Training and Onboarding for Partners
When considering a successful partner program, one of the first items that come to mind is proper training and onboarding for new partners. As a new partner, I want to make sure that I have the tools and education to properly sell your product. As a vendor, I want to make sure my partners are properly enabled so that I am getting the most out of the partnership. It only benefits all parties to ensure proper training for partners.
A successful on-boarding program should offer salespeople a complete insight into your business–it’s products/service offering and its customers. This is important because they should know what they are selling and to whom. This requires a guided sales process for your partners.
Guided Sales Process For Partners
A guided sales process for your partners is ultimately really helping you, the channel manager, to be successful. A sales process comes in a variety of formats such as sales playbooks or tagged assets that represent various stages of the sales process. Additionally, you should provide access to all relevant data such as the most popular products/services, most likely buyer persona, and the most effective medium for interaction with the buyer. This gives your partners easy and clear access to the tools they need to walk a prospect through the product.
Partner Recruitment
This takes us to partner recruitment: as you talk to potential partners, be sure to highlight the above features as perks of your partner program.
A channel enablement software should give you the ability to send out recruitment materials to attract potential partners to your company. The partner portal is certainly an attractive feature in itself, so the addition of training and onboarding for a smooth introduction as well as ongoing, proper education and tools to enable the partner to sell is a great incentive to help boost recruitment efforts.
Asset Management
Have you heard that 95% of buyers chose a solution provider that “provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process”?
Asset management is critical in making your guided sales process successful for your partners, and therefore successful for you. So often the countless collateral that the marketing team develops goes unused when the sales team becomes frustrated trying to find the asset they need. Asset management is a crucial feature in a partner portal that makes it easy for partners to find the collateral they need when they need it.
Finally, an asset management tool also enables you to collect feedback on your assets so you know you are providing your partners with the most effective collateral. A successful channel manager will use this insight to create the most valuable collateral that will most effectively enable your partners to sell.
Partner Visibility and Metrics
Finally, before you start gathering metrics for the success of your partner program you have developed above, you have to first define your expectations for KPIs. Identifying these KPIs early is critical. By doing so, your partners know exactly how you are defining their success and value. These defined KPIs also allow you the baseline by which you can clearly measure ROI on your efforts, your assets, and your partners.
As a channel manager, you need complete visibility into channel partner activities and performance. These metrics provide insight into which channel partners are most engaged in your brand and which ones are probably not worth your company’s investment.
Through these metrics, you and your team will find success by monitoring the utilization and value of your partner sales tools, materials and even the partners themselves to ensure you are getting the most out of your partner program.
