Google Improves Channel Partner Onboarding And Accelerates Revenue

Competition for partners intensifies

Partner recruitment and activation has become more difficult as technology competitors battle each other for market share. Getting the most out of your channel strategy requires significant care in the channel partner onboarding process. Recruitment and activation specifically require focused communication that emphasizes a company's unique value.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) serves as a supportive infrastructure to help organizations empower employees and serve customers. Machine learning expertise, world-class security, and a global network help Google’s partners plan, develop, and launch solutions to reach important business goals. GCP is one of the fastest-growing businesses across the parent company, Alphabet.

An opportunity to strenghten field recruitment and activtion

The cloud computing leader needed our help recruiting and activating key cloud partners.

Moreover, GCP faced challenges with unified messaging, causing a fractured field approach to partner recruitment. Limited role definition and responsibility assignments led to unclear process ownership, resulting in uneven execution and opportunity costs.

Google’s channel teams were looking for a concise and meaningful business value proposition for partners, as well as a top-line metric for partner account managers to gauge recruitment and activation success.

Unifying the channel partner onboarding experience

Using targeted content to address multiple stakeholders, Spur Reply worked closely with Google Cloud Partner experience program managers to develop a structure, process, and resources for a unified channel partner onboarding experience. Our teams jointly overhauled the partner business proposition, highlighting GCP's advantages for partners while calling attention to competitor deficiencies.

Creating a new channel partner onboarding experience specifically required developing systems and tools into field playbooks and execution guidelines for Google Cloud’s technology partner ecosystem. Analyzing multiple audiences across partner executives, marketing teams, sales representatives, and technical resources, our team directed the creation of a content roadmap.

Google trusted Spur Reply with this task because our expertise gave us deep familiarity with GCP’s needs. The cloud computing leader was also confident in our experience building simple and effective messaging frameworks.

Buy-in optimizes Google Cloud partner experience

Ultimately, buy-in from global stakeholders for key objectives, strategies, and the operating framework accelerated the ability to onboard partners. Clear expectations for partners and account managers drove activation.

The success of GCP’s new onboarding system was largely due to consistent metrics, scorecard, and processes for measuring partner and field channel activation. Data-driven, targeted lists improved the field recruitment effort.

The collaboration gave each internal stakeholder group the tools, playbooks, and partner-facing content they needed to excel in the area of channel partner onboarding and retention.