What is Partner Scoring?
Partner scoring is the process of assigning ‘points’ or score to your partners based on their interaction with your brand. It involves tracking, measuring and analyzing your partner’s brand interaction to arrive at a score for them.
Partner Scoring helps you develop a baseline to measure partner engagement, Which is the key to successful Channel Partner Enablement
There are two types of partner engagement-
- Internal
- External
External user engagement refers to activities such as:
- Website visits
- Asset downloads from website
- Email opens/click-throughs, etc.,
Internal user engagement refers to activities that happen within your channel enablement platform or partner portal, such as:
- Partner portal logins
- Asset consumption via portal
- Training and certification programs attended
- Marketing & sales campaigns run
- Number of leads registered
An important element of partner scoring-Depreciation for partner scores
One of the key concepts in partner engagement scoring is a consistency of engagement. Hence, partner score deprecations. Inconsistent engagement patterns should affect partner score negatively. For example, if a partner interacted with your brand a month ago and has been dormant ever since, you should depreciate their score.
Setting a threshold for partner scores
While partner scoring is great, how do you ensure the scores are genuine and not inflated? Answer: By setting a threshold for partner activity scoring. Meaning, you set the number of times a particular activity is to be scored. For example, if a partner opens the same email ten times, you must set a limit as to how many times the same activity will be scored.
Partner score based triggers
You can set triggers based on partner scores. For example, if a partner’s score reaches a certain level, you can have them classified as hot, based on their engagement and decide on the next course of action as per your partner program.
Redemption of partner scores-A motivating innovation
You can motivate your partners to interact with your brand more often by allowing them to redeem their scores. For example, Based on your partner scoring model, you can introduce partner score redemption, wherein you can allow your partners to redeem their scores for rewards of your choice, such as additional MDF dollars, a paid vacation, online shopping voucher, starbucks coupon, etc.,.
Partner scoring is important because it helps you identify how each partner is performing. It gives you solid numbers to go by. It helps you overcome the dreaded 80/20 rule and lets you focus and invest on partners who truly care about your brand and relationship with them. It also helps you identify patterns that can help you improve your partner network, partner program and overall channel marketing and sales strategies.
