With the right strategy and commitment, you can fundamentally change your partner relationships for the better. We recommend thinking about partners on an individual basis and focusing on three fundamental components: developing a clear understanding of your partner ecosystem, focusing on your unique partner business proposition, and creating a rewarding partner journey.
Before developing or amending a partner experience, take a few steps to clearly understand your partners and the overall ecosystem through partner scoring and capacity planning.
First, use a partner scoring model to evaluate each of your partners. We’ve seen these common elements in the best scoring frameworks: transactional data, qualitative data translated into quantitative measures, measurement over time, relevant data, and consistency. For instance, The Spur Group model uses the 5Cs, which include contribution, consumption, coverage, capability, and commitment.
Once you’ve developed your model, you can begin scoring. For The Spur Group’s model, the first step is to rank all partners using the 5Cs, then categorize partners into groups. Lastly, rank each partner within each group to understand how each one performs among similar partners.
Once you’ve scored partners individually, you can start assessing your entire partner ecosystem to measure overall partner performance. Use the categories you created in partner scoring and further classify them based on current and potential revenue. With a detailed capacity plan, you can then conduct data-based territory planning, investment planning, and program planning.
Next, you want to identify and communicate your organization’s unique partner business proposition. The three main elements of a quality partner business proposition (in order of priority for partners) are relationships, market momentum, and economics.
Relationships with partners is all about creating long-term value. Your relationships will be largely defined by the strategic alignment between your business model and that of a potential partner, your reputation with the industry, and partners’ firsthand experience with you.
With market momentum, focus on your organization’s current market share, how customer demand for your product is changing, and how innovative your product is.
Partner economics is focused on the financial gain a partner can get from a vendor relationship, which is impacted by revenue, ongoing expenses, and halo benefits.
Lastly, focus on building a rewarding and motivating partner journey, aka a set of phases a partner moves through as they build a relationship. Ultimately, the journey should cultivate a positive partner experience and result in your partner building their business around you. The five phases in a typical journey are interest, recruitment, activation, investment, and devotion.
In the first phase, a partner is initially intrigued by working with you and conducts research into a working relationship.
This stage is focused on educating potential partners on your organization and products and/or solutions. By explaining potential strengths and weaknesses, you can help prepare partners for a working relationship.
Training is key in this phase as you work with partners to build sales and customer service skills, setting them up for success with repeat business.
Motivating partners to invest in your business is one of the trickiest phases. While many vendors expect partners to commit before they see financial returns, we believe vendors are most successful after positioning the partner for success.
In this final phase, partners will ideally build their business around yours, and you’ll start to see significant scale as an organization. This is the best-case scenario for your partner relationships.
You’ve learned the basics of the new partner experience model. Want to learn the next steps for improving your own partner program? Download our guide on delivering a superior partner experience.