard marketing metrics at a campaign and regional level to allocate budget globally.”

Earlewine from IntelePeer also stresses ROI, along with top-line objectives such as with what products, geographies, or partners you expect to find growth. “ROI on past spend [and] company growth goals,” he says.

Partner engagement and revenue metrics

Sangoma’s Portnowitz further stresses measuring ROI, but he focuses heavily on partner engagement and overall revenues. He says the “top three metrics that are most crucial [are]:

1. Partner engagement. We track partner activity and look at how engaged our partners are. How active are they in the channel? Are they selling our product?
2. ROI on investment from MDF and co-op dollars. What is our investment going in, and how do we measure that from the back end?
3. Revenue goals. That may sound generic, but I think if we’re meeting revenue goals, then everything else falls into place.”

All things pipeline

“Marketing sourced pipeline is the most important,” says Nutanix’s Newnam. “We want to be able to show the direct impact of our efforts. We track from prospect to MQL [marketing qualified leads] to deal reg to close. The greatest success measure for us is marketing sourced, channel-initiated pipeline.”

OpenText’s Schulze says: “Most crucial: sales based on expected bookings, MQLs and closed pipeline. Not just on a product-by-product basis, but really on the type of behavior that most aligns with our company goals. If there are regions we’re trying to reach, we’ll put growth marketing funding behind them.”

Mora from Motorola Services also leads with pipeline metrics. “Incremental pipeline, influenced pipeline, and channel amplification and enablement metrics” are tops, he says.

7 Channel Budget Planning Tips for 2022

1. Start with the Budget from the Year Before

“We always start with what we spent last year,” says Sangoma’s Portnowitz. “We look at it, break down the categories of spending, and think about events that worked or didn’t work. Then, we’re looking at what we need from a content standpoint. Do we need an agency? Do we not need an agency? What type of support do we need from a third party? Our steps aren’t secret. It’s pretty much just digging into the data and making decisions from there.”

IntelePeer’s Earlewine also starts with an analysis of the previous year’s performance. “[We lead with an] ROI review on previous year’s budget … plus evaluation of tools, third-party vendor solutions (like portal vendor) and channel-specific event sponsorships and demand-generation activities,” he says. “[We also perform] leadership review against proposed budget against strategic plans for channel coverage and expansion, strategic partners, partner performance, growing partners/declining partners, etc.”

Knowing where your program has been makes it easier to predict future spend. Julie Garcia, Zscaler, says that, “[w]e align our budget with the expected growth we are targeting. We look at all contributing functions to align investments with % of growth responsibility paired with impact potential.”

2. Double Down on Past Successes

ROI – unsurprisingly – is the most essential budgeting metric (see the metrics list above). Doubling down on ROI-generating activities should be a big part of your budgeting process – not just to maintain success but to guide future investments as well.

“For repeat requests (conferences, campaigns, etc. that we have done in the past), we make decisions based on the previous year’s ROI,” says Ribbon’s Macario. “For new initiatives, we use historical marketing metrics to estimate the number of leads and opportunities that would be created. Then, we work with the local sales leaders to tie those metrics to expected revenue.”

3. Target Spend Strategically with Segmentation

“The challenge with planning a channel marketing budget is that sometimes we’re a small fish in a big pond,” says OpenText’s Schulze. “We have to focus on being targeted and relevant, which is the guidance that I’m continuously giving my team. Outside of this, I’m also telling my team to be masters of their own channel. Their job is not to have sales tell them what to do. Their job is to listen and develop a thoughtful and targeted marketing plan.”

Schulze adds, “Ultimately, we have to balance what we want to achieve with our partners and then what we want to achieve as a whole organization through strategic marketing.”

Schulze says the individual steps include:

1. Looking at past bookings and market growth
2. Ensuring alignment with sales
3. Choosing one-to-many activities
4. Assigning MDF for partners in the one-to-few model

In terms of segmentation, Schulze starts at the Segment level and works inward on a partner-specific basis. “We look at segments by gathering external data [from] distribution, VAR, MSP direct, global service integrators, etc. From there, we see who are partners we want to be working with and who we’ve worked with well in the past. We go to past bookings, then assign MDF from there. MDF funds are aligned on a partner-by-partner basis. This is for every single segment of ours.

 “In some cases, those activities help educate sellers,” Schulze says. “In other cases, we want to market to end-users who will influence partners. Our partners are our customers since we’re 100 percent channel.”

Nutanix’s Newnam also stresses the importance of segmentation based on historical contribution and big bets. “Planning involves many considerations,” she says. “First, we allocate the budget to channel segments (managed/emerging, broad channel/target and nationals) based on QoQ [quarter over quarter] contribution to our overall revenue number. We then factor in our overall MQL, SAL [sales accepted lead] and pipeline goals for each quarter.” 

Once Newnam has budgeted by segment, “the segment leaders do the same factoring in individual f partner business plans/goals. At this point, we round out the picture with pipeline gains from channel scale programs, multipartner initiative investments and participation in Nutanix-funded one-to-many initiatives.”

Sangoma’s Portnowitz says his company backs into categorization through a revenue plan. “We start with a revenue plan,” he says. “We have to work backward from there. We want to look at what the company is hoping to achieve revenue-wise and what portion of that needs to come from which channel.  Does it come from distributors, master agents, wholesale?

“We’re looking at how we enable our partners to sell and hit their goals, as well as how we enable salespeople to make sure that they have the right content to go out with their partners and co-sell.”

IntelePeer’s Earlewine categorizes both horizontally and vertically. His list includes:

• company level
• program level
• strategic partner level (top 20 percent of partners by revenue)
• partner industry events
• partner-specific events
• demand generation

4. Consult with Sales Stakeholders

Macario from Ribbon Communications gathers input from sales stakeholders when planning budgets. “We work closely with our sales teams around the world to understand their needs and priorities for the coming year,” he says. “Some general themes emerge and also some specific regional needs. The enterprise and channel marketing team pulls together a plan and budget which strives to balance the needs of established markets with those of emerging ones.”

He also involves leadership throughout the process and emphasizes sales and marketing alignment. “Leadership is involved from the beginning,” Marcario says. “We start with our head of sales for Americas, EMEA and APAC to understand where they would like to see revenue growth — countries, vertical markets, behavior-based segments, etc. Our job is to build a plan to help them meet their goals.  In our organization, sales and marketing are joined at the hip from the very start.”

Mora from Motorola Solutions also focuses on sales and marketing alignment. “[We are] looking for full alignment of marketing plans with sales priorities and goals for the new year,” he says.

Cesena at Dropbox backs this up, saying that she “work[s] with channel sales teams on channel strategies for the year and then brainstorm new activities with costs as well as decide what current activities we keep in the coming year. Channel Marketing and Sales work very closely together for tight alignment on the activities.”

5. Build in Room for Unexpected Opportunities

“Opportunities don’t line up neatly by the fourth quarter, so you can plan for everything you need the following year,” says Zift’s Tenuto. “New opportunities come along throughout the year. Build some wiggle room into your budget in advance so you can capitalize on those opportunities without having to bend budgets or seek new spending approval.”

How much padding do you need? “If you don’t have a track record of how much extra budget you’ll need, use the 80/20 rule. But strategically speaking, you don’t want to box yourself into only the opportunities you can see right now. You want to be nimble and responsive when the time is right.”

6. Plan for the Return of Events in 2022

Live events already are starting to creep back into mainstream channel activities. Some companies are penciling them into their budgets. “Companies that successfully navigated channel recruitment and enablement without live events will continue to use their expanded digital marketing and publicity powers as the live event circuit comes back to life,” says BuzzTheory’s Henderson. “It’s not a matter of either/or, or of returning to pre-pandemic norms. It’s a matter of ‘also.’ The channel winners of tomorrow will be running on all cylinders – digital, publicity and live events.”

For some companies, the return to events means evaluating the scope of that participation, particularly when collaborating with partners to target regions or industry verticals. Portnowitz says Sangoma is one of them.

“Historically, we used to spend a lot of money on events by looking at how we want to attract new channel partners, where we want to be to meet partners, and how we want to find them,” he says. “Obviously, we aren’t doing as many events this year, and that’s not unique to us. As we look into 2022, we’re cautiously optimistic that there will be more events. One thing we’re hoping to focus on in the next 12 months is hosting more of our own events and doing co-branded events with our partners to attract customers. That’s probably where we’ll invest more dollars, so having fewer dollars going to traditional, larger-scale events. We’re focused on the customer side.”

7. Review Your Budgets Quarterly

“We do a full budget review during [the] end of Q3/beginning of Q4,” says Earlewine. “This includes a look at overall channel budget, as well as deep-dive reviews on items such as MDF ROI and maps against our strategic channel plans for the upcoming year.”

Newnam from Nutanix also performs quarterly reviews. “We look at historical data that shows effectiveness QoQ and also consider partner propensity for success across activities,” she says.

Estimating return-on-investment (ROI) is both vital and challenging for businesses, their units and their activities.

• While simple in concept, ROI in practice consists of both hard costs and soft costs that are allocated differently by different providers.

• The channel and channel activities are no exception to the challenges of ROI measurement (and in some ways are more complex).

• Virtually every company department – including those not dedicated to the channel – impacts channel ROI.

• While the metrics used in channel ROI dashboards vary (and evolve) from provider to provider, it’s vital for partner relationship management (PRM) platforms and dashboard tools to empower accurate tracking across multiple distribution layers.

Author Stephen King says that Henry G. Bohn got it wrong. The road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions, King asserts, but adverbs. But any channel chief can tell you they’re both wrong – it’s paved with discussions about channel ROI.

The pursuit of ROI, for all its challenges, is a noble cause. If you don’t believe us, ask your CFO. It’s also a necessary pursuit that can benefit greatly from ROI dashboards. We talked with eight channel experts to help you build yours.

What is Channel ROI?

The concept of ROI is simple enough. If you invest in something, you hope to get more back than you put in. The calculation – at least in concept – is just as simple. Here’s how Investopedia advises its site visitors to determine ROI:

To calculate ROI, the benefit (or return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment. The result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio.

   Current Value of Investment – Cost of Investment 

ROI = ——————————————————————————————–

Cost of Investment   

But as any CMO, CFO or CEO can tell you, ROI is anything but simple. And you don’t have to plummet down the rabbit hole pursuing concepts like net present value (NPV), discount rate or internal rate of return (IRR) for things to become complicated – especially when discussing nearly any business activity. That’s because of issues like time horizon, revenue and expense allocation, fixed costs vs. variable costs and – as oft as not – C-suite philosophy.

The channel is no exception. Only instead of struggles with concepts like how much to invest in customer retention programs (and, later, how much of a difference they made when facing a new competitive dynamic), channel leaders face questions like: 

• What’s the ROI on tradeshow participation?
• How much does channel revenue contribute to our cost basis?
• How do we cost justify sales teaming between our inside reps and channel partners?
• How long will our new channel program take to achieve ROI?
• How do we achieve ROI competing with firms offering aggressive SPIFFs and compensation?
• So many more – virtually all business challenges are mirrored in channel programs.

 The elephant in the room for all of these issues is that businesses – and their channel programs – are dynamic. And so are the markets and competitive landscapes in which they operate. This means that detailed ROI models and assumptions need to be developed and agreed to with the unique characteristics of each organization.

 At the same time, it’s essential to avoid becoming hamstrung in paralysis by analysis when developing or expanding channel programs that may not have sufficient scale for hard ROI (aside from projections). This is where ROI indicators (in the form of metrics) come in. The right KPIs and other indicators can help channel programs gain their bearings and pursue improvement regardless of issues like program stage, allocation and other factors.

To help you gain your own bearings, we discussed the challenges of Channel ROI with eight channel experts and developed a list of six Channel Dashboard ROI tips you can put to work on your behalf.

How Departments Aside from Sales and Marketing Contribute to Channel ROI

Channel chiefs sometimes face challenges when communicating that every department in the company impacts channel ROI – engineering, provisioning, customer service… All of it. With this in mind, we asked our experts about how other departments (aside from the apparent relevancy of marketing and sales) impact channel ROI. Here are some key takeaways:

• Accounting: “Accounting is a critical piece of the puzzle,” says Greg Plum, Principal, Americas-East for Partner Ready. “Since the accounting team is often tasked with tracking and paying commissions earned by channel partners, their accuracy and availability to address partner inquiries greatly impacts channel success.”
• Systems Engineering: “The systems engineering group may have the most influence of all the departments,” says Dede Haas, Channel Sales Strategist & Coach at DLH Services. “They are definitely the most trusted by the partners and their customers because they are not considered ‘sales.’ They are – besides the channel account manager (CAM) – the go-to people when partners and their customers have technical issues. They are not confronting the partners on marketing and sales issues, but by the very nature of what they do – repairs, troubleshooting, updating/upgrading, explaining the reasons why the product is so important for the partners and their customers – they are listening and fixing a problem. Any recommendations they give will be taken seriously and that can lead to more product or enhancement revenue.”
• Enablement, Training and Support: “Enablement/training plays an important role with channel program ROI,” says Matthew Peeples, Channel Leader. “An enabled/trained partner that can explain the value of technology from a vendor’s products produces much faster than a partner that cannot. [Additionally], partners that have access to a dedicated partner support team provide a faster ROI than partners that have to figure it out on their own or have to work with the customer to call through the normal customer support team.” All of these factors underscore the importance of having your channel enablement best practices down pat.
• Product Teams: “Product and product development play a key role via offers and offer definitions,” says Brent Earlewine, Senior Vice President of Indirect Channels, IntelePeer. “At its core, the channel program is based upon what we bring to market via the channel community.” 
• All of Them: Jon Howes, Sales Director for Juniper Networks, points out that every department can contribute positively to channel ROI. “For organizations where indirect business is the norm, it’s a cliché, but true to say that every department should contribute to the channel program’s ROI model,” he says. “Legal, finance, product support and customer service each play an important role!”

Channel ROI Considerations

The indirect layer(s) in the channel deliver substantial revenue opportunities. But those layers – which could include technology services brokers and distributors as well as direct partners – also create multiple points for ROI assessment. Is your relationship with distributors generating sufficient ROI? What about partners? How about partner enablement and your through-partner efforts? How does your channel partner engagement plan help to drive ROI?

We picked up some helpful tidbits from our experts to help you maintain perspective across all of your ROI-related activities with these realities in mind. Here’s a summary: 

• Intuition matters: Often – especially early in channel programs when insufficient scope and scale exist for reliable ROI – decisions are made with an intuitive understanding that ROI is “built in” to certain activities. “The classic example of an activity that delivers intuitive ROI is tradeshow participation,” says BuzzTheory’s Khali Henderson. “It really speaks to the power of a strong channel partner. Providers will confidently participate in tradeshows knowing that recruiting one productive partner will deliver ROI, even if they can’t put an exact number on it. That never really goes away, but when programs mature, the same principle applies to partner retention. Providers will work the shows both to gain new partners and protect their existing partners from poachers.”
• Platforms should enable distributor ROI tracking: “Distributors like technology services brokers can significantly impact ROI,” says Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer for Zift Solutions. “However, these relationships are complex. You don’t just sign up with a technology services broker and watch the revenue come in. They have communications plans and sponsorship opportunities, technology services broker-only SPIFFs, partner summits with booths and sponsorships, and other incentives that encourage them to promote your products to their subagents. This complexity means you need tools that can track it all and assess ROI at the distributor level without dealing with issues like double counting technology services broker-sub contributions or, worse, having no real visibility at all. Your PRM tools should empower you to accurately track partner recruitment and engagement across all of your activities with distributors so you can determine their effectiveness.” 
• The pandemic clouds some measurements: Even established programs must weather potentially confusing external forces. Mary Moore Cavanagh, Channel Manager for PGi, observes that the pandemic has turned some metrics – such as average time to achieve partner ROI – upside down. “In ‘normal’ times, I would say we would see ROI in about six months,” she says. “However, Covid has changed this, and our channel partners are not as familiar with webcasting and have moved more heavily into the collaboration platforms like Zoom/Teams/and webinar products like GoToMeeting and WebEx. We are seeing the biggest ROI right now from resellers of our product. The irony of this is channel partners would see a larger payout on a webcasting option, but many deal with SMBs and they have no need for a webcasting platform.”

Channel ROI Dashboard Tips from the Pros

We asked our experts for tips on building channel ROI dashboards to help you develop and refine your own dashboard. They provided sage advice covering everything from ROI philosophy to metrics that help to drive partner engagement best practices to dashboard KPIs themselves. Here’s a breakdown of their tips:

Tip 1: ROI is in the Eye of the Beholder

As we indicated earlier, determining ROI on individual activities is both an art and a science. DLH’s Haas points out that determining ROI varies from company to company. “ROI is viewed differently by different vendors based on what they think is important,” Haas says. “Unless they are strictly transactional, there is so much more they can add to what they think is an appropriate investment.”

“How do they measure ROI? Is it by revenue alone, or is market share included? ROI is usually measured on hard numbers like revenue, but what about soft numbers or no numbers at all? Some vendors may measure their investment in the channel based on how many of their partners have gotten certified. They can assign a number to that and add it to the calculation. In my opinion, it is whatever the vendor wants to measure to determine what they consider is an ROI.”

Tip 2: ROI May Be Relative

BuzzTheory’s Henderson agrees with Haas and points out that some companies determine ROI by comparing the costs of customer acquisition from one activity to the costs of another. “You might compare the results of sponsoring a distributor’s annual partner meeting against the costs of acquiring those partners outside of the event,” she says.

Even this kind of measurement could vary from one vendor to the next. “Vendor A might look at straight partner acquisition costs, and Vendor B might also factor in the time-to-revenue benefits of gaining multiple productive partners at once,” says Henderson.

 “Either way, the comparative approach provides a meaningful frame of reference that keeps companies from becoming too bogged down in tricky issues like soft-cost allocation. They know they must recruit partners regardless of those factors. The ability to measure the performance of a targeted boost in spend against their day-to-day recruitment activities provides enough data for them to know when they’re moving in the right direction.”

Tip 3: Sometimes ROI Indicators Are Simple Benchmarks

Speaking of moving in the right direction, Tenuto of Zift Solutions adds that, for many companies, ROI indicators are a matter of taking a snapshot of performance today and comparing that performance over time. “So, you don’t have all your ROI factors worked out,” she says. “Improving in vital KPIs signals improving ROI.

“This is another reason you need a PRM with strong reporting and API capabilities,” she said. “And it’s not just about partner acquisition. It’s about partner engagement and retention and how to improve both metrics.”

Tip 4: Don’t Overlook ROI Indicators at the Partner Level

Partner Ready’s Plum points out that ROI indicators apply at the individual partner level as well. “Deal registrations moving to discovery stage is a major indicator of your partner’s understanding the value of your service and your optimal target customer,” he says. “If fallout at the deal registration stage is excessively high (compared to other sources of business), it would make sense to spend time with the partner to ensure alignment.”

Peeples also points to partner-level indicators. “At the simplest level [you have] badging and deal registrations,” he says. “For more mature channel programs [you have] tracking customer satisfaction of working with a partner, partner satisfaction in the channel program, partner portal engagement, joint-business planning, additional sales of multiple products, average discount requested above program level, etc.”

Tip 5: ‘Human ROI’ Is Harder to Calculate with Metrics

“[Determining ROI] really depends on what metric is homed in on,” says PGi’s Cavanagh. “If you are looking at the ROI on spending money at a technology services broker event, then you can do that with sales stats.

“The human ROI is harder to gauge.  Did you become a trusted advisor for a channel partner by doing extra training/being responsive?  Longer-term sales dollars answer the question, but in the short term, [it’s] harder to gauge … and at what point [are you] in the ROI negative because you’ve sunk time and effort into a channel partner without any return?”

Tip 6: Track KPIs

Howes of Juniper Networks and Earlewine of IntelePeer offer up some KPIs they like to track. They include:

• Active Pipeline Value
• Average Deal Construct Size
• Average Deal Value
• Conversion Rate
• Cost Per Lead
• Funnel Velocity
• Joint Business Planning
• Leads Provided
• MDF Spend
• Number of Current Opportunities
• Partner Investment Cost
• Ramp to Revenue
• Resource Allocation
• Sales State Per Lead
• Win/Loss Ratio

A deep dive into other channel program KPIs is available in our channel reporting dashboard article here.

• The channel is more competitive than it has ever been. Even smaller players and upstarts need channel partner reporting data to compete in today’s environment.

• Channel partner reporting helps you across a wide swath of strategic and operational objectives—from better decision-making to stakeholder motivation.

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are central to developing a channel partner management reporting framework, but it’s as essential to think about how metrics are derived as the output they provide.

• Ultimately, KPIs should help you assess new partner potential and identify which established partners you’ll invest in.

• Your reporting framework should consolidate information, deliver the right information to the right parties at the right time, and help you nurture relationships with partners.

Channel partner reporting impacts your entire channel operation. Without it, you’re flying by the seat of your pants.

To be fair, many companies launched successful channel programs without partner reporting—especially in the channel’s early days. It’s easy to take care of partners and their customers when you’ve only a handful. Get some basics right like provisioning, commissions, and support, and you could be wildly successful in the game.

But two significant channel realities are rapidly putting navigation-by-instinct in the rearview mirror:

• Today’s channel competition is fierce. Competition in the channel isn’t what it was 20 years ago, or even five years ago. Its proven pay-for-performance advantages can power unparalleled growth, which has spurred competition in every aspect of working with channel partners and their customers. Leading channel firms are leveraging data to make smarter decisions faster and help their partners grow their businesses. Players that want to become leading channel firms need that same data to compete.
• Channel success creates scale quickly. Throughout the channel’s history, companies with channel success often experienced growing pains when scaling up. As their programs matured and sales accelerated, their success sometimes got out from under them. Today’s channel entrants have learned from the struggles of companies before them and are building in growth-management tools from the get-go. That means data.

To help you develop or improve your channel partner management reporting framework, we talked with eight highly successful executives in the channel—from top analysts, marketers, and consultants to operators inside firms large and small. Here’s what we learned.

How a Channel Partner Management Reporting Framework Can Boost Your Business

Channel partner reporting is your flashlight in the dark. It helps you see where you’ve been, where you are today, and where you’re headed. More importantly, it empowers you to change course and optimize your journey. As we learned in discussions with these same channel leaders about best practices in channel partner reporting, having access to the right data helps you:

• Make better decisions. From the C-suite to your channel account managers (CAMs), reporting dashboards can give your team the data it needs to make better decisions faster.
• Identify strengths and weaknesses across your channel program, including people, processes, and partners.
• Build stronger partner relationships. Incorporating data into your discussions with partners helps you build trust with your partners through transparency and helps tell the story of your partnership.
• Motivate personnel and partners. People are competitive creatures; a good dashboard can go a long way toward coaxing partners to excel.

What to Consider when Creating a Channel Partner Reporting Strategy

Data, for all practical purposes, is a tool. Just as you need the right tool for the job, you need the right data in your reporting framework. In practical terms, this means that channel partner reporting is all about key performance indicators (KPIs).

Before we dig into the nuts and bolts of building your framework, consider these valuable observations and advice from our panelists regarding KPIs:

Tip 1: Building a successful reporting framework requires the right metrics

When it comes to assessing the best KPIs for internal use in evaluating the health of your channel program, it’s essential to take a holistic view of the data. That means it’s not only important to discuss the most important metrics to track but also the flaws in the KPIs most organizations use, how they can be improved, or be replaced.

Reconsider these commonly-used metrics:

Other key metrics that channel organizations should be tracking to measure their health include: 

• Return-on-investment (ROI). To eliminate wasted investment, focus on high-producing programs and maintain the company’s willingness to invest in channels, you should measure and compare your various partner programs’ ROI (revenue generated by the program compared to the cost). Focus on deal registration and co-op/market development funds (MDF) since they’re usually the most complex and expensive programs within a channel organization.
• Partner profitability. Eliciting feedback from partners about their satisfaction with all aspects of their vendor relationship is essential. Since the major factor contributing to partner satisfaction is partner profitability, this metric is just as important, if not more so. If your partners are not driving profitability by promoting, selling and/or supporting your offerings, they’re not going to invest in more training, marketing or sales activities.
• Channel team performance and satisfaction. Nothing matters more when it comes to channel revenue success than having the best possible people in place to support your partner community. Best practice metrics to track are the percentage of channel account managers (CAM) achieving at least 75 percent of quota as well as their churn rate and their satisfaction level.

Tip 2: KPIs should help you decide in which partners to invest

When discussing which KPIs are the most important for external use in communicating with partners, determining which partners to focus on is essential to successful channel management.

Not all partners are created equally. Therefore, a core determinant of channel success is effectively deciding on which partners to focus time, effort, and resources to drive the highest return. The traditional approach has been to assess, rank, and prioritize partners based primarily on revenue performance. However, revenue is a lagging indicator that measures how a partner performed in the past.

With rapidly changing buyer behaviors and market dynamics, past performance is no longer the strongest indicator of future performance. High-performing channel organizations derive more accurate insights by assessing and prioritizing partners based on revenue performance as well as the value they deliver and their growth potential. They also share that data directly with the partners during joint business planning and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to open dialogues about where and how both parties can make needed changes or improvements to drive mutual success.

Tip 3: With new partners, look for leading indicators that help you assess future potential

Partner engagement metrics, such as those listed below, are important leading indicators of the future success of a new channel partner. In other words, the more engaged they are, the faster they grow and the more they grow. That said, as partners move beyond the onboarding and activation stage in their journey with a supplier, there are more predictive and prescriptive metrics to track, as outlined above.

7 Steps to Build a Channel Partner Management Reporting Framework from Channel Leaders

With the KPI overview as a backdrop, you can apply the recommendations from industry leaders on building out your channel partner reporting framework. Here’s their advice, presented as actionable steps you can take to set up your organization for success.

1. Map Your Channel Partner Reporting Needs with Stakeholders
2. Pick Strong Tech for Channel Partner Reporting
3. Integrate PRM and CRM to Improve Channel Partner Reporting
4. Build In Best Practices for Channel Partner Reporting Upfront
5. Design Your Channel Partner Reporting Dashboard and Report Templates with Your Brand in Mind
6. Build Channel Partner Reporting Dashboards for a Range of Roles and Relationships
7. Leverage Quantitative Channel Partner Reporting Data to Spark Qualitative Discussions

Step 1: Map Your Channel Partner Reporting Needs with Stakeholders

Since it’s difficult to establish meaningful data when your metrics keep changing, you’ll want to bring stakeholders together to nail down those metrics. That means internal personnel and alike.

Step 2: Pick Strong Tech for Channel Partner Reporting

“It’s almost cliche to say that not all solutions are created equal,” says  Lionel Farr, Chief Technology Officer for Zift Solutions. “But as any seasoned channel executive can tell you, it’s true. Hopefully, you’ve got a partner relationship management (PRM) that’s up to the task of delivering the data you need to know from your partner activities that also can pull in the external data you need so you can centralize it.”

If your PRM isn’t up to the task, consider business intelligence (BI) and data visualization platforms. “[Use] a wrapper like POWER BI to generate centralized views from disparate data sources,” says Brent Earlewine, Senior Vice President of Indirect Channels for IntelePeer.

Eileen Corrigan, channel leader, uses reports instead of dashboards. She says BI can be helpful across complex business units, markets, and ecosystems.

Step 3: Integrate PRM and CRM to Improve Channel Partner Reporting

Farr’s observation on leveraging your PRM for data centralization was echoed by most of our experts. Using your PRM as a single source of truth is logical and convenient—particularly when factoring in integrations.

Kris Blackmon, Chief Channel Officer for JS Group, advocates using a PRM to centralize data and emphasizes the need to integrate the PRM with your customer relationship management (CRM) system–not only to eliminate data silos but to avoid channel conflict, too. “Vendors wanting a full understanding of their channel have to start with really leveraging the heck out of their CRM,” she says. “I see too many examples of companies that use only the barest capabilities of their CRM, which is a giant miss.”

 

“Being able to pinpoint where in the pipeline you’re losing prospects is absolutely critical for growth efforts. Your CRM needs to tie to everything, especially your PRM system. Every time you have to manually enter data into your CRM, you’re wasting time and increasing your opportunities for error. Having your CRM and your PRM closely tied together not only gives you vital visibility into your own pipeline but it helps you manage your partners’ opportunities. Most importantly, it helps mitigate channel conflict, which is the number one complaint of partners about their vendors,” Blackmon says.

Step 4: Build In Best Practices for Channel Partner Reporting Upfront

“Leverage everything you know about best practices upfront so you can minimize refinements later,” says  Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer for Zift Solutions. “You want to focus on how to use your data effectively and not become bogged down in experiments and redesigns.”

We’ve developed an extensive review of best practices with channel leaders, which you can review in full here. Here’s a quick highlight video as a refresher:

Video: Channel Reporting Best Practices

Step 5: Design Your Channel Partner Reporting Dashboard and Report Templates with Your Brand in Mind

Once your data is in place, ask your brand manager to design your dashboards. Today’s visual brand specialists are skilled in data visualization. If you don’t have a brand manager available internally or through your marketing agency, make sure you use your formal brand guidelines when developing your dashboard.

“You may think it unnecessary to focus on the data presentation, but it makes more sense to do so when you consider a recent webinar you watched and how the quality of the slides impacted your perception of the presenter and his or her company,” says Khali Henderson, Senior Partner for BuzzTheory.

Step 6: Build Channel Partner Reporting Dashboards for a Range of Roles and Relationships

Everybody looks at data differently depending on their role in the organization. For example:

• Executives don’t want to sift through piles of data to get what they need.
• CAMs need actionable information.
• Partners want to understand and improve upon their performance.

Take the time to build the right dashboards or reports for the right parties.

Step 7: Leverage Quantitative Channel Partner Reporting Data to Spark Qualitative Discussions

When all parties have the data they need, you can leverage that data to improve performance. Sometimes, driving quantitative improvements requires qualitative assessment with partners. Having objective data at your fingertips helps to put those discussions in perspective.

“The quantitative data should lead to qualitative discussions,” says IntelePeer’s Earlewine. “The struggle is embedding or producing qualitative data as part of the actual dashboards. A [partner] relationship health index score is a possible example where we can use the quantitative data to feed a qualitative ‘report card.’”

• Channel partner reporting is an essential component to managing channel operations, with a broad reach across your operations.

• Channel reporting also delivers mission-critical data to channel partners, serving both motivational and relationship-building goals.

• Dashboards can be leveraged for channel strategy and tactics and meet the needs of many roles in your organization.

• Right-sizing your dashboards and their contents for specific roles or relationships is essential to a successful channel partner reporting practice.

• Channel experts advise a range of use cases and best practices, detailed below.

Ours is a data-driven world. There’s little doubt about that, and channel programs are no exception. But, as with all programs that aim to cohesively tackle both hard (quantitative) and soft (qualitative) measurement, establishing solid channel partner reporting practices is often viewed as both a science and an art.

To pull the curtain back on this tricky subject, we talked to 9 channel experts to unpack the goals and challenges of channel reporting. Along the way, we also picked up some best practices to share.

Understand and Analyze Your Channel Partner Program

Channel data reporting, when done right, can deliver benefits to your company and your partners. Examples of this include:

• Improved decision-making. Whether the goal is finding, selecting and activating the best partners or designing the right program to drive partner capability, capacity and motivation, the right data allows the organization and individuals to make faster, more informed decisions. It also enables more effective advocating for investment.
• Goal definition and attainment. Monitoring the right data helps organizations and individuals set realistic and attainable goals, define the steps needed to reach them, chart progress, and determine when and how to adjust to ensure they are achieved.
• Accountability. It is difficult to hide behind data. For example, if one channel account manager (CAM) isn’t performing well, the right data should let you know what is going wrong and why. It is important to create accountability. The result can make channel management and team members, as well as partners, more productive.
• Higher partner satisfaction and retention. Much like improving the customer experience (CX), improving partner experience (PX) is an essential avenue for revenue growth. To do so, organizations need access to data to uncover strengths that can be leveraged and prioritize the weaknesses that must be addressed to drive success.
• Reduce costs and optimize efficiencies. High-grade data is a great defense against overpayments, inventory imbalances, ineffective incentive programs, inefficient marketing spend, and even fraud.

If you’re looking at this list and thinking that’s practically the whole business, you’re right. Andy Gilbert, Director for Connection2Channel, put it this way: Channel data and reporting strengthens a business “the same way as blood works in the body. It’s essential.”

Why Channel Partner Reporting is Vital to Partner Program Success

Kris Blackmon, Chief Channel Officer for JS Group, reminds us of these oft-repeated words of wisdom: “You can only manage what you measure. It’s almost impossible to improve if you don’t have a solid understanding of your metrics. Data and reporting, having those quantitative metrics, is the only way to track that improvement (or lack thereof),” she says.

Dede Haas, Channel Strategist, Practitioner and Coach at DLH Services, agrees. “I find that many folks want to rely on their gut feeling when it comes to reporting,” she says. “But you want to know that what you’re doing for your partners is actually working—and that gut feeling won’t always be correct. Piecing together real data is important and enables you to see what’s going on in the business, as well as gather partner thoughts or feedback. [And] it’s a quick way to accurately check [return on investment (ROI)].”

Khali Henderson, Senior Partner for channel marketing firm BuzzTheory, points out that channel reporting is necessary to allocate resources properly. “You can have the best talent in the industry at your fingertips, but that’s only an advantage if you know when and where to use it,” she says. “Of course, you want to identify and shore up weaknesses, but you also want to know what you’re doing right, turn it into a best practice and scale it up.”

Henderson offers the example of providing high-value leads and the assistance of your best sales engineers to the most likely partners to close the business. “In doing so, you will simultaneously increase partner satisfaction with important partners while increasing the probability of converting that lead into a customer,” she says.

Create a Channel Partner Dashboard

Dashboards are powerful tools on two fronts—reporting and motivating. Reporting is essential to measuring and communicating performance internally and with partners. As many of our experts pointed out, the right data identifies strengths and weaknesses and delivers the tools you need to manage your channel program effectively. Dashboards make data analytics easier by showing you key metrics (and their trajectories) at a glance.

Dashboards also are fantastic tools for motivating your internal teams and partners to improve their performances. Channel expert Matthew Peeples says dashboards play well in today’s rewards culture and spark friendly competition among partners. “Today’s society is points-driven,” he says. “Every fast-food restaurant has a rewards program. The same is true for travel. We’ve been conditioned to track our progress and achieve levels. Partners want to know where they rank compared to their competition and how to surpass them or move to the next level of a program.”

The key is developing the right dashboard—or dashboard set—for the right circumstances. Getting the right output requires planning with all stakeholders to get the information you need from your partner relationship management (PRM) solution.

Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer for Zift Solutions, says dashboards are essential to making both strategic and tactical adjustments. “Meaningful dashboards are strategic in nature,” she says. “Yes, you have all the top-level, instrument-panel data looking at the overall performance of your channel program. But you also can deliver specific information that department heads can rely on to adjust their plans and tactics. At the same time, you need to set partners up for success while, hopefully, motivating them in that process.”

Lionel Farr, Chief Technology Officer for Zift Solutions, agrees and points out that the right dashboard requires both human and technological know-how. “When it comes to dashboards, you really do get out of them what you put into them,” he observes. “That’s not just human input. Hopefully, you’re working with a strong enough PRM solution to generate the metrics you need from the tool itself but also import the metrics you need from other solutions, like your CRM, via API.”

While you’ll want to customize a dashboard to meet your needs, that doesn’t mean you must reinvent the wheel. Some well-established and proven dashboard metrics can get you started. We’ve provided some examples from ZiftONE to give you a jumpstart toward developing or refining your dashboards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No dashboards? No worries. While dashboards are the preferred tool, you can—and should—generate some of the output you need as reports. “We don’t use the actual dashboards, but we have standardized reports that can be used as source material for content on performance metrics, etc.,” says Eileen Corrigan, Strategic Channel Leader.

10 Channel Partner Reporting Best Practices from Channel Leaders

Now that you’ve got sample dashboards and advice on putting data to good use, let’s dig into some best practices for channel partner reporting that you can put to work right away:

1. Centralize Channel Partner Reporting Data
2. Select a Channel Partner Reporting Tool with a Strong API
3. Make Executive Dashboards for Channel Partner Reporting
4. Curate Shared Channel Partner Reporting Data for All Stakeholders
5. Set Up Channel Partner Reporting with Consistency in Mind
6. Leverage Channel Partner Reporting Dashboards to Build Partner Relationships
7. Balance Channel Partner Reporting Data with Relationship Building
8. Tell a Story with Channel Partner Reporting Dashboards
9. Track the Behavior of Partners’ Customers, Too
10. Make Channel Partner Reporting About Your Partners’ Businesses

Best Practice #1: Centralize Channel Partner Reporting Data

Zift’s Farr honed in on the importance of data centralization to delivering thorough, actionable information. Most companies are coming up short on this front. Complete, accurate and timely data is table-stakes in all aspects of business, including channels, and it continues to grow in importance.

The silver lining to this message should become an action item for you; tackling decentralized data today can put you ahead of many in the channel. That’s a textbook competitive advantage.

Best Practice #2: Select a Channel Partner Reporting Tool with a Strong API

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. Dashboard fatigue is real; your partners are given dashboards by nearly every vendor and have it worse than most. Your PRM should be able to pull in many data sources to deliver a holistic view of your channel operation, but it’s vital that you help partners do the same, says Zift’s Farr.

“Ideally, you’ll have a solution that delivers everything you need to know about your channel through native reporting and data imported from other sources via API,” Farr says. “Your partners need that same ability in their own firms. Your PRM should be able to deliver data or preformatted widgets they can use in their own dashboard solutions.”

Best Practice #3: Make Executive Dashboards for Channel Partner Reporting

Sometimes dashboards offer too many features and customizations for senior managers. BuzzTheory’s Henderson says you can supplement dashboards that are actionable for your channel specialists with summary data that the C-suite doesn’t have to decode.

“You can overbuild a dashboard,” says Henderson. “That’s true in general and also by role. Specialist dashboards can be awesome for practitioners, but executives don’t want to have to trudge through dozens of widgets or spend 10 minutes making data selections to get the data they need. In fact, a fair number of executives will ask for PDFs of dashboard data instead of logging in. And on the other end of the spectrum, some will want to port summary data from your dashboard into their own dashboards. A carefully crafted executive dashboard can meet all of these needs.”

Best Practice #4: Curate Shared Channel Partner Reporting Data for All Stakeholders

Henderson’s advice about right-sizing dashboards by role also applies to shared boards, says Connection2Channel’s Gilbert. That involves introducing partners to dashboards and loading them with data that measures shared goals.

“Familiarity with dashboards is key,” he says. “But they must be displaying metrics important to all stakeholders (i.e., designed and specified together).”

Channel expert Peeples agrees, adding that getting input from multiple parties in advance can help you establish the right data early. “Leverage a Partner Advisory Board to give you the metrics they want to see on the dashboard,” he says.

Incorporating the right data into your dashboards is central to getting partners to use them. But “don’t assume they will use them; assume they won’t,” Gilbert says. “Use data to define performance—[it’s the] best way to get partners to engage.”

Best Practice #5: Set Up Channel Partner Reporting with Consistency in Mind

Take the time to confidently choose data points you can leverage to drive improvements over a long period.

Channel expert Peeples points out that channel reporting data is only helpful if the metrics are stable. “Using the same metrics month over month and year over year provides a strong foundation to understand what is working or not working in a channel program,” he says. “If you are constantly changing the metrics, then it is difficult to measure success.”

Corrigan also drives home the importance of consistency. “Standardized content for CAM usage removes information variability,” she says.

Best Practice #6: Leverage Channel Partner Reporting Dashboards to Build Partner Relationships

Brent Earlewine, Senior Vice President for Indirect Channels at IntelePeer, points out that partner-facing dashboards are helpful in keeping communication lines open and engaging partners. “[Dashboards can be used] during 1:1 meetings, funnel reviews, deal updates and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) as well as embedded in the business planning process,” he says.

JS Group’s Blackmon agrees. “You have to be able to reference pipeline and revenue metrics when you’re helping partners plan for the upcoming year or quarter,” she says. “Too many vendors skip the annual business planning or QBR step, and that’s a giant miss. You want to be involved in your partners’ business as much as they’ll let you. Understand how they make money and how they structure their businesses, so you know where to plug in. Understand their growth goals. Help them calculate cash flow.”

Blackmon also recommends referencing customer engagement metrics to help partners pinpoint where they need your help in the sales process. “Sales pitches are often subjective, but data doesn’t lie,” she says. “It’s super convincing when you can show a partner hard and fast numbers during your touch base meetings (which you should be having regularly).”

Best Practice #7: Balance Channel Partner Reporting Data with Relationship Building

Keep in mind that data analytics is vital, but it’s only one tool in your channel success toolbox. Take care to use it in proper balance with other strategies, especially a human touch.

“While gathering data is incredibly important, you can’t establish relationships this way,” says DLH Services’ Haas. “You have to establish relationships with partners first before you get into the analytics.”

Haas says some vendors have become so enamored with data that they are alienating potentially productive partners.

“I work with many companies in the [tech] channel—MSPs, VARs, etc.—[that] feel like they are just a number,” she says. “Many of the vendors they are working with are trying to build a big partner channel (quantity) rather than getting to know their partners first (quality) to see if they can build a business relationship together. Hard data does not mean anything if you can’t get along or develop trust.”

Haas notes that the over-reliance on data may begin with targeting and recruiting against an Ideal Partner Profile, but it often continues through enablement and engagement phases of the partnership.

“Data is gathered, lists are run, and decisions are made based only on numbers,” says Haas. “The relationship is transactional.”

Best Practice #8: Tell a Story with Channel Partner Reporting Dashboards

If you’ve recently visited the websites of leading news outlets, you undoubtedly noticed that data is used to tell stories. And as any successful content marketer will tell you, stories drive engagement. Zift’s Tenuto says that turning some dashboards (or sets) into storyboards can impact partner motivation in a big way.

“Every relationship has a story, including your partnership,” says Tenuto. “Structuring your boards to tell that story—by tracking progress over time—can be a powerful driver of your ongoing relationship. Are earnings increasing? Are deals accelerating? Everyone wants their story to have a happy ending. The visualization of that kind of information, whether it’s good or in need of improvement, can engage your partners in a visceral way.”

Best Practice #9: Track the Behavior of Partners’ Customers, Too

Perhaps the most significant character in the story of your partnership is your joint customer. So, it’s important to help partners track customer behavior data, too, says JS Group’s Blackmon.

“[Customer behavior] is one of the most valuable uses of data, and it’s important for partners, many of which struggle with gaining and keeping customers,” Blackmon says. “It’s also important for vendors trying to pinpoint where partners are losing the sale and how they can help leads progress through the pipeline.”

Marketing, sales and customer success teams can study data to get a clear picture of where they’re losing customers and prospects, she says, advising vendors to:

• Use marketing data to A/B test different messages
• Leverage Salesforce to determine where in the sales pipeline you’re losing leads
• Study NPS and CSAT scores to get an idea of why customers churn

“When you apply this data to revenue gains or losses,” Blackmon says, “you can arrive at a total cost for your customers, get an understanding of how each function is positively or negatively impacting revenue, and see where improvements can be made to increase customer lifetime value.”

Best Practice #10: Make Channel Partner Reporting About Your Partners’ Businesses

Your partnership should have an audience of one—your partners. Reporting and/or dashboards built for partners should deliver value in ways that are meaningful to them, not just to you, advises IntelePeer’s Earlewine.

“Show them the value of the data to help them run their businesses and how it supports their KPIs and their growth metrics,” he says. “At the end of the day, the dashboards are the only place they can get critical data regarding portions of your relationship (e.g., commissions, etc.).”

• Channel partner engagement is both essential to – and a reflection of – the strength of your partner relationships.

• No partner engagement plan can generate long-term results with a partner that isn’t a fit for your company and its services. Make sure you’re targeting best-fit partners upfront.

• Every partnership is different. Different partners may require different engagement processes.

• Make sure you’ve got what you need to drive engagement. Partner engagement requires that asset- and partner-enablement processes are in place.

• In the first 30 days, you and your partner will learn about each other – including the value you can deliver your partners via incentives – and set goals.

• 60 days into your plan, you’ll be educating customers and helping them start to sell your solutions.

• At the 90-day mark, you’ll be making refinements with partners where needed, starting up your quarterly business reviews (QBRs), and helping your partners go to market with your solutions more extensively.

• At 12 months and onward, you’re celebrating a successful partnership and keeping the relationship refreshed and renewed through ongoing communication, regular meetings and goal alignment.

It stands to reason that increasing your partner engagement program’s stickiness can help you keep a steady stream of partner revenue flowing. Keeping partners engaged is what long-term channel success is all about, after all. And it’s essential to building those big revenue engines that make the channel such a powerful tool for growth.

In our most recent column detailing partner engagement best practices, we turned to a panel of partner engagement experts and asked them to share some of their best insights for increasing program stickiness. They covered everything from the program challenges to re-engaging inactive partners – all good, actionable advice that can help you get your arms around a complex and challenging subject.

To help put that into a timeline, we asked those same experts to break down a successful engagement program into steps at the following milestones: 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and 12-months-and-onward. Before we dig into those, here are three tips to help you set up your engagement program for success:

TIP #1: Target the Right Channel Partners for Your Company

There’s a reason they’re called channel “partners.” Working with them means establishing business partnerships that help both firms succeed. And as we’ve discussed many times in our blogs, webinars and other discussions, finding the right partner for your company is essential to developing a successful partnership. There’s even shorthand for modeling them – they’re called IPPs, or ideal partner profiles.

Think of them like buyer personas your marketing team develops for retail customers, but instead of helping you target the right accounts for your services, they help you find the right partners to distribute your services.

Steve Braverman, Founding Partner for EagleTEQ Advisors, stresses the importance of this process. “Be selective about the partners you’re onboarding,” he says.

Rackspace Global Partner Manager Vicki Patten agrees. “Don’t try to boil the ocean and be everyone’s partner,” she says. “Focus on great-fit partners and [technology services brokers] that are truly trying to grow with the solutions that you offer. Build strong relationships with those people who can drive their ecosystems to you.”

TIP #2: Tweak the Engagement Process to Meet the Partners’ Needs

For the most part, our experts identified broad trends that you can apply to most business models. But before we dig into those 30/60/90-day benchmarks, it’s essential to recognize that different partners may require different engagement processes.

“Based on their criteria, you can know how to onboard them,” says EagleTEQ’s Braverman, who has experience in technology services broker agency leadership. Once you “understand a partner’s business,” you can “help them understand your business and explain who their touchpoints will be in your company.”

That criteria may not be their business model but the situation at hand. Jeff Mattan, Vice President of Global Partner Programs at BeyondTrust, noted, for example, that the engagement process may be accelerated if there’s a deal on the table. “This all changes if the reason you got engaged in the first place is because the partner has a deal to work on with you,” he says. “In cases like that, it’s a lot faster on-the-job training exercise engaging with the partner and customer.”

TIP #3: Make it Easy for Partners to Engage

You won’t drive partners to engage with you if you don’t make it easy for them. Like you, they’re stretched thin and seeking efficiency at every turn. Channel enablement is essential to onboarding and foundational for driving partner engagement.

30 Days: Getting Started on Your Channel Partner Engagement Plan

We tend to harp on the importance of making a good first impression with partners, but that’s only because it’s true. The first 30 days represent the first big moment of truth for your channel partners in their experience with your company. It’s no surprise that the experts we interviewed had more to say about those first 30 days than any other timeline benchmarks.

Your engagement plan is part of the total partner experience and should sync with your channel partner enablement framework.

Here are some tips from our panel of partner engagement experts:

Get to Know Your Partner

Partners are like everyone else in our overscheduled world – pressed for time but also feeling like nobody has time for them, either. You can get an edge up over your channel competitors by simply scheduling time to learn about your partners and find out what they expect from the partnership and how you can help them alleviate pain points and grow their businesses.

“[In the] first 30 days, I’m just getting to know partners’ businesses and what makes them unique in their own way,” says Tony Burns, Channel Account Manager for Mitel. “Some partners are smaller guys, some are larger, so it’s important to know what their particular goals are.”

Help Partners Get to Know You, Too

Partners are learning about you, too. It’s essential to make it easy for them to learn about your products – and how to work with your teams – especially when they’re onboarding.

“[Exactly what we address] depends upon the partners,” says BeyondTrust’s Mattan. “Generally speaking, at 30 days, you want partners registering for the portal, taking training and meeting the sales teams. [All the] standard onboarding activities that allow them to learn about you… while you also learn about them by ongoing interaction.”

Eric Brooker, Vice President of Sales for Bigleaf Networks, also emphasizes learning and looking at partner engagement metrics right away. He says his company’s goals for the first 30 days include “getting them through the initial discovery meeting where we determine if we are a fit, providing them portal access, measuring their portal usage [and] getting them through our certification process.”

Jim Tennant, Head of Channels at Replicant, introduces partners to the product offering and target audience and begins discussions about aligning toward common goals.

Set Goals to Keep Partners Engaged from the Beginning

There’s no single rule for a successful partnership – every relationship is unique. But if there’s such a thing as a universal component to success, it’s aligning and setting goals. If you’ve been following our series of blogs with advice from experts across the channel, you’ll have noticed that goal setting is a hot topic. It cropped up in interviews with engagement experts as well.

“In the first 30 days, I like to focus on meeting all of the players and setting goals for the partnership,” says Rackspace’s Patten.  

 Jackie Funk, Director of Channel Marketing at Appgate, says her firm includes sales, sales engineering and marketing alignment in the first 30 days. 

Offer Incentives to Jumpstart Engagement

“Be sure that your programs incentivize partners,” says Mayka Rosales Peterson, Senior Manager, Managing Partner Program for AppSmart. “And offer the support and tools they’ll need to be successful to sell your solutions and products – there’s value in that.”

“On the technology services broker [agency] side,” she adds, “make sure you’re educating partners (campaigns, webinars, etc.). Be the person who can market [to] the partners’ people. Give them the marketing that they need. Many partners struggle with marketing. Being that person to help them with prospecting, lead gen, brand awareness, what have you, is a full partnership.”

60 Days: Drive Momentum Toward Sales Goals

In month two, you’re planning activities to reach your shared goals and beginning to execute against those plans. For all practical purposes, the momentum phase starts now. It’s also a good idea to review your partner’s first 30 days and fill any onboarding gaps they identify. Here’s some advice from our expert panel:

Solidify Your Plans

Now is the time to take what you’ve learned from your partners – and what they’ve learned from you – and put plans in place. “In 60 days, I want to have a solid plan for the activities that will drive activities to enable partners at both the technology services broker [agent] and subagents’ companies,” says Rackspace’s Patten.

Just as with goal setting, listening to your partners and getting buy-in on your plans can help you keep your goals front and center. “Schedule an agreed-upon plan that includes cadence of communication and specific activities that are aligned with each other’s initiatives, goals, milestones of success,” advises Jim Tennant from Replicant.

Appgate’s Funk focuses on “understanding the competitive landscape, account mapping and initial field marketing planning/execution.”

Help Your Partners Begin Selling

Note that Funk included initial execution with her planning. She’s not alone in that. Many firms emphasize sales collaboration and begin the process of joint selling during this window.

“At 60 days, [channel partner] onboarding continues, and I’d want them to graduate to things like jointly talking to customers as they typically aren’t ready to do it themselves,” says BeyondTrust’s Mattan. “This gives vendor sales teams the opportunity to prove it’s a two-way street by having partners sit in on sales calls and demos.”

In some cases, moving to this step requires education and getting your partners to reframe their perspective and approach. “[At] 60 days, I’m educating,” says Mitel’s Burns. “Partners are so smart, but sometimes, you have to show them a different way or change the way partners view things.”

90 Days: Get into a Rhythm for Partner Engagement

In the third month of working with new partners, your partnership should hit its full stride. Sure, there’s still work to do – that will never stop – but at this point, you can start drumbeat meetings, focus on performance, and help your partners help themselves.

Check Progress Against Goals

“In 90 days, we should see the pipeline building and also have the first Quarterly Business Review to check progress against the goals,” says Rackspace’s Patten.

Funk from Appgate also gets QBRs underway at this point, along with building on earlier planning and execution. At the 90-day milestone, she emphasizes:

• Quarterly planning (goals and tactics to achieve them)
• Demand generation
• Field execution
• Ongoing training and enablement

Replicant’s Tennant says his firm focuses on account mapping, event planning and steady cadence on everything established over the first 60 days.

For his part, Mitel’s Burns focuses on being an extension of the partner’s business. “90 days in, I’m really just trying to serve as that extra arm,” he says. “I’m an extra member of their team that they can rely on for little and big things.”

Help Partners Stretch Their Sales Wings

Depending on your business model, you may want your partners to begin taking independent sale steps at this point.

“At 90 days, ideally you want to see them start to approach customers on their own and bring you in as needed instead of relying on you so much,” says BeyondTrust’s Mattan. “I’d also like to see them start to use some of the marketing tools we make available for partner use.”

12 Months: What Comes Next?

Reaching the 12-month mark with an active, engaged partner is a significant milestone. It’s an important anniversary for both companies that’s worth reviewing and celebrating.

Jackie Funk at Appgate says their organization conducts an annual evaluation, which includes reviewing alignment, evaluating wins (to replicate success in all territories) and checking that the sales/marketing engine is running smoothly. This ensures that Appgate is investing in the partners who are helping to drive revenue and pipeline.

At this point, the partner relationship should be running as planned. In other words, they’re likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if there are hiccups. However, they’re still a hot target for your competitors, so don’t rest on your laurels or take the relationship for granted.

Conduct and Continue QBRs

Leading up to this point, you will have developed your partnership, closed business, reviewed metrics and refined your objectives.

“Over 12 months, we should see our first sales closing together and continue the QBRs, and reset goals as is appropriate,” says Rackspace’s Patten.

Replicant’s Tennant also sees driving engagement in long-term partnerships as a matter of consistent communication and realignment. “Conduct QBRs to review and fine-tune [everything you’ve done to date], review pipeline opportunities and [what you’ve learned across the partnership],” he says.

Leverage Data and Deeper Connections to Drive More Sales

Data analytics on such things as portal activity, use of marketing campaigns and other marketing materials, and leaderboards can help to fuel your relationship long term. Both parties have a role to play in that equation.

Mattan of BeyondTrust likes to see partners engaged deeply with his organization at this point. “At 12 months, I’d love the partner to be a regular visitor to the partner portal, running our marketing campaigns, engaging more with our sales teams than our CAMs (channel account managers) and leveraging our sales tools to help their customers and making money from both sales and services,” he says.

Mattan also remains engaged, helping partners benchmark their performance levels and sharing the activities that have proved to move the needle. “On my side, I’d be sharing leaderboards on their various activity levels that drive combined pipeline,” he says.

• Keeping partners engaged is vital to building a solid channel revenue engine and a primary goal for all firms involved in the channel.

• Successful channel partner programs nurture relationships between the parties and foster “true partnership.” Therefore, healthy partner engagement is a sign of a healthy partnership.

• One size does not fit all. New and long-term partners require different levels of – and approaches to – support.

• Inactive or lost customers are best approached methodically and directly. If your companies’ goals remain aligned, give them a reason to re-engage.

• Analytics can help you evaluate and retain current partners and re-engage lost or inactive partners you’d like to recover.

• Like any meaningful relationship, open communications lines are essential to keeping channel partner relationships fruitful.

Channel programs are a sticky business. Or at least they are if you’re doing them right. It takes as much effort or more (often more) to recruit and retain a good channel partner as it does a good enterprise client. Just as developing customer stickiness is essential to revenue growth, creating partner stickiness is essential to growing your base of revenue-producing partners. That means doubling down on partner engagement. Like so many aspects of the channel, creating your partner engagement plan requires effort, but it can pay off by helping to fuel a formidable engine for growth.

What is Successful Channel Partner Engagement?

Ask seven channel experts what defines successful partner engagement, and you’ll likely get seven different – but highly valuable – answers. We did just that and then asked more questions to develop a list of channel engagement practices you can put to work.

We’ll dig into those responses in a moment, but first, let’s answer the question about what successful partner engagement means at Zift. We define successful channel partner engagement as successful collaboration with channel partners that helps both organizations achieve their goals. In other words, it means developing and maintaining an authentic, ongoing partnership. 

Now, where were we? Oh, yes. Our seven experts, how they define successful engagement, and their advice for creating programs that work.

On defining success, they remind us of all the things that matter in a partnership, including:

“I define partner engagement as ‘an agreed-upon, continuous level of trust and collaboration.’”

Jim Tennant, Head of Channels, Replicant

“Partner engagement means being top of mind and making sure they have everything they need to be successful.”

Mayka Rosales Peterson, Senior Manager, Managing Partner Program, AppSmart

“Anything that drives consistent interaction and communication falls into my definition of [partner] engagement.”

Jeff Mattan, Vice President, Global Partner Programs, BeyondTrust

“[Partner engagement means the] partnership is a two-way street.”

Steve Braverman, Founding Partner, EagleTEQ Advisors

“To me, partner engagement is all about building relationships, demonstrating commitment, and aligning goals across the partner organization (Leadership, Sales, Marketing, Professional Services, Product, Support, etc.)”

Jackie Funk, Director, Channel Marketing, Appgate

7 Partner Engagement Best Practices from Channel Leaders

We asked our channel engagement experts more than just how they define partner engagement. As BCG advises, partnerships need attention. So, we asked our panelists how to succeed in engaging the channel, and we came away with seven best practices you can put to work right away:

1. Give New Partners Lots of Attention
2. Refresh Long-Term Partner Relationships
3. Re-engage Inactive Partners
4. Give Inactive Partners a Reason to Re-Engage
5. Sometimes It’s (More Than) OK to Move On
6. Use Metrics to Measure Engagement
7. Open Communication Is Essential to Long-Term Success

Best Practice 1: Give New Partners Lots of Attention

One of the running themes in our blogs is the importance of first impressions with channel partners and how vital onboarding is to gaining their trust and ongoing commitment. Our engagement experts reaffirmed this strategy with their advice for new partner engagement. Here’s what they recommend:

• Spend plenty of one-on-one time with new partners. Rackspace’s Patten says with new partners, “it’s really important to spend a lot of time building relationships and working closely together to build a joint plan for success.” The real challenge, she says, is “getting their focused attention and keeping it going after those initial planning meetings.” She addresses these needs by meeting in person as much as possible to stay “top of mind.”
• Get your onboarding down pat. “Engaging new partners is getting them onboarded and into the LMS,” says Bigleaf’s Brooker. Follow-on actions include “providing them portal access, measuring their portal usage, getting them through our certification process.”
• Lead with your products. “When engaging new partners, you have to show them what’s exciting about your product,” says Mitel’s Burns. “Show what makes your product special and how we can improve your customer’s business.”
• Embrace the new generation. “Everyone is trying to find new partners, especially from younger generations and backgrounds that might not understand what the channel is and can offer new perspectives on how to do business,” says AppSmart’s Rosales Peterson. “Inclusivity and diversity in thought and people is what will keep our channel ecosystem thriving.”

Best Practice 2: Refresh Long-Term Partner Relationships

“Longer-term partners give you more benefit of the doubt,” as BeyondTrust’s Mattan puts it, but it’s essential to keep the partnership refreshed and renewed. Our experts advise:

• Maintain those QBRs. Rackspace’s Patten says to avoid the pitfall of riding on past successes by “doing the QBRs and resetting goals each year to keep the revenue growing for both partners.”
• Keep partners updated on product releases and updates. “With long-term partners, it is about making sure they are aware of changes within your product set and company,” says Bigleaf’s Brooker.
• Protect your partners from poachers. “As partners get bigger, they pop up on the radar of the entire industry,” notes EagleTEQ’s Braverman. “You need to maintain relationships to incentivize partners and keep that stickiness, so they’re engaged.”
• Spice up the marriage. “For older partners, you’ve got to be working just as hard as you would with new partners,” says Mitel’s Burns. “Engaging older partners is like a marriage: if you don’t do date night, that marriage may fail. Keep that spark and interest alive with older partners. Be available to them, show you respect them.”

Best Practice 3: Re-engage Inactive Partners

As EagleTEQ’s Braverman points out, good partners land on everyone’s target lists—including your competitors. Poaching is one reason partners may go dark, but it’s not the only one. Your compensation, support or solution set also could be driving them away. Rather than guess, our experts said a direct approach is best.

“Honestly, have a live, candid conversation about the commitment on both sides,” says Rackspace’s Patten. “If it’s not there or there is no longer a fit, move on!”

Bigleaf’s Brooker agrees. “Call a spade a spade and be comfortable calling it out,” he says. “Let the partner know they aren’t engaged and that you want to do business. Ask what you can do to re-engage with them. Ask why you aren’t winning business. Be willing to start from scratch and address the fact that you want them to re-engage and see if they are open to digging in and working together.”

Keep in mind that the cause of your “breakup” could have nothing to do with you. (It’s them, not you!) “Partners are constantly changing their goals, focus, and initiatives within their organization,” says Replicant’s Tennant. “Non-engaged partners could be non-engaging for a variety of reasons.”

Tennant’s three-point strategy for re-engagement is to:

1. Establish an agreed-upon communication cadence
2. Provide information to your partner that’s new and drives engagement
3. Be respectful if the partner’s direction has changed and they need to focus elsewhere, but stay in touch as they just have other priorities to attend to

Best Practice 4: Give Inactive Partners a Reason to Re-Engage

After you’ve had that frank conversation with lost or inactive partners, it’s essential to give them a reason to come back.

“You need to make it easy for them to interact, and there must be a value prop for them,” says BeyondTrust’s Mattan. “Use data to try to predict what will resonate with them or to try to get them to read a case study about a customer in markets they serve, to try to get them to do one thing with you they aren’t doing now. And then [it’s a matter of] repeating that process on the next thing until they reach a level you determine as ‘re-engaged.” It takes data, patience and creativity.

Appgate’s Funk says that it’s vital to re-evaluate inactive partners to ensure they’re still a good match and that your goals remain aligned. If the answer is “yes” to both of those questions, her team seeks to re-engage them by:

• Bringing them leads
• Providing training and certification opportunities
• Sharing the successes her team has had with similar partners
• Lining up account mapping sessions

Best Practice 5: Sometimes It’s (More Than) OK to Move On

As Appgate’s Funk and Rackspace’s Patten point out, sometimes partnerships are just a bad fit. When that happens, it’s not only OK to move on but it’s wise to do so. Spend your time and resources on engaged and happy partners. And find more like them.

“If a partner isn’t engaged and we have tried a number of different ways to increase engagement, we need to take a closer look at the partnership,” says Bigleaf’s Brooker. “This may not be the type of partner we want to work with, and that needs to be OK.”

Funk’s team at Appgate sorts good-fit partners from bad-fit partners from the get-go by asking new partners to demonstrate commitment on their side of the partnership. “We ask that they put ‘skin in the game’ – achieving certifications, participating in training, and working closely with their assigned channel sales executive to build territory plans and perform account mapping,” Funk says. “We evaluate key metrics to determine where investments will be made going forward and to reward/recognize those partners who commit to those behaviors and actions that result in success.”

Best Practice 6: Use Metrics to Measure Engagement

We couldn’t help but notice that Mattan uses the d-word (data) in his advice for re-engagement. Analytics are always helpful, and establishing measurements for partner engagement metrics can go a long way toward keeping your program on the right track (and hopefully having fewer discussions with inactive partners).

As is often the case in analytics, our experts and their firms measure engagement in various ways. Those include:

• Pipeline and revenue, including leads generated and converted to prospects and prospects converted to customers
• Participation in QBRs and planning meetings
• Portal and content use, including logins, downloads, etc.
• Participation in training or certifications earned

Best Practice 7: Open Communication Is Essential to Long-Term Success

Not surprisingly, our diverse panel of experts offered varied insight, but one common theme threaded its way through every conversation— the need to have open communication.

“As long as you have a relationship where people are honest and working hard to communicate openly, you’re showing good faith,” says EagleTEQ’s Braverman. “Keep that policy for openness. Working with partners is really just one large partnership of support.”

BeyondTrust’s Mattan says talking is more than half the battle. “Regularly talk with your partners about what they need, how they want to communicate, where you are jointly missing opportunities, etc.,” he says. “They’ll give you 80 percent of what you need. It’s up to you to try other methods of engaging that fill in that other 20 percent, so this is where your data and creativity come in.”

Replicant’s Tennant advocates knowledge sharing. “Stayed informed yourself, and help your partners stay informed,” he says. “Stay informed at a macro and micro level.”

Open communication means taking information in, not just blasting it out. “We need to truly understand the partner’s business,” says Bigleaf’s Brooker. “We need to understand what is important to them and work up a mutually beneficial business plan. If we take the time to understand them and what would make us win together based on their definition, not ours, they will be more engaged.”

“We need to build trust and demonstrate our commitment… and request the same from our partners,” says Appgate’s Funk. “We must develop and nurture our relationships!”

Amen to that.

Aligning Activities to a Successful Partner Engagement Plan

Aligning your activities and goals with your partner engagement plan takes effort and organization, but it doesn’t have to be painful. An article we put together on key elements of a successful partner engagement plan provides a solid framework to help you get started. Those include:

1. Build strong relationships between your organizations. You’ll never engage your partners if you treat channel activity as a task. Partner relationships need nurturing (see the points below—especially 4 and 5).
2. Develop partner-friendly programs and content that can help them close business. As we always say, help a partner grow their business and you’ll keep that partner for life. Sales training, product education, white-label materials, and even closing support can keep your partners productive and coming back for more.
3. Communicate consistently with your partners. Things change fast in today’s business world. In the tech space, it happens at a dizzying speed. Help keep partners current on technology changes, product releases, feature updates and even industry trends. That, in turn, helps your partners remain knowledgeable and helpful to their customers, which means more revenue for you and your partners.
4. Get partner buy-in on your programs. The best way to make sure you’re meeting your partners’ needs is to ask them. Too often, companies create programs or materials that miss the mark with partner needs. It’s a partnership. Give them a seat at your design table.
5. Get channel manager buy-in. Your channel managers also need a seat at the table. They’re in the trenches with your partners every day and help you develop or refine your program with real-world insight gleaned from work with many partners.

• Sales and marketing alignment increases the power of marketing’s contributions to sales cycles, resulting in substantial improvements in key revenue and growth metrics including top-line growth, higher lead-closing ratios, shorter sales cycles, and many other measures of health and competitive advantage.

• Obstacles to sales and marketing alignment include disjointed communications, misaligned goals and siloed departments.

• Channel marketing and sales alignment strategies should include objectives that facilitate greater sales- and marketing-team collaboration by communicating frequently, building trust, establishing shared vocabularies, aligning goals and measuring outcomes.

• Interviews with channel leaders unearthed 10 concrete steps you can take to achieve channel marketing and sales alignment.

What’s not to love about aligning marketing and sales? Successful alignment positively impacts your top-line and bottom-line metrics by attracting more and better leads, boosting conversions, shortening sales cycles and improving customer experience. In short, you can gain more customers faster and then hold on to them longer—textbook markers for competitive advantage.

Sales and marketing alignment impacts your partner initiatives as well—and not just when recruiting channel partners. It continues to deliver advantages throughout the partner lifecycle—from channel partner onboarding to ongoing efforts to earn partner mindshare and keep them engaged.

In other words, like all things channel, marketing and sales alignment requires more effort but delivers greater rewards.

 

How Sales and Channel Marketing Collaboration Can Benefit Your Business

Sales and marketing alignment, or “smarketing,” refers to the integration of sales and marketing processes. Or, more simply put, sales and marketing collaboration.

Return-on-investment (ROI) from aligning these teams varies by business model, study, industry, etc., but are consistently substantial. The most commonly-cited statistics stem from a 2013 Marketo study that found:

• A 67% higher probability that marketing-generated leads will close.
• 108% better lead acceptance.
• A 209% stronger contribution to revenue from marketing-generated leads.

However, many sales and marketing professionals had zeroed in on the power of marketing and sales alignment long before then. In fact, in 2010, Aberdeen Strategy & Research (then known as “Aberdeen Group”) found that:

• Companies achieving best-practices in sales and marketing alignment have achieved an average 20 percent increase in revenue growth compared to laggards.
• Those same companies (achieving best practices) had much stronger marketing departments in terms of revenue generation— with 47 percent of their sales forecasted pipelines generated by marketing. Laggards fell well behind this benchmark at just 5 percent.

Remember, this was more than a decade ago. The very fact that major research organizations could benchmark for best practices speaks to just how long some firms have been pursuing sales and marketing alignment, even though it’s only bubbled up to our collective consciousness in recent years.

We could fill this page with statistics old and new, touting many more ROI benefits, but you get the point. They’re significant no matter how you slice them. In short, sales cycles are compressed and sales teams log more wins.

At this point, the question isn’t whether sales and marketing alignment is beneficial, but how to do it well.

Working Hand in Hand: Understanding the Importance of Sales in Marketing

For all its known benefits, successful marketing and sales alignment has proven surprisingly elusive—even to seasoned business managers. Just as the undertaking of alignment itself is complex, so are the reasons companies struggle to achieve sustainable, scalable alignment that’s baked into their business processes. Those challenges include:

• Disjointed communications: Historically, marketing departments focused primarily on brand building while sales teams on revenue generation. Over time, as the digital age emerged and marketers began to focus on lead and demand generation, the line between sales and marketing didn’t vanish so much as it moved. Marketing did its part and then handed off leads to sales teams for “the close.” That blunt handoff—which still exists inside many firms today—creates fractured communications and an inconsistent customer experience at precisely the wrong time—when customers have expressed interest in your products and services. The result? Marketers think sales teams are dropping the ball on hard-won prospects and sales teams think marketers are giving them worthless leads.
• Misaligned goals: When sales and marketing teams are pursuing different business outcomes, your entire revenue operation disagrees on what your overall business outcomes should be.
• Siloed departments: When departments have different communications objectives and business goals, the arc of interaction between those departments does not bend toward alignment. Instead, it bends toward retrenchment, mistrust and higher walls between them.

Overcoming these obstacles is essential because buyers are increasingly making purchasing decisions or completing most of their purchasing journey before speaking with a salesperson. The same goes for partners—particularly those in the digitally-savvy tech space who are putting themselves in the shoes of their customers when they’re interacting with your company.

All in, marketing needs to understand what sales departments are hearing on the ground with customers, and sales teams need to understand which marketing messages and assets have driven those customers to them. Bridging this gap and establishing a consistent experience for those customers throughout their journey is the sweet spot for maximizing revenue.

What to Consider When Creating a Channel Marketing and Sales Alignment Strategy

Aligning sales and marketing requires a sustained effort to address several essential needs. Those include:

• Opening lines of communication to establish shared purpose and visibility throughout the customer journey:
  • What marketing challenges can sales address?
  • What sales objectives can marketing help with?
  • What can marketing learn from sales conversations with partners and customers?
  • What can sales learn from partner and customer interactions with marketing assets?
  • Where are the weak spots in the partner journey, and how can both teams shore them up?
• Building trust between teams to keep everyone oriented toward customer acquisition and retention.
• Eliminating mismatched language between departments.
  • What’s a good lead versus a bad lead?
  • How do we score our leads?
  • How does a marketing qualified lead (MQL) compare to a sales qualified lead (SQL)?
  • What counts as a conversion?

• Aligning goals for shared business objectives and customer-centric key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Measuring success tangibly with tools like ZiftONE, which provides strong channel pipeline visibility.

10 Steps to Achieve Channel Marketing and Sales Alignment from Channel Leaders

We spoke with a dozen channel pros to help you establish the three essential pillars of sales and marketing alignment—communications, collaboration and common goals. They provided solid advice that we winnowed into a 10-step plan you can put to work right away.

1. Open Lines of Communication Between Sales and Marketing Teams
2. Get Sales Input into Marketing Activities
3. Establish an Ongoing Knowledge Exchange Between Sales and Marketing
4. Map Out Common Sales and Marketing Objectives
5. Establish Shared Goals for Sales and Marketing Teams
6. Check Your Work
7. Get Your Sales and Marketing Tech Stack in Place
8. Build and Test Your Sales and Marketing Campaigns
9. Measure, Adjust, Measure Again
10. Nurture Partnership Between Sales and Marketing Teams

Step 1: Open Lines of Communication Between Sales and Marketing Teams

It’s essential to establish meaningful communication between your sales and marketing departments. Make sure sales understands marketing’s challenges and vice versa. Tackle issues like language, terminology and objectives. You’ll move on to more detail, but the first step is getting sales and marketing to see each other in a new light to establish empathy and a desire for collaboration.

“The first thing to do is to get conversations happening,” says Theresa Caragol, Founder and CEO of partner performance company AchieveUnite. “Get peer groups and connections going between sales and marketing. It has to happen at the executive… level, as well as among the actual team. Use the opportunity of getting teams together to identify where there isn’t common vernacular.”

“First and foremost, you have to decide upon a common baseline,” says Aaron Acree, National Director of Master Agents at cloud communications company Nextiva. “You can’t go anywhere unless you know where you’re coming from. From there, find out what the problems are and how you can solve for them. It’s all about communication here, especially as technology is always changing.”

This process also helps the teams build compassion for each other. “Put them in a room [and] ask each to explain a day in the life,” says Steve Farmiloe, Senior Channel Sales Manager for AppSmart, a marketplace and master agency for technology services. “Then ask each department what they think the other department can do to make them successful.

“Show sales that marketing is doing part of the pipeline and revenue work,” adds Carlo di Colloredo-Mels, Senior Director of Global Partner Marketing at end-to-end enterprise automation platform provider UiPath. “That keeps your end goal in mind from day one.”

Step 2: Get Sales Input into Marketing Activities

As business has moved online, sales pros have ceded ever-increasing ground to marketing departments, who not only manage traditional areas like brand initiatives  but also demand generation, marketing funnels and parts of sales funnels. In other words, marketeers, you’ve had quite the decade.

Still, there’s one massive chink in your armor—the lack of direct, face-to-face interaction with partners and customers. Without that interaction, you can’t optimize experiential journeys or even develop the best lead qualification and scoring systems, for that matter. But you know who does have that knowledge? Salespeople. And you can learn a lot from them (if you ask and listen).

Irfan Fazlulla, Senior Director, Marketing Partnerships and Strategy for global business cloud communications provider Vonage, says getting this feedback is paramount when pursuing sales and marketing alignment. In the first 30 days, marketers should be “interviewing everyone on the sales team,” he advises. “Find out what they do, what they’re working on, what isn’t working for them, everything. When you talk to all those people, you’re going to get a good 360-degree view of what has been going on.”

“I always start with learning,” says MeiLee Langley, formerly of cloud communications company Nextiva. “Sit down and talk to the sales leaders and get feedback from them. Figure out the pulse of the business—where the gaps are, where opportunities are, then show them how those things can be addressed.”

Rachel Turkus, Director of Digital Marketing & Demand Generation for communications solutions provider NetFortris, points out that, besides downloading sales team feedback from their interactions with partners and customers, marketers can learn about the gaps between sales and marketing. “For the first 30 days, I think it is important to do one thing—listen to the sales team,” she says. “Find out what they expect from marketing, what their experience internally has been to date and what their expectations are moving forward.”

Kathy Mazza, Regional Vice President of Channel Sales – Strategic Masters for software-as-a-service (SaaS) communications solutions provider 8×8, suggests bringing in additional field-level players into the discussion. “In my experience, making sure that teams are in sync has shown clear alignment,” she says. “Also, bringing in masters, a subagent, and field marketing managers all in one place provides a clear line of sight at the leadership level as to what we’re doing.”

Step 3: Establish an Ongoing Knowledge Exchange Between Sales and Marketing

“There’s no substitute for cross-departmental communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing across sales, channel, marketing, product marketing, customer experience and customer success functions,” says Dina Moskowitz, Founder and CEO of partner discovery platform SaaSMAX. “Don’t cut corners—instill that in your corporate culture.”

Step 4: Map Out Common Sales and Marketing Objectives

Sometimes sales and marketing departments have operated in such deep silos that you’ll need to establish a common “North Star.” Other times, you’ll have found that star but haven’t mapped out how to get there. In both cases, this is where real collaboration between the teams starts.

“Map the customer journey from customer/partner identification and acquisition all the way through success, retention and renewal,” advises SaaSMAX’s Moskowitz. “Gain full alignment.”

“Sales and Marketing alignment is the cornerstone for driving accelerated growth. But the alignment needs to start from a position of mutually accepted definition and understanding of the customer and, as an extension, the partner,” says Vonage’s Fazlulla. “Laboring on building that initial foundation by essentially ‘becoming’ a part of the sales teams – interviewing your sales peers and partners, tagging along in demos and sales meetings; and listening in on our SDRs and BDRs, among other things, is what will not just define your business growth but how fast you will grow. ”

At this stage, you also can start to look at goals and processes with an analytical eye. “Look at what regions you’re trying to focus on,” says Jennifer Schulze, Vice President of Channel and Field Marketing at information management solutions provider OpenText. “What products are you trying to push? What partners do you want to work with? Start with the number you want, then slice and dice that number according to where you’re going to get it.”

It’s also important to establish responsibilities as you map out your objectives. “We need to know where one team starts and stops and where the other team starts and stops,” says AchieveUnite’s Caragol. “People must know what they’re responsible for.”

Step 5: Establish Shared Goals for Sales and Marketing Teams

“Set common goals that marketing and sales have to achieve together,” advises AchieveUnite’s Caragol.

For his part, Paul Mora, Head of Global Enterprise and Channel Marketing at mission-critical communications and analytics provider Motorola Solutions, prefers a reverse-engineering approach to goal setting. “Start with the end result in mind,” he suggests. “What does success look like? Lay out a vision for the year, and then peel back on how to achieve that vision through the different quarters.”

Step 6: Check Your Work

Your fourth-grade teacher taught you more than you realized during those painful afternoons of long division homework— how to withstand the torture of monotonous repetition, the mercy of rounding to short decimal places and an everlasting love for calculators. This was also when you learned the importance of checking your work. And that’s exactly what you should do once you have your communications lines open, goals outlined and KPIs in place. After all, you’re bridging the chasm between two cultures, perhaps for the first time.

“Confirm that everyone involved understands the who, what, when, where, why and how of each campaign,” advises Oanh McClure, Director of Alliances and Channels for cloud security provider Zscaler. “It seems granular or tedious at times but getting back to basics is the most important factor of executing a successful campaign.”

Her advice is to make sure that all stakeholders are aligned on:

• Who the audience is
• What the messaging is (is it the right message for the audience?)
• When that message is most relevant and why we are talking about it now
• Where the messaging resonates
• Why partners and customers should care
• How to provide value based on why they should care

 

Step 7: Get Your Sales and Marketing Tech Stack in Place

With your starting objectives and KPIs in mind, it’s time to audit your tech stack for any gaps. For example, will your current tools accomplish everything you need? How about measurement and analytics? Figure out what you’re missing and fill those holes so you can get your campaigns moving.

“The channel often is a big donut hole when it comes to marketing and sales analytics,” says Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer at Zift Solutions. “Relying on second hand reports from overly optimistic channel managers isn’t the best way to get the data you need for accurate forecasting. Instead, invest in a platform that measures the performance of your channel as you intend – as a vital extension of your team.”

Step 8: Build and Test Your Sales and Marketing Campaigns

At long last (OK, not really, you’ll probably get here in 90 days or less), it’s time to build and assess your first campaigns. Test them internally with stakeholders first, then run A and B testing on the campaign ideas your internal teams believed were the strongest contenders. (You can test other ideas going forward, but in the interest of getting campaigns deployed and revenue moving, pick some “best candidates.”).

Deploy those best candidates and watch your metrics closely while they scale so you can make adjustments if you need to. Be sure to keep lines of communication open, with regular meetings and feedback. Your marketing team can inform sales reps of assets and messaging campaigns that resonate strongly at the top and middle of the funnel. Your sales teams can pass vital information upstream from their interaction with prospective partners and customers.

Step 9: Measure, Adjust, Measure Again

As your campaigns build and you leverage results data to drive continuous improvement, it’s essential to focus first on metrics that have the greatest impact.

“When we look at the reporting, what item do you want immediate improvement on?” asks NetFortris’ Turkus.

The answer to that question—and those like it—will impact not just your campaigns but the ongoing interaction between sales and marketing. This is why shared goals are vital to your efforts—adjustments you make in your program should align with each department’s objectives without compromising the other department. Everyone should be able to realize the same hits and misses from the same data sheet. When that’s in place, your entire team will focus on the best possible outcome for your organization.

Step 10: Nurture Partnership Between Sales and Marketing Teams

Creating a culture of partnership between sales and marketing teams is critical to long-term success. “Everything falls under relationship and mentality,” says UiPath’s di Colloredo-Mels. “Marketing is a partner [to sales], not a resource or provider of support. If you can think this way, you’re starting in the right place.”

• Sales and marketing alignment is a challenging but worthwhile pursuit that can generate double- and triple-digit improvement in vital key performance indicators (KPIs). 

• Because of the channel’s added complexity, channel sales and alignment holds even greater potential for synergies than with “plain vanilla” marketing. 

• Focusing on “three Cs” can help channel sales and marketing leaders achieve successful alignment that benefits their companies, sales partners and customers.

• Interviews with channel experts identified 10 actionable DOs and DON’Ts that can help channel sales and marketing practitioners achieve key goals including predictable sales funnels, focus on metrics that “move the needle,” collaboration and shared goals and outcomes, among others.  

NEWSFLASH: Sales and marketing alignment gets results!

OK, that’s not exactly news. In 2013, a study emerged that yielded a now-infamous trifecta of statistics touting the benefits of sales and marketing alignment, and the sales and marketing worlds have been chasing the brass ring ever since:

• 67% higher probability that marketing-generated leads will close
• 108% better lead acceptance
• 209% stronger contribution to revenue from marketing-generated leads

Those stats live on today in presentations, articles and cocktail conversations. Since then, studies have examined the benefits across a dizzying array of dimensions. While the numbers may vary depending on the research and the industry, they all point to the same overall trend: massive gains from sales and marketing alignment. That’s true when selling to end users and recruiting channel partners.

Today, with buyers completing more of their buying journey before they speak with a sales representative, the competitive gap between companies that successfully align sales and marketing and those that don’t will only grow.

No Easy Undertaking: Successfully Combining Sales and Marketing

Achieving sales and marketing alignment – or “smarketing” – is a complex undertaking that boils down to three Cs:

• Communication: Left to their own devices, sales and marketing teams have no idea what the other is up to. When they do, they often don’t understand why. These blind spots do not form foundations suitable for delivering the consistent customer experience your firm needs to compete today. Bridging this gap is essential.
• Collaboration: Most of the time, marketers and salespeople are dealing with customers at different stages of the customer journey, or the sales funnel, or the buying cycle, or whatever term you prefer to describe the process of nurturing prospects and converting them to customers. Once those lines of communications are open, it’s essential to get your team actively working together to provide the right information – and human interaction – at the right time. This means leveraging marketing analytics to identify weak points in that journey, sharing what salespeople learn in their interactions with customers, trying and testing ideas that delight customers and shorten sales cycles, and bringing about shared success.
• Common Goals: Speaking of shared success, it’s virtually impossible to bring sales and marketing into alignment if they have competing or disjointed goals. All too often, sales and marketing departments don’t operate like they’re on the same team. Marketing teams think sales teams botch follow-up on the leads they give them, and sales teams think marketing sends them lousy leads. Sure, lead qualification and scoring can help to deliver accountability on both sides of that equation, but you want your teams on the same page, not policing each other or butting heads. After all, for all the complexities of your products and services and communications and interactions, the end goal itself is simple: winning and retaining customers. The goals for each department need to align along that same, simple axis.

Channel Marketing and Sales Alignment Examples from Channel Leaders

I know what you’re thinking: That may all be true, Laz, but it’s far easier said than done. 

My answer: Absolutely. 

Sales and marketing alignment is indeed challenging, but it’s still a vital undertaking for your long-term competitiveness. So, we dug through our contact list and called on some friends we have in the channel who focus on this alignment every day. Here are some examples they shared on how they define successful alignment, along with a few anecdotes to help you along. 

In the Channel, it’s About Partner Success, Too

Channel practitioners have an advantage over other marketing and sales pros when it comes to sales and marketing alignment in that their channel models are designed to help sales partners succeed. Ultimately, that focus can help drive success for the provider, the channel partner and the customer.

“Successful marketing and sales alignment means that your internal team is aligned with your partners’ and customers’ success,” says Dina Moskowitz, Founder and CEO of SaaSMAX, creators of the Partner Optimizer partner discovery platform. “It indicates that your organization invests in the processes and tools to reduce friction and inefficiencies, and it instills a corporate culture that encourages collaboration and communication.”

Theresa Caragol, Founder and CEO of partner performance company AchieveUnite, agrees. “Marketing, digital marketing specifically, has become much more important,” she says. “If you believe that is happening because of COVID and the new way of work, then it furthers the importance of sales and marketing interlocking. Marketing, sales, and – if you have it, a channel or partner ecosystem – all need to be interlocked together in order to be successful. The degree to which that interlock happens is the degree to which companies that have partner and channel strategies are successful.”

PRO TIP: Since marketing enablement is incorporated into channel partner onboarding and channel partners also interact with your channel sales teams as they’re coming up to speed, a natural sales and marketing opportunity exists during onboarding.

Sales and Marketing Alignment Creates a Predictable Sales Funnel

“Ultimately, the definition of success of marketing and sales alignment is a predictable sales funnel,” says Rachel Turkus, Director of Digital Marketing and Demand Generation for communications solutions provider NetFortris. “Alignment means so many things – messaging syncs, timing calendars, open honest communication and most importantly transparent reporting.  All these things – when done right – lead to a predictable sales funnel.”

Note that Turkus didn’t say that a successful marketing funnel delivers predictability. Customers may start in a marketing funnel, but ultimately, it’s the ability to forecast revenue through your sales funnel that signals that you’re achieving scalable, reliable alignment.

Metrics that Matter Need to Be Specific and Aligned

That reliable sales funnel that NetFortris’ Turkus cites is driven by metrics for processes beneath those top-line sales conversions. The better you dial those metrics in and successfully align them for both sales and marketing, the stronger your performance.

Jennifer Schulze, Vice President of Channel and Field Marketing at information management solutions provider OpenText, defines success as “having common metrics and goals. Not just high-level metrics and goals but having those on a deeper level: for individual partner types, according to how you go to market in various regions, and also according to what you don’t do.”

Those goals need to be in alignment. Paul Mora, Head of Global Enterprise and Channel Marketing at mission-critical communications and analytics provider Motorola Solutions, defines successful alignment as “shared goals clearly visible to both teams [with] full alignment on what success looks like.” Motorola Solutions connects people and technologies to make the world safer through a powerful ecosystem of critical communications, video security and analytics and command center software.

Carlo di Colloredo-Mels, Senior Director of Global Partner Marketing at end-to-end enterprise automation platform provider UiPath agrees. “To me, successful marketing and sales alignment is when marketing has a metric that is completely aligned with the sales goals,” he says.

Collaboration is the Lynchpin for Sales and Marketing Alignment

“[Successful sales and marketing alignment] starts with the people being completely aligned through the organization,” says Kathy Mazza, Regional Vice President of Channel Sales – Strategic Masters for software-as-a-service (SaaS) communications solutions provider 8×8. “Marketing has one direction, sales has another, but they’re absolutely intertwined – which starts with collaboration.”

Even when divisions between sales and marketing appear to be more traditional on the surface, collaboration drives success. “Successful marketing goes hand in hand with sales alignment,” says Steve Farmiloe, Senior Channel Sales Manager for AppSmart, a marketplace and master agency for technology services. “The role of marketing is to position and message the unique, crisp, compelling value proposition. Sales then spreads the word. When marketing and sales are in alignment, revenue quickly follows.”

Sales Needs to Own Its Part Throughout the Cycle

Breaking down walls isn’t just a matter of marketing accepting input from sales. Sometimes, sales needs to keep from creating scenarios that drop “do this” bombs on marketing teams.

“Field Marketing should never operate in a silo independent of the field,” says Oanh McClure, Director of Alliances and Channels for cloud security provider Zscaler. “In order to have proper alignment, there must be agreement as to who the audience/target is, who will support it, what is the messaging, what is the positioning, etc. Oftentimes, sales passes ownership of an event to marketing, and then after it is executed, sales will complain that marketing made too many executive decisions. Sales needs to own their part and effort in the conversation.”

Sales and Marketing Must Value the Other

Aaron Acree, National Director of Master Agents at cloud communications company Nextiva, notes that sales doesn’t happen without marketing. “If there’s disconnect between the two, then partners are going to get confused,” he says. “Alignment will lead to less confusion across the board.”

That cross-unit respect is a two-way street. MeiLee Langley, formerly of Nextiva, says that marketing needs to “make it easy and make it quick” in order for successful alignment to happen. “Be willing to listen to sales and accept their feedback,” she says. 

“Marketing and sales is like a marriage,” says Samantha Bontemps, Senior Channel Marketing Manager for communications provider Vonage. “You’re in a mutual partnership and you have to work to achieve the same goals. True marketing and sales alignment comes into play when you have a team that works together well. It’s important that you have an interactive, involved dialogue between these teams where everybody can bring their ideas to the table.”

10 DOs and DON’Ts of Channel Marketing and Sales Alignment

With their viewpoints on successful sales and marketing alignment in place, we asked these same channel sales and marketing pros for tips that can help you kickstart or give new life to your sales and marketing alignment efforts. 

Here are 10 DOs and DON’Ts we culled from those discussions.

Tip #1: DO Start with Communication

The overwhelming consensus from our group of experts was that opening lines of dialogue between sales and marketing is the essential component in building sales and marketing alignment. Keep the interaction positive and help your teams understand the challenges the other team faces, focusing on collective goals and each team assisting the other.

“I would start by getting marketing and sales into a room and discussing the measurable objectives of each department,” says AppSmart’s Farmiloe. “Then I would ask each to communicate how the other department can help in the achievement of those goals.”

Tip #2: DO Focus on Building Trust

“The biggest hurdle [in sales and marketing alignment] is developing the trust,” says Langley. “When marketing comes in, sales can wonder what they’re bringing to the table. Instead of becoming defensive, humble yourself. You have to earn their trust and respect.”

That same skepticism also plays out in reverse in some instances, particularly when marketers hand off hard-won leads blindly and don’t have visibility into how they are handled. A vital part of cross-departmental interaction should focus on delivering visibility and transparency between departments so all parties can see the hard work of the other team toward their common goals.

Tip #3: DO Make Time for Knowledge Sharing

Most of us live in a fast-paced, whirlwind world. Time – or a lack of it – is a well-known obstacle to sales and marketing alignment. Make sure you establish time for your teams to not only talk about their challenges and objectives but to share knowledge as well. 

“Find/make the time to share strategic knowledge across functions,” advises SaaSMAX’s Moskowitz.

AchieveUnite’s Caragol agrees. “One hurdle that teams will face is if they don’t speak the same language,” she says. “Thinking everyone’s saying the same thing but not really being on the same page can be a huge hurdle. The importance of a common language is really critical.”

Tip #4: DO Leverage Portals and Platforms When Possible

From partner onboarding to sales enablement, portals and platforms can go a long way toward helping with channel sales and marketing alignment.

“Portals keep things consistent and set systems up that everyone can turn to,” says OpenText’s Schulze. “Portals also enable automation, which is vital for marketing.”

Vonage’s Bontemps agrees. “The portal is one of the biggest proponents of marketing and sales alignment,” she says. “We have to enable our partners and with the portal, we’re giving them tools to succeed and help them move the ball forward. Also, with a portal, it’s a one-stop-shop for marketing. You can load assets, data sheets, and email campaigns in there. The portal gives us a sort of common room where we can all meet.”

Shared insight, key performance indicators (KPIs) and campaign efficacy also deliver value. “One of our key tools includes campaign dashboards showing the impact of our efforts in terms of leads, data-driven and field results, and other programmatic impacts to measure ROI,” says Mora of Motorola Solutions.

Tip #5: DO Use Familiar Tools When Practical

Some portals and platforms facilitate end-to-end interaction and enablement. But in many cases, they integrate with major CRMs and sales-automation tools. Leveraging well-known platforms that your channel teams and partners are likely to have worked with can facilitate better campaign execution.

“My team is digital marketing and demand generation,” says NetFortris’ Turkus. “We try to use the tools that our channel managers are the most comfortable with – including HubSpot, Calendly and social – to highlight the channel managers themselves.”

Tip #6: DO Facilitate Education and Training

“I would definitely recommend educational programs like our Channel Acceleration Bootcamp [that enable] marketers, partnering professionals, and sales to be aligned,” says AchieveUnite’s Caragol.

She also notes that using automation tools also helps to drive knowledge exchange by osmosis. “Similarly, marketing automation platforms provide one integrated experience for multiple teams,” she says. “That’s going to drive cross-training by nature.”

Tip #7: DO Use Budgets Strategically

“The way you use your budget is crucial,” says UiPath’s di Colloredo-Mels. “When there’s a sales and marketing alignment, the conversation about budget is the same. Goals are aligned. Sales, pipeline, revenue — these are all benefits [of the process],” he says.

Tip #8: DON’T Point Fingers

It’s crucial that marketing and sales steer away from “the blame game.”

“Facts and data inspire constructive collaboration and successful sales and marketing alignment,” says Vonage’s Bontemps. “It’s hard to argue with numbers, and removing emotions from the table makes it easier for everyone to work together.”

Tip #9: DON’T Allow Poaching from the Sidelines

As we’ve discussed, successful sales and marketing alignment is all about the details, whether we’re talking knowledge exchange, goal setting, or testing and refinement. It’s difficult to sustain the open lines of communications and trust when one party opts out of portions of the process.

A classic example is the blind handoff of leads from the marketing department we discussed earlier. But it can happen in the other direction too, and it’s important to avoid situations such as when “sales doesn’t want to handle the nuances of execution, but critiques the result,” advises Zscaler’s McClure.

Tip #10: DON’T Be Afraid to Speak Up and Ask Questions

B2B sales and marketing is complex — especially when you’re selling technology solutions. Channel sales and marketing is even more complicated. Mesh them together, and opportunities for confusion abound — especially when you’re aligning departments. Make it safe for your teams to ask questions without feeling self-conscious.

Vonage’s Bontemps reminds us of a timeless piece of wisdom our teachers shared with us throughout our school years. “Don’t be afraid to look dumb and ask questions,” she says. “I guarantee somebody else in the room has the same question.”

Taking our best practices on the road? Here are our 10 tips to align sales and marketing – straight from channel leaders.

Have anything you want to add? Sound off in the comments below.

Successful channel marketing doesn’t just happen. It takes planning, resources and a sustained effort. Channel marketing is more complex than other marketing efforts because you must simultaneously market to your partners – often through multiple layers of distribution – and through your partners to end customers. However, the rewards for your redoubled efforts are much greater since channel partners that are successfully activated become force multipliers that can bring in new customers.

Getting Started on Your Channel Partner Marketing Plan

The first steps toward a successful channel marketing program begin well before the marketing starts, with foundational channel program investments, including:

• C-Suite Commitment: Any channel veteran can tell you that nothing has hampered company success in the channel more than wishy-washy executive teams that flip-flop on their channel commitments. For some companies – especially big brands – that’s meant entering, leaving and reentering the channel altogether. Such boomerang behavior ceases when channel-friendly firms rack up revenue gains, often at the incumbents’ expense. For other firms, vacillating has been more subtle, such as limited commitments to partner enablement and marketing. We’ve said it before, and we’re saying it here again – there is no better way to build lucrative, long-term relationships with channel partners than to help them grow their businesses.Taking the time to spell out the virtues of partner enablement to get C-Suite buy-in upfront can help you secure the commitment and resources you need to develop channel enablement best practices.
• Rock-Solid Onboarding: You need to include partner marketing in your onboarding process. There’s no doubt about that. However, the best partner marketing plan in the world won’t matter if the rest of your channel partner onboarding program fails to deliver – particularly since partners’ first impressions influence your potential for repeat business.

Equip Yourself with the Right Channel Partner Marketing Tools

The cornerstone of effective channel marketing is content. But, following the pandemic, the bar for content marketing is higher. According to new research from Content Marketing Institute,  it’s no longer enough to create content that can help customers find us through search engine optimization (SEO); we must also create content experiences that boost engagement throughout the customer lifecycle – from awareness and evaluation to purchase and advocacy. And channel marketers must pull double duty, executing campaigns to engage both partners and partners’ customers. To deliver on this tall order, channel marketers need a veritable war chest of marketing tools.

• Develop a Strong Company and Channel Brand. To-channel marketing has two primary objectives: The first is to sign up partners, and the second – and often the more difficult to achieve – is to motivate partners to sell your solutions. To do this, channel marketers must avail themselves of all content marketing vehicles (see list below) to establish thought leadership, generate interest and maintain mindshare. While partners may have a reputation for being coin-operated or aligning with the highest bidder, savvy ones look for partner programs with strong marketing support (an area where they tend to be weak). They also will tell you that one of the most important things vendors can do to strengthen their channel is build their company’s own brand, making it easier for partners to sell their solutions to end customers. Content is key to both company and channel branding initiatives.
• Create Brandable Content. Through-channel content is similar to what you would develop for your direct marketing efforts. The primary difference is that all physical and digital assets are designed to be branded or co-branded by your partners. Best-in-class channel marketing programs go further than simply leaving room for partners to slap on their logo and web address; they enable partners to customize channel marketing collateral with their own messaging that promotes their value proposition as well as your products. Examples of brandable content include:
  • Flyers and data sheets
  • Battlecards
  • Blogs
  • Case studies
  • eBooks
  • White papers
  • Presentations
  • Videos
  • Podcasts
  • Webinars
  • Events
  • Digital campaigns
  • Social campaigns
• Automate Digital/Social Campaigns. To ensure consistent and persistent marketing messaging, automate your to- and through-channel campaigns. Using a tool like ZiftONE, channel marketers can automate campaigns for partners. They can also build turnkey nurture campaigns and workflows that partners can activate to communicate with their end customers and prospects via email. Marketers can also boost their brands (and yours) by automating co-branded posts to social channels.
• Build a Content Factory. To generate all this content, you need to build a well-oiled channel marketing content factory, including:
  • An experienced content development team consisting of in-house, freelance, or agency talent with a range of skill sets, including marketing, writing, and design, research and long-form content development, industry and solutions knowledge, and channel expertise.
  • A full-featured channel marketing management software platform to help you manage and scale your partner relationships as you grow.
• Offer Agency-level Assistance. Increasingly, channel marketers are supplementing their content factories with an ecosystem of marketing agencies that can assist partners with executing through-channel campaigns. Some vendors are simplifying agency-partner collaboration with directories like ZiftONE’s Services Marketplace. In some cases, vendors are funding agency assistance in whole or part through MDF or other reward programs. This approach not only bridges the marketing talent gap at many partner organizations but also ensures partners align with agencies with capabilities that are pre-screened and vendor-approved.

7 Steps to Build Your Channel Partner Marketing Program

To help you build (or update) your channel marketing program, we returned to our all-star panel of channel marketing gurus to identify seven key steps you can take to set yourself up for success. Collectively, our panelists are responsible for billions of dollars in channel partner revenue development. They didn’t disappoint, delivering candid, actionable advice you can put to work right away.

Step 1: Lead Channel Marketing Programs with Purpose

Channel partners aren’t just independent salespeople. They’re businesses in their own right, with their own objectives and challenges. If your targeting is on point, you’re recruiting and working with partners that solve problems or create efficiencies for end customers that can benefit from your solutions. Your approach to those partners needs to be driven with the same attention to purpose that underpins your core value proposition for end customers.

“A channel partner, for all practical purposes, is a power customer that brings you revenue,” says Khali Henderson, Senior Partner for channel marketing firm BuzzTheory. “You can create considerable value and consistency by formally establishing why you’re doing business in the channel, the problems you aim to solve and opportunities you aim to create for your partners, just as you do for your end customers.”

These foundational principles help crystallize operational and marketing objectives, making it easier to scale while maintaining core values and consistently rewarding partner performance.

 

Step 2: Map Your Channel Marketing Communications

In the same way that direct marketing targets various buyer personas, channel marketing must target a range of decision-makers, too. The difference is that these decision-makers may be part of one or more organizations that make up your distribution channel. Mapping them is essential for effective communications.

Be sure to identify:

• To-channel marketing points. In the simplest of scenarios, channel marketers need only target partners directly, but often, there’s also a distributor they must convince and convert first to gain access to selling partners. And the distributor often remains the gatekeeper, governing all future communications to their partners. In many cases, vendor communications are not only screened but “pay to play,” putting speed bumps on your path to partner engagement. Once connected with a partner, getting mindshare may not be straightforward but involve communications with different stakeholders, such as owners and sellers, etc. (See organizational roles below.)

• Through-channel marketing points. At best, selling through partners to end customers is two steps, but it can be more if there are distributors in the mix. Complicating this marketing motion is that channel marketers often need to pair through-channel campaigns with to-channel messaging about objectives, promotions and sales incentives. Establishing these essential communications and experience points helps you with content strategy, of course, but also enables you to prepare to measure the right outcomes from the right activities. “For channel market-to activities, we measure partner enrollment and engagement,” says Tamara Prazak, National Channel Director for secure access solutions provider Appgate. “For channel market-through efforts, we measure leads, opportunities and bookings.”

• Partner types. In many cases, your channel program won’t comprise a homogenous group. A classic example is referring partners versus selling partners. At a minimum, their “hot buttons” are different – one wants to passively throw leads over the fence while the other wants to actively sell your solution. In another more complex example from the tech space, there may be many types of partners, including sales agents, value-added resellers, white-label resellers, systems integrators and managed services providers, etc. – all of which may sell your solution but for different reasons with different compensation models and different pre- and post-sales responsibilities up to and including installation, billing and customer care. In this scenario, both recruitment and enablement marketing materials must be tailored to match their go-to-market models.

• Organizational roles. “First, figure out your partner types,” says Heather Margolis, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Founder of channel demand-gen platform, Spark Your Channel. “Then ensure that in your communications, you have some roles-based communication.” Messaging that may convince an owner to sign on as a partner may not be the same messaging required to motivate sales reps to introduce your solutions to their customers.

• Specialization. Your partners may come to the table with expertise in health care, financial or other industries. Or they may focus on multinational enterprises or small and medium businesses (SMBs). Capitalize on their specializations by tailoring your messaging to vertical or horizontal needs. Even when your partners or solutions are more broadly focused, tailored marketing can boost results. “Customizing campaign language, use cases and positioning of your products for a specific vertical or company size can make your marketing more relatable, drive more engagement and, ultimately, more conversions for you and your partners,” says  Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer for enterprise channel management platform provider Zift Solutions.

Step 3: Allocate Your Channel Marketing Spend

In marketing, the term “different strokes for different folks” comes into play everywhere — even when it comes to budgeting. Prioritization can vary dramatically from company to company.

“It really depends on the individual company,” says Maeve Naughton, President and Owner of MKN Consulting Group. “Some companies that I’ve worked with … put all the money into the MDF program, so they can help partners track the success and results of trade shows, email campaigns, or webinars… More mature channel programs may want to develop technology resources and services for partners.” 

And sometimes, companies make multivariable calculations. “We take a lot of different things into account when assigning marketing budget,” says Karen Levy Newnam, Senior Director, Americas Channel Marketing for cloud infrastructure provider Nutanix. “[These include] contribution of segment/geo/partners to the overall business, historical partner engagement, managed partner status, sales leadership big bets, quality of the plan, marketing/sales plan alignment , etc.”

The takeaway from these experts – whose sentiments were reflected throughout our panel – dovetails with our own long experiences in partner enablement. There’s no single “right way” to budget and prioritize channel program spend, and it likely will change over time. The key is to incentivize the outcomes you want and then market and enable those outcomes effectively.

Step 4: Develop Your Channel Marketing Assets

As we noted earlier, nothing impacts your campaigns more than effective content. Successful ads have great content. Videos that convert have solid scripts. Landing page conversions? Yeah… it’s all about the content. Whatever content you create has to move the needle. That means your content team needs to understand your technology, channels, verticals, to-channel and through-channel marketing, and how to effectively (and affordably) franchise content throughout that ecosystem.

As to which types of content you need? That will vary — as will the performance of that content — depending on your markets and partners.

For example, Sylvia Judkins, Channel Marketing Operations Manager at Intermedia Cloud Communications, says for her partners, the biggest draws are the downloadable single-sheet flyers. “A lot of our partners want to easily grab a piece of content, brand it and shoot it out,” she says.  

Partners’ desire for fast sales means fewer take advantage of email nurture campaigns spanning weeks or months. “Nurture campaigns work well for a subset of partners but require commitment and time,” Judkins says. “They can yield great results, but in today’s world, people are looking for quick results, which impacts the percentage of partners that engage with nurture campaigns. 

In contrast, David Portnowitz, Chief Marketing Officer for communications and collaboration provider Star2Star, says campaigns outperform individual deliverables for his partners. “Anything that we can develop for our partners that is more of a full campaign has worked better than one-off content,” he says. “We’ve had success with unique gifting campaigns. Ultimately, it’s got to be holistic.”

Even when you have top-tier content teams at your disposal, strategic alignment with partner and buyer journeys is vital. You need to deliver the right asset at the right time and circumstance. “It is more how each type of collateral is being used that has determined success,” notes Nutanix’s Levy Newnam. “Different types of collateral are effective at different phases of the buyer’s journey. Ultimately our data shows this as well as the importance of how the resulting leads are nurtured.”

Step 5: Deploy Your Channel Marketing Assets (and Keep it Simple)

At deployment time, channel program management software can be your best friend. “You’ve got to fill a library as fast as you can,” says Star2Star’s Portnowitz. “Assuming you have a platform like Zift to help you, you’ve got to have the people and content in place. You can adapt from there.”

It’s also essential to make it simple for partners to work with you, Portnowitz adds. “What doesn’t work well is putting stuff in [your library] and telling Mr. and Mrs. Partner that it’s ‘in here’ and ‘go get it.’ You have got to make it easy for the partner, handhold them through that process, talk to them about how other partners use that process and make it successful.”

John Macario, Senior Vice President of Enterprise and Channel Marketing for communications solutions and networking provider Ribbon Communications, also advocates warming up the partner experience as much as possible. “Be nice to your partners,” he advises. “Despite all this automation, we’re talking to human beings. You need to build relationships; this is not transactional. If you’re in tech, you need to have relationships with your partners and you need to focus on the efforts of your colleagues, your peers, and your superiors.”

Intermedia’s Judkins agrees. “We really make it easy for a partner to do business with us – from the channel program itself… to an entire team of sales, tech and marketing support, ready and eager to help a partner be successful,” she says.

Step 6: Test, Refine, Repeat Your Channel Marketing Programs

Measurement and refinement of your programs are essential to maximizing ROI. “We use a full cross-section of metrics to measure success and provide a roadmap,” says Natascha Lee, Director of Global Channel and Partner Marketing for TIBCO Software. For her firm, metrics include:

• Partner ecosystem coverage
• Maturity and readiness
• Partner activity and participation in key programs
• Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)
• Sales-qualified leads (SQLs)
• Opportunities
• Pipeline stages
• Product pillar focus and mix
• New logo vs. Upsell
• Certifications
• Customer and partner satisfaction

“The key is to take data snapshots on a regular basis to measure the growth in each of these key areas, as well as to compare the indirect business to your direct business,” Lee advises. “This way, you can pinpoint trending by partner, partner type as well as find hidden correlations that can be leveraged to increase partner success.”

Andra Hedden, Chief Marketing Officer and Owner of Marketopia, has advice on taking the development of channel marketing programs one step further. “The ultimate next step in any forward-thinking partner program is the last mile – actually generating leads for your partners as a value of your program. We help many vendors do just that – we help to generate not only marketing qualified leads (MQLs) for their partners, but sales qualified leads (SQLs – appointments) as well.”

Bridging the gap between sales and marketing is essential to ongoing refinement. “As a vendor, it’s important to always be thinking about how to help the partner scale to grow. One way to do this is to take the burden off of them to generate their own leads and let them focus on closing and servicing the business vs finding it. Helping partners generate qualified leads through your program is a huge value add and will differentiate your program from the rest.”

That collaboration extends to partners, of course, who are high-value sales arms. So, in addition to your quantitative evaluations, be sure to solicit partner feedback. They can give you qualitative assessments that can help you refine your materials or help you identify assets that deliver better than their stats might reveal.

Step 7: Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment with Channel Marketing

A common theme in our discussions with channel marketing leaders is the need for creativity, innovation and experimentation. “I’m a big fan of let’s just try it,” says Star2Star’s Portnowitz. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll pivot and move on.”

“The best marketers are focused on becoming better marketers,” says BuzzTheory’s Henderson. “They’re always learning and trying new things – not just in creative and campaigns but in process and delivery as well. So, even when you’re leading the pack, there’s always opportunity for innovation and improvement in an ecosystem as complex as the channel.” 

That intricacy is what attracts many top marketers to the channel to begin with. “You have to love the complexity of the channel,” says TIBCO’s Lee. “It’s like 3-D chess –  every decision has layers and layers.”

Ah, channel partners—you gotta love ’em. They bring your company business on a pay-for-performance basis. They give you access to accounts that your direct team usually can’t reach. They can also accelerate your revenue growth faster than any other engine. But, like all valuable relationships, you have to nurture them to keep them warm and productive—no small feat when your competitors shower them with promises of fat incentives and partnership nirvana.

Fortunately, channel partners are businesspeople. This means that most of them (the ones you want to invest in, at least) will evaluate the full package and choose long-term partnerships with providers they can rely on rather than short-term financial incentives. That said, incentives and earnings matter—partners are in business to make money, after all—but delivering a high-value package that partners can rely on over the long haul can help you stave off irrational bidders and would-be poachers.

This stiff competition is why it’s vital to nail down channel partner onboarding best practices. You want to make a positive impression on your new partners as they form important opinions about working with you. It’s also why you need best practices in place to ensure that you’re engaging partners on their terms in order to earn their mindshare.

What is Channel Marketing, Anyway?

Channel marketing for our purposes means marketing to partners in the indirect sales channel. Traditionally, channel partners were the distributors of manufacturers’ equipment. Today, many companies leverage channel distribution strategies for software, IT services, telecom services and more. It’s become so prominent in the tech space that marketing through these distributors, agents, resellers, consultants and the like is simply called “the channel.”

Marketing in the channel often includes cross-channel marketing, but it’s much more complex than that because you need to communicate your value proposition not just to the end customer, as with direct marketing, but to and through your sales channels as well. And you also have to communicate value just for your sales partners.

From 10,000 feet, channel marketing is usually discussed in two forms— to channel and through channel:

• To-channel marketing usually means recruiting and engaging sales partners in your partnership with them—why they should work with you, benefits of working with you, how you can help them attract and serve their customers, and so on. To-channel marketing sometimes has multiple layers—e.g., distributors and master agencies as well as their networks of resellers or subagents.
• Through-channel marketing means marketing your products and services to end customers through your sales channels. This might include some to-channel elements (e.g., what partners get for selling that product) as well as sales-enablement training and materials your sales partners use to recruit and close end customer revenue.

Sales partners highly value effective through-channel marketing because it can help them close business. We’ve said it before, and it’s worth repeating: There’s no better way to build partner loyalty – which keeps you top-of-mind and your partners generating revenue – than helping your partners grow their businesses.

To do this well, you need to equip your sales partners with everything you’d arm your direct salesforce with— plus knowledge, institutional support and programs that help your partners’ businesses. All in, you’re addressing the needs of three parties at once: yours, your partner’s, and your partner’s customer. Aligning the needs of all three in a way that’s repeatable and scalable requires two key elements— a channel marketing management (CMM) platform and a channel partner marketing strategy.

What to Consider When Building a Channel Partner Marketing Strategy

Channel marketing plans are complex and varied, depending on business, product and industry. The pain points they need to address, however, are nearly universal. For product, service and platform providers, those include:

• Low partner engagement
• Abandoned campaigns
• MDF left on the table
• Ineffective campaigns
• Lack of measurement/visibility

For sales partners, the pain points your channel partner marketing strategy should address include:

• Ineffective campaigns (yes, some of these are the same for both parties— business partners sometimes feast and famine together!)
• Unused market development funds (MDF)
• Measurement challenges
• Qualifying, scoring and working leads effectively
• Communicating solutions-oriented value to end customers
• Confident and authoritative representation of product and service differentiators
• Delivering quality, professional marketing information to end customers

Setting the Foundation for Successful Channel Partner Marketing

Simply providing and customizing marketing collateral for your partners isn’t enough. That’s just the price of entry. Groundwork across your entire organization can help your channel marketing program succeed. Consider these tips:

• Set the stage for marketing success early by introducing marketing support in your partner onboarding process.
• Establish regular cross-channel communications (e.g., web, text, email, events, etc.) to engage your partners on their terms.
• Make marketing enablement core to your overall partner enablement strategy.
• Incorporate partner marketing needs when developing product- and vertical-training programs.
• Build campaign and lead-conversion measurement capabilities into your partner marketing models upfront so you can quickly identify and replicate best practices.

11 Channel Marketing Best Practices from Channel Leaders

We interviewed channel experts to identify best practices in channel marketing that you can use to jumpstart or refine your partner marketing efforts. We uncovered 11 essential practices in that process.

1. Look at Both Leading and Lagging Indicators to Measure Success of Channel Marketing
2. Pick a Measurement, Any Measurement for Channel Marketing
3. Take a Revenue Marketing Approach to Channel Marketing
4. Build Content Partners Can Customize for Marketing Automation
5. Include Partner Performance in Your Channel Marketing Measurements
6. Always Seek Improvement in Your Channel Marketing
7. Evaluate “To” and “Through” Channel Marketing on Their Own Merits
8. Bake Engagement into Your Channel Marketing Programs
9. Offer Marketing Services or Consulting to Your Partners
10. Feed Your Channel Marketing Programs with Feedback
11. Ask Partners for Their Plans

Best Practice 1: Look at Both Leading and Lagging Indicators to Measure Success of Channel Marketing

Break out the macro-level factors that matter most to your program’s success—your pool of active partners, new partners, engaged partners, channel revenue, etc.—and leverage them as the foundations for your practice management. This way, your underlying programs and tactics will be oriented toward your goals, and you can better assess where and when to budget your resources.

“For channel marketing market-through efforts, we measure the success of our channel marketing efforts by looking at both leading indicators like leads and opportunities and lagging indicators like bookings,” says Tamara Prazak, National Channel Director for secure access solutions provider AppGate. “Holistically, we are tracking where we’re investing channel marketing dollars and determining if those investments match and accelerate partner production and then adjusting how we invest accordingly.”

John Macario, Senior Vice President of Enterprise and Channel Marketing for communications solutions and networking provider Ribbon Communications, agrees. He recommends aligning goals with local, in-market support to drive results. “If our partners are succeeding, that means we’re succeeding,” Macario says. “To make our partners successful, we’ve got to help drive business to them. [When operating in different countries, there’s the] coordination with the local channel managers and local enterprise sellers to figure out what’s going to play in their market. I want to measure success by how many dollars are coming out of the channel. That’s the best means to do it.”

 

Best Practice 2: Pick a Measurement, Any Measurement for Channel Marketing

Always measure, even when line-item or campaign-level return on investment (ROI) is challenging, so you can establish baselines and pursue improvements in relative performance.

Marketing ROI is easier to establish in some activities and settings than others. This isn’t news. However, if you estimate lifetime value for a typical end customer for the software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution you’re promoting via pay-per-click (PPC), for example, you can back your way into a reasonable ROI estimate that can stand up to some pokes and prodding.

Directly tying complex marketing campaigns to revenue with precision has long been a challenge for businesses everywhere. How many conversions would have happened without it? If you included an earned media component, how much did that move the needle? Did your marketing effort help with customer retention? Is the C-Suite satisfied with your methodologies for answering these questions? We’ll stop there…you know how the circular arguments (or firing squad!) can go. 

The channel is not exempt from some of these challenges. Sometimes ROI is (relatively) easy to establish, as in this example: We spent X on a booth, travel and presence at a new trade show and netted Y new partners for projected revenue of Z. Other times, it’s not as straightforward as in this example: The trade show we attended is mature and we’re there to keep existing partners engaged. But that doesn’t mean you can’t establish metrics to determine how some components perform within larger campaigns.

“We measure a number of things in regards to channel marketing,” says Sylvia Judkins, Channel Marketing Operations Manager at Intermedia Cloud Communications. “One, partner adoption of the content/assets we create for them. Two, partner metrics in their lead-generating activities, so primarily email metrics and leads generated. (These first two are hard to track if you do not have a PRM available for the partners to leverage.)  Lastly, the hardest of them all, is tying a marketing campaign directly to partner revenue. This is the holy grail. I have yet to find the magic solution with true 1:1 mapping.”

Best Practice 3: Take a Revenue Marketing Approach to Channel Marketing

We sometimes talk in the channel about unused MDF as a lost opportunity for partners and suppliers alike. But that’s not the only missed opportunity—especially when you have developed professional-level, high-performing content assets. Taking the time to customize and spin those assets throughout your sales organization—including your channel partners—can maximize your potential ROI for each content piece. Over time, that adds up to significant boosts in marketing performance.

“Those of us in the channel were revenue marketers before revenue marketing was a thing,” says Khali Henderson, Senior Partner of channel marketing firm BuzzTheory. “When done right and fueled by the right content, channel marketing is like revenue marketing on steroids. Map out your marketing and media efforts and ‘channelize’ them for partner consumption. You’ll gain partner mind share, pick up revenue opportunities you might otherwise overlook, and in so doing further underwrite your branding and other ‘soft’ marketing activities with hard marketing that makes the C-Suite happy.”

Best Practice 4: Build Content Partners Can Customize for Marketing Automation

Satisfaction with marketing automation efforts is notoriously low across all industries and segments. But that’s less about the merits of marketing automation engines themselves than it is the content that goes into them. When you have good content available, putting it to work in automation routines can benefit you and your partners.

“Almost all of our marketing and sales materials are available to partners, and a subset is available to partners to co-logo via our Launchpad (exclusive Partner-marketing automation tool), which is seeing partner response rates north of 10%,” says Natascha Lee, Director of Global Channel and Partner Marketing for TIBCO Software. “They can co-logo key high-performing campaign assets (including emails, landing pages, whitepapers, etc.) that have already been designed and proven successful.”

Best Practice 5: Include Partner Performance in Your Channel Marketing Measurements

Not all partners perform equally. Factoring individual partner performance into your assessments can help you better understand how your programs perform and which partners merit continued attention and investment.

“One way [of measuring channel success] is to see how many deals are closing that are coming through the channel,” says Maeve Naughton, president and owner of MKN Consulting Group. “Another way is to see how many general opportunities are coming in. This will give you a good idea of what your channel partners are capable of. It’s important to measure the success of your channel by looking at the amount of channel partners you have and see how many are actually bringing deals in. If partners aren’t doing anything, they’re draining your resources and aren’t being a strategic part of your company.”

Look at your new partners across the length of your sales cycle—say, six months—to see how many are closing deals or have legitimate options in the pipeline, she advises, which gives insight into your program’s performance over time as well. “You can look at how many channel partners are staying with you and are actively engaged in the partner program,” she says.

Best Practice 6: Always Seek Improvement in Your Channel Marketing

There may be 101 ways to debate ROI and revenue contributions from any individual marketing effort but establishing baselines for measurement (see “pick a measurement, any measurement” above) empowers you to establish cycles of continuous improvement.

Heather Margolis, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Founder of channel demand-gen platform Spark Your Channel, says that baseline engagement metrics can help you improve and identify potential issues that you need to address. “Have the partners’ revenue increased? Are they leveraging your demand gen content or downloading your eBooks? Are they attending your webinars? Are they talking about you on social media? You need to be always improving. If you see a big dip all of a sudden, you need to go back and see why partners aren’t engaging.”

Best Practice 7: Evaluate “To” and “Through” Channel Marketing on Their Own Merits

“[When] we look at success for channel marketing, there’s a couple of ways we engage that,” says David Portnowitz, Chief Marketing Officer for communications and collaboration provider Star2Star.  “We look at the through-side and [the] to-side.

“When you’re looking at the to-partner side, you’re trying to drive leads and MQLs and then work them pretty hard from a marketing and sales perspective. [We’re] also looking at cost per lead, what that partner generated over its lifespan, why the partner did or didn’t come to us.

“From a through-partner standpoint, it’s really about engagement and satisfaction levels. Looking at why some partners are more successful than others. Looking at what campaigns they’re running through our platform. How many leads? How many partners are active on our platform? All of those kinds of things we’re looking at on a monthly and quarterly basis. The success metrics run across the board there.”

Best Practice 8: Bake Engagement into Your Channel Marketing Programs

One way to ensure partner engagement is to build it directly into your programs. Such planning can include training, feedback and special accommodations in both to- and through-channel marketing.

“We consistently drive engagement through to-partner marketing, enablement and relationship building,” says Karen Levy Newnam, Senior Director, Americas Channel Marketing for cloud infrastructure provider Nutanix. “Because engagement is key to partner allegiance, we have created specific initiatives to keep partners active, curious and hungry for more.” These include:

• Programs that bundle marketing campaigns with product training to increase lead follow-up effectiveness.
• To-partner marketing designed to drive thought leadership and bolster partner affinity.
• Risk-matrix driven to-partner communications.
• Sales- and marketing-focused Partner Advisory Councils.
• Quarterly feedback surveys designed to enhance partner marketing processes and support.
• Executive sponsorship of key partners.

Best Practice 9: Offer Marketing Services or Consulting to Your Partners

One of the challenges in through-channel marketing is that many partners are inexperienced or understaffed in marketing, so assets and campaigns don’t get used as they should. Increasingly, vendors are looking at ways to provide hands-on marketing services to help their partners.

“Some vendors are offering their partners marketing training or consultations while others are deploying campaigns on their partners’ behalf,” said BuzzTheory’s Henderson. “The obvious challenge with this approach is cost to the vendor. So, some vendors are getting creative and using these services as a perk for achieving revenue goals. Of course, that’s a chicken-and-egg scenario requiring revenue before marketing, so others are looking at offering services for a fee or shared cost and other models that require partners to indicate commitment to a go-to-market plan.”

Best Practice 10: Feed Your Channel Marketing Programs with Feedback

Nobody knows what your partners need more than your partners do. Ask them.

“Always be thinking partner-first,” says Andra Hedden, Chief Marketing Officer and Owner of marketing firm Marketopia. “But, in order to do that, you need to actually listen to the partners and what they need to succeed. Then, add value in those ways. A lot of vendors try to be partner-first, but you actually need to find out what partner-first means for your partners. It’s not always the same for every vendor.”

Best Practice 11: Ask Partners for Their Plans

Partnerships are two-way streets. When your partners want support for marketing initiatives built around your products, you can challenge them to develop plans you can review and sign off on. They’ll have more skin in the game and will be driven to perform better to keep those opportunities open in the future, and you can step up and deliver on your partner’s terms, not just yours.

“I’m a big fan of ‘give-get,’” says Mike Coleman, North American Channel Chief for cloud communications solutions provider Avaya. “We’re going to give you these resources in exchange for a plan, and we’re going to get ROI back that will be a win-win.”

11 Channel Marketing Best Practices – Download

Here are our 11 channel marketing best practices that can help you engage partners and earn mindshare.

Have anything you want to add? Sound off in the comments below.

Your channel managers have been hard at work scouring their contact lists, referral networks and online watering holes for ideal channel partners. Sales meetings are going well, and prospects are moving further down the pipeline with some now sold and signing agreements – to sell your services.

Now you can sit back and wait for the money to come rolling in, right?

Not quite. Despite the Herculean effort your channel team has made to win over these new partners, the work has only just begun. You now need to onboard these new partners into your channel program, so they can become the revenue-generating machines you’ve imagined.

What is Channel Partner Onboarding?

Channel partner onboarding is the process of introducing and assimilating new partners into your company’s partner program. Common elements of a channel partner onboarding are:

• Business planning
• Sales training
• Technical training
• Systems integration
• Marketing support
• Lead generation
• Co-selling
• Deal wins

These activities should be accompanied by periodic check-ins, quarterly business reviews (QBRs), and partner progress assessments in reaching agreed-upon milestones.

Why is Channel Partner Onboarding Important?

Learning how to recruit channel partners successfully is a challenging endeavor. You’ll only spoil the fruits of your labor by delivering a lackluster partner onboarding experience. Instead, give it the attention it deserves. How much is that? According to many of the channel leaders we surveyed, it’s the cornerstone of your partner program.

“Onboarding a new partner is the first experience that partner has with your organization, so it is the most important step,” said Chad Gagnon, Senior Channel Advisor at cloud communications provider Evolve IP.

When executed incorrectly, onboarding can leave selling partners ill-prepared, which is a disincentive to sell or, worse, opens the door for them to misrepresent your company and its solutions. Either way, poor onboarding can damage your reputation among potential customers and the channel community, which ultimately affects your bottom line.

When executed properly, channel partner onboarding pays off exponentially for providers by laying the groundwork for the channel partner program’s success. Results may include autonomous selling partners, a path to recoup the investment in the partner program, faster company growth, lower overhead in provider sales expenses, and loyal partner advocates who raise your company profile and impact your reputation positively.

B2B Partner Onboarding vs. B2C Partner Onboarding

Your channel partner program’s timeline to return on investment (ROI) is heavily influenced by whether you’re selling business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C).

Key differences between B2B and B2C partnerships (and by extension onboarding) include:

• Time to value. Time to close deals will be faster for B2C partnerships due to the transactional nature of the sale.
• Deal size. Individual deal size is likely to be larger in B2B transactions.
• Partner enablement. Both B2C and B2B partners require marketing support, but B2B sellers are likely to need additional resources like in-depth product and sales training and even opportunities to co-sell.
• Sales activity volume. B2C solutions are less complex than B2B solutions and typically appeal to a broad swath of consumers, increasing the overall volume of sales activities from the partner, but not necessarily the dollar value.
• Customer service. B2B transactions may be large enough to warrant dedicated support, while B2C transactions are too small for dedicated resources.
• The number of decision-makers. B2B transactions involve approvals from multiple stakeholders at the customer company. B2C transactions usually only require buy-in from one or two decision-makers in the household.
• Solution training. To ensure adoption, B2B providers often must invest in live training for both the partner and their end customer. Conversely, B2C products usually don’t require instruction beyond a video tutorial or a short user guide.
• Customer relationship management. Customer relationship management is much higher for B2B services and requires in-person nurturing on a monthly to yearly basis to retain the customer. With B2C, customers typically remain loyal or make repeat purchases if the product or service delivers value. Automated email or text nurture campaigns are mainstays for keeping the brand top of mind.
• Personas. In B2B sales environments, the buyer of a product or service often is not the one using it, which adds further complexity to marketing and sales needs on the part of the provider and the partners. In B2C environments, the buyer and user often are one and the same.
• Switching costs. In a B2B setting, switching from a competitive product to your solution has costs of its own, such as contractual penalties for early termination, migration fees, user training, etc. B2C switching costs, if they exist at all, are contained to a single person or household.

Factoring in the differences in B2B and B2C selling will aid you in building out your channel partner onboarding process.

Remember to set expectations based on your go-to-market model so that every stakeholder is on the same page. The last thing you want is executives or investors expecting wins from a new partner in month one if it takes four months to train them and develop a pipeline.

Map out the first 90 days (and beyond) so that your team and your partners know what to expect from your B2B partnership. Reference our blog on channel partner onboarding best practices for a sample timeline.

8 Steps to Include in Your Channel Partner Onboarding Process

To help you tactically develop a channel partner onboarding process, we surveyed 10 seasoned channel business leaders on their work in the trenches handling partner onboarding.

Eight concrete steps materialized from these interviews.

1. Welcome Partners to Your Partner Program
2. Host a Kick-Off Call
3. Develop a Partner Business Plan
4. Establish Goals & Benchmarks on a Firm Timeline
5. Train Your Partner
6. Provide Easily Accessible Sales & Marketing Resources
7. Hand Off Leads & Jointly Work Sales Opportunities
8. Track & Measure Success

Step 1: Welcome Partners to Your Partner Program

There are no second chances when making first impressions, so set the tone with a warm welcome for your new partner. Proactive communication and engagement are essential throughout onboarding, but our panel recommends creating a professional partner welcome kit as your first touchpoint.

Contents of your channel partner welcome kit will vary depending on your solutions and business model. However, it typically includes some or all of the following assets:

• Welcome letter
• Table of contents
• Onboarding checklist or next steps
• Solutions overview and benefits
• Partner program overview and benefits by tier if applicable
• Instructions for accessing and using your partner portal
• Overview of partner portal contents and functionality
• Information on training or certification programs required to sell or implement your solutions
• Overview of sales and marketing tools and customer-facing materials
• Rules of engagement to avoid channel conflict
• Deal registration requirements, guidelines and approvals (if required)
• FAQs
• Links to all resources noted in the kit
• Contact information, such as channel managers, sales support, marketing support, back-office support and finance

Putting all of this information in one place creates one source of truth and makes your company easier to do business with. Being a no-hassle business partner is critical, says Patrick Sheehan, Senior Director of Field Channel Sales for cloud communications provider Intermedia. “Streamline the onboarding process and try not to overwhelm partners,” he says. “Keep in mind they already have a business to run, so they can’t drop everything and focus on you.”

When sending out the welcome kit, our panel suggests you also introduce your new partner to the primary point of contact for onboarding inside your organization.

Liz Lederer, Senior Vice President of North American Channel Development for cloud communications provider Star2Star, recommends assigning a dedicated representative to walk partners through the months-long onboarding process. “We start with assigning an engagement manager who will guide you through all of your onboarding,” she says.

Step 2: Host a Kick-Off Call

After sending the welcome kit to your new partner, you’ll want to host a kick-off call to set the stage and ensure everyone is on the same page. Getting day-one buy-in from key stakeholders in the partner organization is paramount.

Our panel recommends bringing in executives from both companies to the call. Their attendance and attention communicate how much you value the partnership.

“It may seem counterintuitive to have SVPs or C-level executives attend a kick-off call, but leadership presence can set the tone for the relationship,” said Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer for enterprise channel management platform provider Zift Solutions. “It shows we’re invested in the partnership and expect the same in return. An hour of your leader’s time today can pay off exponentially for the partnership in the long run.”

Once the stakeholders have met and virtually shook hands, introduce the partner’s team to their dedicated onboarding representative and walk them through all of the available resources outlined in the welcome kit. Don’t assume your partner has read the welcome kit. Go through it together as if they’re seeing it for the first time. Remember to record the walk-through and send it along to your partner after the call; they may need to refer to it again or share it with teammates who weren’t in the meeting.

Once the walk-through is concluded, schedule your next discovery call when you’ll begin the process of developing the partner’s business plan.

Step 3: Develop a Partner Business Plan

Successful onboarding requires that you develop a joint business plan with your partner. That begins with discovery. It’s important to get under the hood of your new partner’s company so that you understand their capabilities, resources and go-to-market motions and, more importantly, where their organization performs well and where it has gaps. This baseline information is essential to mapping a path for the partner to become an autonomous selling machine for your solutions.

Identifying the sales, marketing and training needs of the partner and where vendors can fill holes is essential, says Janet Schijns, CEO of channel consulting firm JS Group. “As we work with our vendor clients, we find what works well to onboard partners varies widely depending on the solution set, partner and channel program maturity,” Schijns says. “Some common things, however, are identifying the initial business, marketing and sales plans as well as determining the rules of engagement and training cadence.”

Hilary Gadda, Director of National Channel Development for TPx, a nationwide managed services provider, agrees with the need to jointly develop your partner’s business plan. “It is important to collaboratively build out a business plan,” she says. “As a vendor, I need to completely understand the partner’s business and what their customers look like. How can TPx help them achieve their sales goals and company growth? How do we fit into their business?”

Some questions you’ll want to consider in building an effective partner business plan include:

• What is the current total partner MRR? How much of the current total partner MRR comes from solutions like those your company offers? What is a realistic increase in MRR in six months or a year?
• Does the partner currently see opportunities to increase MRR with your company’s solutions? If so, how many opportunities? If not, what vertical or horizontal industries does the partner feel capable of targeting to offer your solution? Can you spearhead penetration in these markets for the partner?
• Will the partner sell into their existing customer base with your solution? Or is their existing customer base not a fit?
• How well developed are the partner company’s sales, marketing, customer service and operations departments? Are some departments, such as marketing, nonexistent
• Does the partner have the capacity and staff to handle front-line customer support inquiries? Or do all trouble tickets need to be fielded by your organization?
• Where does your partner believe they struggle the most? Can your company fill any of those gaps? If so, to what extent? If not, can you connect the partner with a third party that can?
• How familiar is the partner company with your type of solution and the industries you typically serve? How much education or assistance can you offer in this area? How does their level of knowledge impact the long-term timeline to ROI?
• What market development funds (MDF) can you contribute to this new partnership? How will you allocate MDF and ensure agreement for its use?
• How important are you as a vendor to the partner’s overall business right now? Are they partnering with you so they can close an immediate opportunity or fill an unmet need? Or are your solutions “nice to have” as an add-on or yet another variation of similar offers in their portfolio?

Answering these questions with your partner will get you well on your way to establishing a roadmap and realistic timeline for your partnership’s future.

Step 4: Establish Goals & Benchmarks on a Firm Timeline

As part of building a partner business plan, milestones must be set and tied to dates. Once you have a solid timeline, you and your partner will understand the pace for ramping up sales and what resources are required from both sides to reach agreed-upon goals.

“It’s important to clearly define what resources and materials are needed for the channel partner to reach the benchmarks and goals established in the business plan,” says channel veteran Robert Maute, former Senior Vice President of Channel Sales for Evolve IP.

Maute also advocates looping in stakeholders across the partner organization to ensure targets are understood and met and determine whether the partner is genuinely interested. “Engagement and participation levels with the executive suite, marketing and sales feet on the street is a good initial barometer that your process is working well,” he says. “Building KPIs aligned to ongoing success is important.”

Joint business planning is the leading indicator of success for channel partnerships, but other KPIs that are leading indicators include:

1. Participation in technology or sales and marketing training
2. Attendance at your events or webinars
3. Engagement with the portal
4. Number of campaigns sent (if supported in the portal)
5. Number of demos or proofs of concept performed
6. Number of deals registered

(Note: See Step 8 for performance KPIs .)

Be sure to establish frequent check-ins with your partner on reaching milestones and goals, so you can work together to make any adjustments.

Step 5: Train Your Partner

Once you’ve got the partner business plan and timeline finalized, you’re now at the point where you need to train your partner. A word of caution – don’t take your foot off the gas just because the plan is done. Multiple people at the partner organization need to understand your products, solutions and business processes so they know how, when and why to pitch your company to their customers.

“[Training] involves teaching the company story, training on the key products (high level or in-depth), showing them when your company wins and why, and then ends with how do you do business with us (quotes, orders, repair, etc.),” says Stacy Conrad, Director of Channel Sales, Southeast for TPx.

Just as the partner business plan is customized, training also must be tailored to your partner’s needs. “We have a philosophy that not all partners are created equal. So, giving them the proper training [aligned with] how they do business is important to us,” says Star2Star’s Lederer, noting that while all Star2Star partners take general sales and technical training, more advanced training tracks are based on how the individual partner sells and goes to market.

Your channel business model also will determine the required training. If you’re offering white-label services, your partner may need extra technical certification training so they can onboard customers and diagnose and resolve customer problems on their own.

You’ll also need to iron out how training is delivered by asking the following questions:

• Will you offer self-service training (written or video courses) through a learning management system (LMS)? Or, will you provide live training – online or in-person?
• Are certifications earned by passing courses in the LMS? Or, are mandatory live training and assessments required?
• Is scheduled live training regularly offered so that partners can attend at their convenience? Or will partners need to schedule one-on-one live training with their dedicated rep?
• How often will partners need to get retrained or recertified?

Step 6: Provide Easily Accessible Sales & Marketing Resources

Hallmarks of successful channel partner programs include an abundance of partner-ready sales and marketing assets, including:

• Fast and accurate quoting tools
• Simple deal registration processes
• Responsive and available channel managers and sales engineers
• Brandable sales collateral, such as
  • Flyers and datasheets
  • Battlecards with comparisons to the competition
  • Templated sales cadences with emails, LinkedIn mail and call scripts
  • Pitch decks and presentations
  • Demo videos
  • Sample proposals
• Brandable marketing materials, such as:
  • Partner marketing kits or “campaigns in a box”
  • Templated email campaigns
  • Topical blogs
  • Demo or marketing videos
  • Promotional social posts
  • Content-rich vendor website for partners to direct customers
  • Customizable web landing pages
  • Active vendor social media accounts with valuable, shareable content for partners

It’s vital that these resources not only exist but that they are easily accessible and brandable via a self-service portal, so your partners can leverage them as needed.

“If you’re just beginning your channel program, you’ll need to invest in creating marketing and sales materials for your partners to use to sell your solutions,” says Zift Solutions’ Tenuto. “Simply having a rolodex of agents isn’t going to get the sales coming in; partners need collateral to communicate your value proposition to the end customer.

“Keep in mind, your competitors are putting in the time and money to enable many of these same partners. If you neglect sales enablement, you’ll lose out on opportunities.”

Step 7: Hand Off Leads & Jointly Work Sales Opportunities

Yes, you read that right. Send opportunities to your partner as early as you can in your partnership. You might be thinking, “Isn’t my partner supposed to bring leads and deals to me? Isn’t that the whole point of the partner program – that prospecting is their responsibility?” Yes, the goal is to eventually get them to sell independently most of the time, but the odds are that they’re going to need help selling your solution and getting a few wins under their belts.

By sending leads to partners and co-selling, you’re training them to handle real-world situations, which fast-tracks the onboarding process and gets partners closer to their revenue targets sooner. Plus, your partner will have tangible evidence of your investment in your partnership and understand you’re serious about creating success for both parties.

TPx’s Gadda believes co-selling is key to getting the partner to a place where you can finally remove the training wheels. “I believe working side by side with the partner on the first two or three opportunities is critical,” she says. “Having the partner hear how I would lead a discovery meeting, uncover needs, position a product or service and deliver solutions [is on-the-job training]. … I know it’s working well when I have helped them gain confidence [and] they bring me in when they need me vs. throughout the entire process.”

Step 8: Track & Measure Success

Now that your partner is out in the wild, hunting down deals and learning to handle the sales process more independently as months go by, it’s time to begin assessing the success (or failure) of your partnership.

Oanh McClure, Director of Alliances and Channels at cloud security provider Zscaler, measures success through two lenses:

• The first way is through hard sales numbers. “Quantitatively, success [is measured in] deal registrations,” she says, noting this shows that the partner trusts you, validates their belief in your product and demonstrates the effort they’re willing to make to achieve success.
• The second way is through how the partner talks about you publicly. “Qualitatively, [the] partner wants to brag with and about you,” McClure says. “They want to post about you and your business on social media, [and] they’re excited about big wins.”

Creation and execution of the agreed-upon business plan are key, says Ayesha Prakash, Vice President of Global Channels & Alliances for KELA, an award-winning Dark Net threat intelligence provider. “All of which [execution and engagement of the plan] can be tracked by implementing a partner scoring program within your CRM,” she says.

A partner scoring method will help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your partner and your channel program in an objective and data-driven way. For an in-depth look at partner scoring, reference Forrester’s article, “How Do You Know You’re Winning With Channel Partners If You Don’t Keep Score?”

 

At a high level, partner scoring involves classifying partners by how they fit into five categories, dubbed by SiriusDecisions “the five “Cs”:

1. Coverage – partner access to buyers in targeted markets
2. Compatibility – partner alignment with your company’s business model and portfolio
3. Capability – partner departments have the abilities, skills, and experience required to function and pull in new business
4. Creditworthiness – partner long-term financial viability
5. Capacity – partner ability to reach revenue targets and workforce to sell

Metrics for measuring the 5Cs can include:

• Sales Performance-to-Plan – Does the partner meet revenue targets?
• Pipeline Performance-to-Plan – Does the partner have a sales pipeline that meets targets?
• Existing Account Cross-Sells & Upgrades
• Number of Sales or Technical Training Sessions Attended
• Number of Certifications Passed
• Deal Win Rates – Does the partner frequently win deals that involve your solution?
• Installed Base Refresh Volume – How many existing customers were migrated to your solution or upgraded from a previous version of your solution?
• MDF Utilization
• Service Contract Renewals
• Customer Churn Rate

Measuring partner performance will vary by company, solution and partner program, so use this list of KPIs as a guide to developing your own.

The Partner Onboarding Process – Downloads

There you have it – eight must-have steps in the partner onboarding process. Download our onboarding process flowchart to use as a channel partner onboarding template when creating your own.

Need a quick take-away? Download our one-pager and take our tips for creating a channel partner onboarding program on the go.

Following these steps in building and delivering your channel partner onboarding experience will give you a leg up in creating and retaining top-tier partnerships.

Once you’ve buttoned down your strategy for recruiting channel partners, you’re ready to establish your channel partner onboarding process. Onboarding is pivotal to your partners’ success in selling your business-to-business (B2B) services, so it must be a focal point of your channel development program and not an afterthought. The old adage “don’t re-invent the wheel” is more apt than ever here, as we spoke with several channel leaders who shared similar views on partner onboarding best practices. But, let’s start at square one:

What is Channel Partner Onboarding?

Channel partner onboarding is a multistep process to initiate and integrate new partners into your company’s partner program. It sets the ground rules and the tone for your relationship. Any major hiccups in this process can compromise your future with a new partner and send them into the welcoming arms of a competitor.

It’s important to understand that onboarding partners is not the same as onboarding direct business customers so they can use your cloud apps or set up hardware. Partner onboarding done well requires more than a couple of web meetings, portal logins and training links; it’s a months-long process that requires both of your organizations to get to know the other so that you can go to market as partners.

Partner onboarding begins in earnest after the agreement is signed. Typically, it includes business planning, sales training, technical training, systems integration (if needed) and usually extends to marketing support, lead generation, co-selling and initial wins.

When done poorly, partner onboarding can cost dearly, including:

• Wasted time and effort
• Lost partner confidence
• Lost sales opportunities
• Unrealized revenue potential
• Damaged market reputation

When done well, channel partner onboarding offers many rewards, including:

• Productive partners who understand your value proposition and can sell independently
• Quicker time to value and return on investment (ROI) from your partner program
• Partner loyalty and reduced customer churn
• Partner advocacy and endorsement, which can ease the recruitment process

What to Consider in the Channel Partner Onboarding Process

The axiom, “garbage in, garbage out,” aptly explains why your partner program must be well defined before developing your partner onboarding process. Without clear rules of engagement (ROEs) and operational processes, it will be challenging, if not impossible, to set up partners for success.

Here are examples of questions you should ask and answer:

• If your company sells through multiple channels, how is channel conflict managed?
• How is training delivered? Must partners be certified to sell your solutions? How long does training and/or certification take?
• Do you offer market development funds (MDF)? If so, how do partners qualify to receive MDF?
• Do you offer SPIFFs or bonuses? How do partners qualify for these incentives? Are incentives attractive, achievable? Will they motivate new partners to sell?
• How will you and your partner communicate? Will you accommodate partner preferences or set standards across the board?
• How do you send and receive reports between your company and the partner organization?
• How do partners get assistance? Are there support systems they need to access or personnel they need to contact?
• How will you handle differing levels of mindshare, interest and engagement among your partners? Will you offer tiers of partnership with resources allotted according to their effort? Will all partners be treated the same?
• Who is responsible for onboarding new partners? How many partners can they onboard at once? Can they keep up with the volume of recruits?

Answers to these sorts of questions will dictate the onboarding process, capacity and pace.

Partner Onboarding: The First 90 Days (& Beyond)

Plan, plan, plan. You need to set key milestones for your critical partnerships. Specifically, mapping expectations for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, six months and 12 months will increase the likelihood of success.

The Channel Company’s IPED Consulting and Research division’s 2017 guide on channel partner program onboarding emphasizes the importance of the first 90 days. “The first 90 days of your relationship directly influence whether the partner will ever become productive.”

What should you do in the first 90 days? We consulted a panel of channel experts who offered the following advice:

Day 1-30: During the first 30 days, onboarding typically consists of:

• Conducting the discovery
• Introducing members of your respective teams
• Assessing vendor-partner alignment
• Creating a business plan with the partner
• Providing access to the partner portal and relevant sales and marketing materials
• Starting initial sales and technical training

“The first 30 days are pure discovery and relationship building,” says Oanh McClure, Director of Alliances and Channels at Zscaler, a provider of cloud security services. “It’s harder to sell a partner on selling your product than sell [your] product to an end-user. You have to enable a partner to know so much that they offer your product first.”

Day 31-60: By day 60, according to our panel, onboarding moves to:

• Discussing longer-term business planning
• Reviewing use cases and case studies
• Beginning demand generation
• Engaging sales opportunities together

Patrick Sheehan, Senior Director of Field Channel Sales for cloud communications provider Intermedia, says following the orientation period, he likes to “get the sales team trained, engaged and excited about making money” while helping his partner execute demand-generation campaigns and ensuring operations are aligned to get some early wins.

Day 61-90: By day 90, our panel generally agrees that onboarding activities include:

• Selling collaboratively
• Growing the sales pipeline
• Celebrating an initial win

6 Months: Day 91 through 180 is when the training wheels slowly come off and partners put into practice what they’ve learned in the first three months and develop confidence and competence to sell independently.

12 Months: At the end of the first year, it’s time to revisit the business plan with new goals and milestones for year two.

The Importance of a Channel Partner Business Plan

A critical component of channel partner onboarding is developing a joint business plan outlining steps for partners, supported by your team, to reach short- and long-term goals from selling your solutions.

The business plan is the road map for your partnership, says Ayesha Prakash, Vice President of Global Channels & Alliances for KELA, an award-winning Dark Net threat intelligence provider. “Sticking to the plan and tracking progress and being consistent” are key, Prakash says.

A solid business plan also lays the groundwork for trust and accountability, adds Robert Maute, former Senior Vice President of Channel Sales for Evolve IP. He says, “The business plan should answer why you are establishing the partnership, agreed-upon goals and benchmarks, how you will work together to accomplish these goals and how to measure success.”

Create (and Use!) a Channel Partner Onboarding Checklist

One of the hallmarks of a successful channel partner onboarding process is that it’s repeatable and easy to follow. Creating a channel partner onboarding checklist is a smart way to keep the process on track.

“An onboarding checklist serves as a guide for your internal staff throughout the partner onboarding period,” says Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer for enterprise channel management platform provider Zift Solutions. “It also helps your partners to understand the process from end to end and see critical milestones at a glance.”

Partner Onboarding Portal – To Use or Not to Use?

According to a Forrester Wave^TM report on Partner Relationship Management (PRM) released in November 2020, channel programs on average have more than 100 distinct elements, with onboarding being among them.

“With so many moving parts, manual processes are prone to human error,” says Zift Solutions’ Tenuto. “This potential for mistakes is multiplied if your channel program is successful and you’re onboarding partners en masse. Using a partner onboarding portal to scale with you as your company grows is vital for long-term success.”

9 Partner Onboarding Best Practices from Channel Leaders

To help you create an effective channel partner onboarding process, we spoke with 10 accomplished channel business leaders about their experiences building and running partner onboarding.

Nine partner onboarding best practices surfaced from these interviews.

1. Keep in Mind Partner Onboarding is an Ongoing Process
2. Establish Simple & Repeatable Processes
3. Designate Onboarding Process Responsibilities & Ownership
4. Gauge Partner Focus & Alignment with Your Company
5. Be Upfront About Solution Strengths (& Weaknesses)
6. Provide Multiple Ways to Learn About Your Solutions
7. Work with Master Agents & Distributors to Collapse Timelines
8. Monitor & Track Onboarding Performance & Feedback
9. Remember to Be Human

Best Practice 1: Keep in Mind Partner Onboarding is an Ongoing Process

Your partner onboarding process is exactly that – a process – that will last for weeks or months after your partner signs on the dotted line and before they become productive. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” should be your mindset going in.

“Onboarding is an ongoing process,” says channel veteran Maute. “It is not a single meeting with partner leadership or a training session with their sales team that magically turns on the revenue stream.”

Partner onboarding not a single event, nor is it an isolated exercise; it’s an integral part of your entire partner program and an essential tool for both short- and long-term goals.

“Don’t think of onboarding by itself,” says Intermedia’s Sheehan. “I’ve found that looking at channel development holistically allows you to create the most effective onboarding process and successful outcomes.”

 

Best Practice 2: Establish Simple & Repeatable Processes

Complexity is the enemy of the good when creating an easily replicable partner onboarding process. Panelists cautioned against building a 90-step program unless absolutely necessary and encouraged automating as many steps as possible using a Partner Management Solution like ZiftONE^TM.

“Keep it simple,” says KELA’s Prakash. “Be strategic and consistent with your onboarding. The front-end work can make all the difference on how the partner engages with you in the future.”

Liz Lederer, Senior Vice President of North American Channel Development for cloud communications provider Star2Star, agrees that upfront effort to develop effective procedures can pay dividends. “We believe that if you would like repeatable and predictable revenue from partners, you have to offer them repeatable and predictable programs and processes.”

Best Practice 3: Designate Onboarding Process Responsibilities & Ownership

Select a point person, ideally a project manager, in your organization to manage onboarding for a given partner from start to finish. Establishing ownership eliminates confusion and creates accountability.

“This doesn’t mean the burden of onboarding falls on one person – it takes an interdepartmental effort to complete the process,” said Zift Solutions’ Tenuto. “However, having one competent individual overseeing the effort will keep the process moving. They’ll know the onboarding status and loop in key parties to avoid delays.”

Best Practice 4: Gauge Partner Focus & Alignment with Your Company

Vendors have high hopes that every partner they bring onboard will become an advocate for their products and bring in tens of thousands of dollars in new monthly recurring revenue. These prized partners are out there, but it’s folly to believe that outstanding sales performance magically happens. In fact, our panel says vendor-partner alignment is a prerequisite to sales growth.

Chad Gagnon, Senior Channel Advisor at Evolve IP, starts an engagement by finding out where his company’s solutions fit into the partner’s go-to-market model. “Personally, I like to really understand the partner’s focus before anything else,” he says. “This allows me to make sure … what I review with them fits into their day-to-day.”

Intermedia’s Sheehan also recommends offering different paths for partners based on their interests. “Having a well-defined onboarding process with ‘tracks’ that address both the long-tail and the high-potential partners — and communicating it to partners upfront — is key to proper alignment.”

According to Gagnon, a key factor in determining alignment is comparing the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for both companies. “Once you are in sync with [the ICP], the focus and planning are easy,” Gagnon says. “You know the process is working well when you are top of mind for a partner and the opportunities are great fits.”

Maute suggests alignment with a new partner also means getting buy-in from the whole organization, not just the signatory on your contract. “It is an ongoing process that involves engaging each area in the partner organization (executives, sales, marketing, sales engineering, etc.) to understand how to best align and build mindshare,” he says.

That said, not every partner you recruit is going to be a fit, which can be a tough pill to swallow after you’ve spent countless hours convincing and converting a prospective partner, only to have them not bring in any meaningful deals. Janet Schijns, CEO of channel consulting firm JS Group, reminds vendors that partner acquisition isn’t a numbers game.

“Focus on the partners you want who also want you and focus on their onboarding experience,” says Schijns. “The channel is not a game of onboarding as many partners as you can; it’s about getting sales and revenue. The onboarding process is the start of that profitable relationship.”

Best Practice 5: Be Upfront About Your Solution’s Strengths (& Weaknesses)

Your “innovative, ground-breaking, revolutionary” solution typically has plenty of competition. So, you must help your partners understand how you compare and what sets you apart. Arm them with resources, including:

• Effective solution applications and use cases
• Industry verticals for the best fit
• Onboarding and deployment timelines
• Customer resources and availability of support
• Potential return on investment
• Solution pricing

Hilary Gadda, Director of National Channel Development for TPx, a nationwide managed services provider, recommends cutting to the chase by outlining how your company can help them win deals. Instead of telling partners about everything in the portfolio, she explains in what situations TPx is a good fit or where “TPx shines” to help partners close deals. “Time is money for partners, and I need to respect that,” she says.

In addition to pointing out where your company is a good fit, you should be transparent about where it isn’t and even admit when a competitor is a better fit, says Stacy Conrad, Director of Channel Sales, Southeast for TPx. “I find often channel managers do not want to mention the competition, but it is imperative that a partner understands when your solution is the right one compared to X and Y,” Conrad says. “There are so many choices to sell today; if the partner can’t understand the key differences between the 15-plus UCaaS providers, for example, how can you expect them to know when to sell your company and why?”

Best Practice 6: Provide Multiple Ways to Learn About Your Solutions

Keep in mind that people, including sales partners, don’t learn in the same way or at the same pace. Some partners would rather attend live scheduled training, while others prefer to watch video tutorials or read product guides in your learning management system (LMS) on their own time. Still, others are inclined to scour your partner portal and website for informative sales and channel marketing collateral.

Making multiple options available to your partners will cover your bases. Experiment with different formats and delivery methods to hit on the best curriculum.

Evolve IP’s Gagnon, for example, has found that live training works best if narrowly focused. “I like to set up multiple sessions with the team to help focus on one of our solution sets,” he says. “This keeps the sessions short and interactive, and the partners are more engaged.”

Intermedia’s Sheehan advocates self-service to accelerate results. “Providing effective self-service enablement via LMS in combination with a robust partner platform that facilitates sales and marketing engagement is fundamental for all partners to start selling quickly,” Sheehan says.

Best Practice 7: Work with Master Agents & Distributors to Collapse Timelines

Master agents and distributors often take on pre- and post-sales functions such as quoting, sales engineering, ordering, project management and installation for partners so they can shortcut some of the processes and start selling faster.

JS Group’s Schijns believes vendors should capitalize on distributor relationships to speed ROI. “Working with distribution is key for most vendors; they shorten that timeline for onboarding and save the vendor significant funds managing the channel at large through onboarding and first sale,” she said.

Best Practice 8: Monitor & Track Onboarding Performance & Feedback

No doubt your organization tracks CSAT scores, surveys customers and audits call center logs to ensure your customer-facing staff delivers top-tier service. Operate the same way with your partners.

“Having a process is great, but you have to monitor its effectiveness over time,” says Intermedia’s Sheehan. “To do that I’ve found it is critical to manage the entire channel development process, including onboarding, through business applications that enable you to monitor KPIs, identify trends and ensure positive outcomes.”

Besides sales, gathering metrics and data about how the partners interact with your staff, training and tools can be a leading indicator. “The level of engagement by the partner is a good way to gauge if the process is working,” says KELA’s Prakash.

Best Practice 9: Remember to Be Human

When selling technology, it’s easy to forget that your “solution” is not only a piece of software or hardware; it’s also your people. And the character of your people can make or break the partnership.

“Yes, our business is tech, and we sell a product, but we are in the business of people,” says Zscaler’s McClure. “Nobody is loyal to companies. People are only loyal to people. A partner will not compromise for a partner program. They will compromise to demonstrate future success with you.”

In other words, if your people are pleasant and helpful, partners are more likely to want to work with your company even if your technology is not best-in-class, and they’re more likely to forgive an honest mistake on an order or install. On the other hand, if your team is difficult to reach or treats partners as second-class sellers, they’ll leave even if your solution is the market leader.

A mission statement is not enough; you need to demonstrate your people skills every day in many ways. When your software has a glitch, how do you handle incoming service calls? When your edge device gets shipped to the wrong address, how do you deal with that? Do you treat both your large enterprise and one-person shop partners with equal importance? Did you welcome and integrate your partner into your organization?

TPx’s Conrad drives this last point home: “It is important the partner feels like part of a community, not just a one-on-one relationship with one channel manager. A partner must feel comfortable with several areas of the company if they are going to put their business and their paycheck in your hands.”

9 Partner Onboarding Best Practices – Download

Below, download our one-pager to help these practices stay top of mind while creating your channel partner onboarding practice.

Following these tips can put you a step ahead of your competition in building and maintaining revenue-generating partner relationships.

Learning how to recruit channel partners is the holy grail of many tech firms across the globe. And why not? Successful channel partner recruitment means developing a revenue engine that’s paid exclusively on performance, is trusted by businesses of all sizes and industry verticals and adapts nimbly to changing economic conditions. During hard times, channel partners are the trusted advisers companies rely on to find cost savings and for IT outsourcing. When times are good, they’re turned to for guidance and assistance in developing tech stacks for competitive advantage. And in mixed-bag conditions, they do a little of both— helping companies find room in their budgets for the next-generation services they need to compete.

For these and many other reasons, learning how to recruit channel partners can deliver significant rewards. Developing a pool of them can become a powerful engine for growth. But therein lies the rub. First, you have to find the right partners. And you have to recruit them amid serious competition from other companies that also want those partners. And when you get through all that, you have to keep them engaged and working for you in a marketplace awash in hyper evolution.

Navigating the Channel Partner Recruitment Process

There’s not one way – or even a prevailing method– of recruiting channel partners. Companies that thrive in the channel get there through many paths – none of which are magic bullets for channel success. In fact, to a layperson, success may appear to be random; firms that struggle in the channel often appear to be modeling similar approaches to competitors that achieve success.

That’s because channel success is complicated and requires a more profound commitment than pushing product and payouts. Those factors matter to be sure, but capturing and retaining channel sales partners is a complex process that touches every aspect of a provider’s business. Success and failure can occur at multiple touchpoints between your firm and your (potential and current) partners that encompass facets of your entire operation.

How to Recruit Channel Partners: Advice from Channel Leaders

To identify best practices for navigating the complex channel partner recruitment process, we talked with eight proven channel business leaders with varied professional backgrounds about their experiences. Together, they’ve:

• Built and sold agencies (and technology services broker agencies)
• Led large global channel operations
• Enabled channel management through specialized software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms
• Successfully developed programs at “channel first” companies
• Successfully added channel programs at large firms with diversified go-to-market strategies

Ten tips for greater success recruiting partners emerged from these interviews.

1. Make It About the Channel Partner, Not Your Company and Its Products
2. Develop “Ideal Channel Partner” Profiles in Advance
3. Don’t Overlook the Soft Parts of Partner Profiling
4. Find New Partners by “Fishing Where the Fish Are”
5. Work with Distributors and Technology Services Brokers to Reach Top-Performing Sales Partners
6. You Snooze, You Lose – Follow Up with Leads Quickly
7. Demonstrate How You Add Value to Your Sales Partners
8. Prioritize Responsiveness to Build Trust and Keep Partners Engaged in Selling Your Services
9. Assess, Assess, Assess
10. Know When to Say “No” to New or Further Investment in a Sales Partner

How to Recruit Channel Partners #1: Make It About the Channel Partner, Not Your Company and Its Products

Solutions selling isn’t new to technology providers. It’s central to their internal direct marketing practices, and it’s how they coach their partners in their go-to-market strategies. But that same approach is all-too-often overlooked in channel partner recruitment – particularly by big brands that think partners should feel privileged to represent them. Providers that have built demonstrably better marketplace solutions also can fall into the trap of pushing product over partnerships.

To be fair, both viewpoints have some merit. Partners sometimes encounter brand-sensitive clients, and cutting-edge solutions can open doors or tilt deals in the right circumstances. When institutionalized, however, those limited perspectives miss the mark with partners in the same way that “product pushers” lose out to “problem solvers” when selling to end customers.

The provider-centric approach also is why the mix of brands that thrive in the channel differs from the pool of market leaders that sell direct. There are some “channel friendly” market leaders, but there also are many smaller companies that have established brand and revenue leadership within the channel through a relentless focus on the issues their channel partners face. Their channel commitment runs deeper than building strong pre- and post-sales support (though both are vital); they strive to understand the business challenges of their partners.

“Since I have built and grown a sales agency, I know the issues that a sales agency owner thinks about,” says Steve Farmiloe, Senior Channel Sales Manager for AppSmart, a marketplace and technology services broker agency for technology services. “I know not only what keeps him/her up at night, but I’ve got proven solutions to help increase the agency value. Contrary to popular selling methods, it isn’t about what I can sell to the sales agency. The real value is about getting on their side of the desk and helping them solve the issues that their sales agency faces each and every day. Understanding them, walking in their shoes, and having solid business acumen is primary.”

Dave Beagle, head of channels for Ooma, agrees. His organization, a provider of cloud-based voice and collaboration solutions, approaches partners with a four-pronged “FIST” strategy for partner management:

• Financial benefit to the partner. What is the value of your products and services to the partner? How do they make money with them?
• Integrity of our organization. How do we position ourselves as trustworthy? It’s more than reviews or being a public company.
• Sincerity of our personnel. Having people who truly care and like working with their partners will always translate to a healthier engagement and should never be under-appreciated as a recruitment aspect.
• Transparency in our communication. We must over communicate and never assume on our partner’s behalf.

“Add all this up and be candid about everything, and the partners you sign will be long term, more likely,” Beagle says.

How to Recruit Channel Partners #2: Develop “Ideal Channel Partner” Profiles in Advance

All partners are not created equally. Some are high performers, some can be nurtured into becoming high performers, and some have limited potential. Knowing the difference and how to screen for the right partners can save you a lot of headaches and wasted investment.

Ooma’s Beagle says the easy answer to the question of what makes an ideal partner is one whose organization is aligned with his sales, marketing, provisioning and support. “The respective departments, when [aligned] truly deliver an ‘extension’ of each other and a true ‘partnership,’” he says, adding that “the more nuanced [answer to the question] is a belief system where both parties truly do believe in each other’s capabilities to grow, serve and support.”

Heather Tenuto, Chief Revenue Officer for enterprise channel management platform provider Zift Solutions, adds that the ideal partner is one that knows their ideal customer. They need to “have a mature understanding of their own offer and ideal customer profile,” she says. Without that, it’s going to be a struggle to find out how your solution fits.

The effort to profile and screen for an ideal partner pays off—especially since it could take six to 12 months (depending on the length of your sales cycle) before you have a good bead on a new partner’s performance. “Don’t be afraid to do the labor-intensive work,” says Stuart Skjerven, channel programs and marketing manager for Mitel, a business communications provider. “If you’ve identified a best-fit partner, they’re worth it.”

How to Recruit Channel Partners #3: Don’t Overlook the Soft Parts of Partner Profiling

Profiling potential partners is both an art and a science. After all, nearly every booming sales partner started small – perhaps as little as a one-person shop. Figuring out which boutique or mediocre-performing partners have the potential to become top performers is every bit as valuable as “hard” partner evaluation based solely on metrics.

As EagleTEQ Founding Partner Curt Allen puts it, “Everyone wants all their Cs to become As, but sometimes Cs are just Cs.” Allen would know; his experience recruiting and grooming partners includes leading a successful technology services broker agency, which sold in 2016, serving as channel chief for providers such as Windstream and Vonage, and consulting to providers and distributors on their channel strategies in his current role.

Our panel identified common traits to look for that can help to uncover suitable partners. These characteristics ranging from culture and values to sales approaches and operations, including:

• Having a strong work ethic
• Focusing not only on recruiting new clients but properly servicing existing clients
• Engaging in social selling
• Leveraging digital marketing strategies
• Possessing a collaborative mindset
• Embracing transparency that enables successful collaboration

Cloud entrepreneur Dina Moskowitz, founder and CEO of SaaSMAX and creator of the PartnerOptimizer partner discovery tool, says developing ideal partner profiles doesn’t just help you know which partners to target, they also keep you from chasing red herrings.

“Obviously, a partner who comes to you with a deal ready to go seems like a good channel partner, but it doesn’t come with a promise that they will have a second, third or fourth deal to bring you in the future. Most do not,” Moskowitz says. “By proactively profiling what [an ideal] channel partner looks like… you can have a much better understanding of what to expect and which partners you would want to invest in.”

How to Recruit Channel Partners #4: Find New Partners by “Fishing Where the Fish Are”

“The channel” is an industry unto itself — and a complicated one at that. Your potential partners attend conferences, read industry publications like CRN and Channel Partners, listen to podcasts, attend webinars, participate in LinkedIn groups—you name it. They do all the things other businesses do to grow their companies and refine their operations.

Just as channel partners with vertical industry expertise meet their customers where they gather, you need to build your brand, develop your leads and build your community where your partners meet.

Michelle McBain, Vice President of Global Channel Strategy at channel consulting firm JS Group, endorses this community approach. “Fish where the fish are,” she says. “Who are your customers? What events (virtual for now) are they attending? What magazines do they read? What webinars/podcasts/groups are they participating in? Who do they follow (who influences them)?”

The answers to these questions may not be straightforward, particularly since technology convergence means your next best partner may look nothing like the ones you’ve worked with in the past. SaaS or emerging tech partners, for example, may not frequent the usual IT partner haunts and, in fact, may not even know about them. You need to find out where they’re spending their time.

How to Recruit Channel Partners #5: Work with Distributors and Technology Services Brokers (TSBs) to Reach Top-Performing Sales Partners

TSBs and other distributors can bring a lot of value to the table, including access to top-performing sales partners. They help to manage commissions, partner service inquiries and training on your company’s solutions. The larger agencies even have their own partner conferences that deliver opportunities to interact with highly engaged partners.

Jim Tennant, Regional Vice President of Channel – West for TalkDesk, a provider of cloud contact center services, places a high value on TSB partnerships in his firm’s channel strategy. He recommends “having a ‘sell-with’ channel strategy with TSBs that give you access to their top-performing cloud selling agents, [and] allowing those same agents to become educated, certified and earn aggressive residual commissions on opportunities sold.”

While TSB agencies can be tremendous allies in connecting your company with top partners, they also can be gatekeepers, ensuring that only vendors offering the best channel agreements, service performance and customer experience get access to their best sales agents. Make sure that you’ve checked all the boxes.

How to Recruit Channel Partners #6: You Snooze, You Lose – Follow Up with Leads Quickly

A reliable channel partner can be a gift that keeps on giving. Of course, you know that already, which is why you’re here. All of your competitors know it, too, and they all collect the same emails at networking events. The prospective partners you talk with may enjoy being the belles of the ball, but their many suitors quickly become a blur. And when they get back from the event and start to receive follow-up emails, they’re overwhelmed after the first few and begin deleting the rest or dragging them to their junk folders.

In other words, you want to be in their first wave of follow-ups. “You need to show up – whether in person or virtual events – but that’s not enough,” warns Mitel’s Skjerven. “Good suppliers make an impression at events and after they leave… . You can’t wait. Follow up in a week, or they’ll forget you.”

In our hyper digital world, channel sales managers who are really first out of the gate, request to connect with partners on LinkedIn immediately after meeting them and while the event is still in progress. A personalized note in the moment can help get that important second meeting on the books.

How to Recruit Channel Partners #7: Demonstrate How You Add Value to Your Sales Partners

Having solid pre-sales support to help your partners close deals is imperative to building a strong reputation in the channel. So is reliable and pain-free provisioning and onboarding of your channel partners’ customers. Post-sale support? Yeah, you’ve got to deliver. And your billing needs to be right, and your commissions need to be accurate and on time.

Getting all of those customer- and partner-side processes down pat is essential to building a strong channel reputation (and avoiding a poor one). But that’s only the cost of entry. Offering something new and valuable to your partners will not only get you noticed, but also can keep your partners engaged after they sign on.

Focusing on the unusual value you can offer partners can pique partners’ interest and help you hedge against the “me too” trap of trying to convince them to displace their current providers by engaging in SPIFF and commissions wars for “bread and butter” product sales. Besides, being the highest bidder isn’t a winning long-term channel strategy; it only works until a better offer comes along and attracts partners who are more concerned about their bank accounts than their customer accounts.

EagleTEQ’s Allen asks himself these questions: “What is our value proposition? What solution for an approach [to customers] or products are we giving them they didn’t have previously? How are we bringing them new customers they didn’t have previously? I’m not here to take business from existing providers, I’m here to deliver something new.”

How to Recruit Channel Partners #8: Prioritize Responsiveness to Build Trust and Keep Partners Engaged in Selling Your Services

Price always matters. Let’s not pretend it doesn’t. In addition to price, the value propositions of most of today’s technology sales are centered firmly on solving business challenges like overtaxed resources, operational headaches and problems that can cause customer dissatisfaction and revenue loss. Channel partners engage in this arena daily, mixing and matching the services they sell to help their customers tackle an array of issues.

But as soon as they leave a client site or close a ticket, channel partners face many of those same issues themselves. They’ve got all the overhead and responsibilities of any other business – HR, payroll, accounting, sales and marketing, etc. – but are at the mercy of the providers they work with to keep their customers up and running (and satisfied).

This is where responsiveness can set you apart from your competitors. The faster your sales support operations can quote services, or your channel account managers can resolve issues for your partners and their clients, the more trust you build in the relationship. That’s because you make your partners look good to their customers and reduce their workload while you do it.

“Go the extra mile in providing what your customers and prospects and partners are asking for, and make sure that you are responsive to them,” advises Mitel’s Skjerven. “Everybody has choices these days. I will deal with someone faster if they are responsive to me – it comes back to the customer experience and meeting my needs.”

How to Recruit Channel Partners #9: Assess, Assess, Assess

Assessment is vital to building and maintaining a strong channel partner recruitment and engagement. Zift Solutions’ Tenuto advocates developing and testing partner incentives and participation directly before launching campaigns. (See graphic, “Refining the Partner Engagement Model” below.)

In terms of measuring partner performance, detailed quarterly business reviews can help you test your partner profiles to make sure they’re performing as expected. You’ll see which products are performing best for your base on one hand, and on the other, you see which partners are performing the best with your products.

Periodic reviews also can help you identify partners that are not engaging or that may have been poached by your competitors as well as any changes in the competitive environment that require attention.

How to Recruit Channel Partners #10: Know When to Say “No” to New or Further Investment in a Sales Partner

Depending on the length of your sales cycle, you’re taking a six- to 12 -month bet that the financial, human and opportunity cost of recruiting a partner will pay off. That means you want to do all you can to tip the odds in your favor.

Use best-fit partners to model an ideal partner profile—and stick to it. Don’t be afraid to tell a prospective partner “no.”

Similarly, if a partner is not engaged, not performing and slow to respond to your outreach or uninterested in opportunities you provide to up their game, focus your resources elsewhere. Spend your time and energy on partners that share your goals and values and who want success as much as you do.

Stop banging your head against the wall. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of misalignment between your objectives and your partner’s objectives. “The most talented channel leaders in the world know when to say no, or manage differently,” says EagleTEQ’s Allen. “Don’t waste time or set yourself up for disappointment by trying to force your partners to fit into your definition of success.”

While there’s no copy-and-paste method for finding the right partners, keeping these tips in mind while developing your channel partner recruitment strategy can set you on the right path. Capturing (and retaining) the best partners for your organization will set the foundation for your channel’s success.

Download these ten tips as a one-pager to share below:

There really is no precedent one can draw an analogy from to describe the level of change B2B channels have had to adjust to in 2020. Digital transformation, once aspirational, has become a means of survival for both suppliers and partners. Last mile execution, often left up to the partner, is no longer the way things work when there’s no customer to visit. Adjusting to these new norms will be challenging for some, but we’re seeing leading channel programs focus on these ten important areas when they want to drive higher ROI in channel sales and marketing efforts.

10 Channel Strategies to Drive Higher Sales & Marketing ROI

(1) Create Tighter Alignment Between Channel Sales and Marketing

There’s no arguing tighter alignment between sales and marketing can drive higher performance. In fact SiriusDecisions/Forrester has said that “highly aligned companies grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable.” In the channel this is not optional. Getting channel account managers (CAM’s) to work with partner marketing managers to drive better engagement, promote new tools or benefits to partners and in some cases, make partner marketing execution a key component to advancing in their program are just a few practical ways to drive better alignment between channel sales and channel marketing that could lead to quicker results.

(2) Improve CAM and Partner Enablement

Like direct sales, both CAMs and partner sales reps should be enabled to succeed. Specifically, CAM’s need to know how their channel works, for example they should know the difference between MSP, Referral or Disty-led channels. They also need to know the ins-and-outs of their own supplier program, how to plan for success with partners and the economics of the partner’s business, so they can set realistic goals. On the partner side, focus on delivery. A channel-friendly LMS like the one found in ZiftONE can help deliver training on product, sales and marketing. Partners will also need to become adept at any supplier sales methodologies, processes and tools to help them manage leads. Additionally, they should be made aware of any competitive information, including strengths and weaknesses that can help them navigate through sales cycles.

(3) Use Partner Segmentation to Drive Higher Engagement and Results

Segment your partners to better understand their uniqueness and create “personalized” sales plays that leverage their strengths and capabilities. This will drive higher engagement as partners will prefer to work with suppliers who can help them differentiate themselves. Start by grouping partners into active and inactive, then find distinctions or capabilities your program can target to drive better performance, like singling out those selling into specific verticals or partner with complementary solutions. Try grouping partners who have completed training and inviting them to engage in follow-up sales or marketing campaigns designed specifically for them. This will sharpen your focus and provide partners with familiar territory they can leverage for success.

(4) Translate Better Channel Visibility and Reporting into Better Outcomes

Use reporting to know what is happening so you can impact outcomes. One place to start is gaining a better understanding of the lead funnel at the top, middle and at the bottom stages. As partner marketing campaigns begin to attract shoppers, the top of the funnel should grow. While encouraging, look past the top of the funnel to see those leads moving through lead distribution and lead registration; noting both volume and velocity. Start gauging their conversion rates from stage to stage to see what is working and what is not and focus on what’s driving results for some partners that could be applied to others. Gaining visibility into the entire lead spectrum requires investing in the end-to-end solutions that can report across silos, similar to the reporting engine we designed in ZiftONE Channel Sales.

(5) Better Partner Planning Equals Higher Performance

CAMs should “plan their work, then work their plan” throughout the year with partners. This includes planning for both sales and marketing initiatives. On the sales side, specific goals should be set for net new and renewals, paying special attention to customer satisfaction and churn metrics, especially if partners are selling ARR cloud solutions. On the marketing side, determine what’s needed from CAM’s to engage partners, setting goals for attendance at webinars, sales and marketing training, each with a strong follow-up or call-to-action. Using a joint funnel approach, described previously, estimate how much marketing partners will need to reach their pipeline goals, then work with them throughout the year to execute against this plan.

(6) Go Beyond Partner Locators to Create Customer Connections

Help customers connect with the right partner by promoting them and offering customers a partner locator they can use to find them. Once a prospect shows any interest, use email nurturing and social media to stay connected on behalf of the partner. These basic “for-partner” activities can help partners convert shoppers into “buyers” but this approach is often overshadowed by “to-partner” and “through-partner” programs used to raise awareness and create leads, respectively. Once customers pick a partner to work with, follow-up on their behalf, making initial contact as needed and redirecting them to the partners website if appropriate, while notifying the partner. Partner websites should be optimized for any incoming traffic you send them, so if you’re not auditing their websites, make sure you survey their capabilities before launching into any for-partner channel marketing programs.

(7) Better Partner Contact Lists Requires Trust

Typically getting partners to share their prospect or customer lists can be challenging, especially in a hybrid channel where direct sales may compete with channel partners. Combined with the data that says an existing customer is three times more likely to take an offer than a new one, it’s critical that suppliers and partners work together to share lists, historical data and any digital body-language prospects leave behind. I’ve found these two principles work best: educate partners letting them know how their list will be used, e.g. only in a specific marketing campaign; and be transparent, using reporting and analytical tools similar to those we’ve built into ZiftONE dashboards, provide partners regular updates on what their prospects are doing and when it’s right to reach out with an offer.

(8) Account Based Marketing – Know the Difference!

Recognize that all opportunities delivered by partners are not all net new, some are existing customers who’ve been buying from the customer for years. Keeping that in mind, help partners maintain a steady connection with their customers leveraging data about their industry, important trends and responding with social thought leadership programs that project the value the partner brings to the table. Whether it’s follow-up training, a series of webinars or financial offers a customer can apply towards a renewal or upsell, a well targeted program can quickly gain traction with existing customers who rely on the partner as a trusted advisor.

(9) Channel Sales and Marketing Shared Funnel

Sales and Marketing should work together to address unique needs at each stage of the lead funnel (top, middle and closing stages). At the top, marketing can drive better lead conversions by working closely with CAM’s to better target prospects using ideal customer and partner data, which will result in better leads and better hand-off to sales. In the middle stages, after a partner accepts the lead marketing can continue to help nurture leads by sending emails, social posts and adding value, especially targeted assets, like competitive comparisons which could help partners navigate through difficult selling situations. At the bottom, where deals get stuck, channel marketing can continue to add value, especially in the form of stimulus marketing programs, e.g. financial offers that may trigger customers to purchase.

(10) Partner Digital Transformation is an Imperative

Suppliers should act quickly, if they haven’t already, to accelerate their channel partner’s digital transformation in light of circumstances where live interactions are limited. While many partners have started the change to digital, many have become adept at single tactics, e.g. over-using email. Start by sharing best practices in social selling, SEO and buyer’s journey so that partners can begin promoting themselves and learn how to use the assets on their websites and those you share from a marketing portal. Next, help them tell their story digitally by converting content you may already have and letting partners put their “spin” on it. Make sure to cover all the bases by teaching partners how to execute, not necessarily develop on their own, integrated marketing plays both CAM’s and partners can use to develop new leads or market to existing customers.

I had the distinct pleasure of reconnecting with an ex-colleague, Maria Chien, who is Service Director of Channel Marketing Strategies for SiriusDecisions. Maria and I joined forces to record a new on-demand webinar detailing how to align channel technology with best practices to support program growth, partner engagement and ROI.

Maria and I worked closely together when I was Group Director of Channel Sales and Marketing Strategies at SiriusDecisions. So, rather than your typical formal webinar, this webcast sounds more like two friends bouncing ideas off one another – great perspectives that I think provide real value and insight you can put to good use overcoming today’s channel challenges.

Top 5 Priorities for Channel Leaders

Maria kicked off our discussion by sharing the top five channel marketing priorities for B2B channel leaders, which are published annually by SiriusDecisions  As programs evolve, new growth initiatives such as entering new markets require these priorities to adapt to reflect overarching company goals.  During the webcast, Maria stressed that the value channel marketing drives can be measured by its degree of impact on a channel organization’s top priorities. Moreover, channel organizations require real skills, processes and specific tactics to achieve their priorities across the channel business.

I don’t want to give everything away, but I will tell you that the five priorities required to build, manage and grow a successful channel business encompass:

• Strategy and Planning: To develop and align channel marketing programs with go-to-market activities, corporate strategy and growth goals.
• Channel Demand Creation: Forming demand creation strategies for channel partners that increase channel marketing’s contribution to pipeline.
• Partner Program Design and Optimization: Designing a best-in-class channel partner program and optimizing existing programs to improve partner experiences.
• Partner Enablement and Engagement: Imparting skills partners need to be successful and building a holistic partner engagement roadmap that goes beyond onboarding.
• Functional Design and Development: Transforming channel marketing to drive better partner performance and contribution.

Maria does an excellent job detailing exactly why and how organizations should dig into each of these priorities, complete with best practices and use cases, to deliver an exceptional partner experience and drive better channel performance overall.

Aligning Channel Technology with Best Practices

Building on Maria’s insights, I explored the multiple technologies required to fulfill demands across channel sales, marketing and operations, as well as the integration challenges often standing in the way of channel program success.  

Instead of a siloed approach to channel program management, Zift recommends a truly integrated approach with Channel as a Service (CHaaS). We feel strongly that integration should not be left up to suppliers or vendors of the disparate software solutions they are using to automate an array of critical processes. In large part, that’s because integration goes beyond getting software applications to speak to each other, which I discussed in this recent Channel Chatter blog.  

Suppliers don’t have time to weave technology, processes and channel best practices together – and with CHaaS, they don’t have to. You’ll see why and how CHaaS spans all of the distinct phases channel programs must manage, along with how to operationalize the best practices Maria indicated are priorities for channel leaders today, when you watch the webinar. I encourage you to take 30 minutes to see how channel programs can win big by aligning technology with best practices. Watch the webinar now.