Recruiting new partners is not easy. You need someone whose enthusiasm for your brand and product/service matches yours. Their core business values should be in line with yours too. Recruiting the partners is tough, but it is even tougher to hold on to the one right ones, keeping them motivated, engaged and helping them drive revenue for themselves and you. The partner onboarding process plays a critical role in making this happen. It sets the tone for the rest of your relationship. If your partner onboarding process is botched up, you are headed for a rocky vendor-partner relationship, which may not last long. This blog discusses a few best practices that can be adopted during the partner onboarding phase to help you start the relationship with your new partner on the right note.
Understand your partner’s persona
The first step is to understand your partner’s persona. The kind of training, marketing and sales support, and even motivational elements that your partners need vary depending on their persona. Understanding partner personas helps you guide your partners better.
Provide the right assets
The next step is to make the relevant assets available to your partners. Again, the partner persona will play a key role in determining the assets that will be useful to them. Vendors often dump a bunch of assets into their partner portal and leave it up to the partners to fish through them looking for the right one. The best practice would be to ensure the right assets, personalized for each partner are made available, by the vendors, based on the partner persona. The assets should be easily accessible and stored at a centralized location.
Training
Conduct relevant, but in-depth training sessions for your channel partners. The training sessions can be conducted through videos, live sessions, PDF walk-throughs, webinars, etc. Apart from these, vendors should also hand-hold the new partners and actually help them close a few initial leads. This instills confidence in new channel partners.
Measurement
The most important step is to measure the performance and engagement levels of your channel partners throughout the onboarding process and after. A partner who attends all training sessions downloads collateral and training documents and completes certification milestones on time can be classified as highly engaged and motivated. Measuring partner engagement and performance levels at the onboarding stage helps vendors get a clearer picture of how the vendor-partner relationship is likely to be. It helps you weed out partners who seemed like a good fit at the recruitment stage but are not in reality.
Mindmatrix makes training and onboarding efficient, objective and effective by providing all the essentials of onboarding and training in one place. With Mindmatrix, you can-
- Reduce ramp-to-revenue time
- Prepare and share effective training materials
- Set alerts and reminders for partner users for training/certification completion
- Track and monitor performance during the training phase
- Conduct certification programs to assess training needs
- Share processes, business trends and consumer insights with sales teams efficiently
- Use interaction with the training, onboarding and certification module to gauge engagement levels with your brand (Channel)
Please visit www.mindmatrix.net to learn more.
