5 tips to improve Partner Experience

In my previous post on Partner Experience (PX) I defined it as,

“...how much expectations of individuals in your channel are met through every human and digital touch point over the life of your engagement with them.”

This article aims to share more on why PX needs to be a part of your channel strategy and five tips that will help you in building towards a more successful experience.  

So, what’s the value of PX?

There was a time when simply offering the best commercial terms alone could win the channel argument, today I believe winning hearts, minds and a point of differentiation can be achieved by providing a superior partner experience.

A well thought through and executed PX has many commercial benefits, which include:

1. Realising the full revenue potential of your partners – Improved partner satisfaction, which fosters repeat business, loyalty, advocacy and reduces partner churn.
2. Realising that revenue faster – Reduced friction and a consistent approach to PX across all touch points expedites returns.
3. Creating a competitive advantage – A unique experience that impresses all that engage with it and exceeds all expectation ensures that not only will they continue to do business with you, they’ll chose you over your competition.

What 5 things could help improve PX?

KNOW your partner personas

On one level and in relation to the partner recruitment process this is looking at the traditional "perfect fit" partner criteria, which if you're reading this, I'm certain you'll be familiar with. As part of the process it is important to also assess your target (typically owner/MD) at an individual level and make sure messaging aligns to meet with their needs.

Once your enablement initiatives kick-in the need to understand individual personas inside your partners becomes ever greater. Obvious differences in expectations exist in each function such as sales, technical, marketing and finance but also at a hierarchical level such as Sales Executive, Manager and Director.

The more you seek to understand each individual need, the better equipped you will be in pin-pointing messaging and materials that adds real value to your partner community.   

IDENTIFY your partner touch points

Touch points are where the individuals within your partner are in contact with your brand. It is a complex and intricate web and potentially more challenging to control than your direct customer touch points.

Channel marketers logically are compelled to focus on the areas that they are responsible for such as social, print, digital, PR etc. But to be most effective in designing and delivering exceptional PX requires cross-functional understanding.

It's not limited to but should include partner sales, account handling, pre-sales support, training, investor relations and even finance, particularly finance! How often does a great programme get let down by a slow or late payment? This small factor can have a profound and lasting impact on your partner's desire to do more with you.

MAP your partner journey

The partner journey has two distinct parts. Recruitment which begins with the first brand contact and ends with "sign-up". Enablement and Retention which is the continuous process of providing the tools, support and incentives to build loyalty and advocacy.  

Partner Recruitment

Recruitment is focused at both partner and individual-level, it’s linear (has a start and a finish) and ends once the partner is either contractually or metaphorically “signed-up” there are three stages:

•  Awareness – Partner becomes familiar with your brand, product and service portfolio
• Consideration – Partner has business need to service client(s) with your products and actively considers whether to engage
• Decision – Partner decides there is value in engaging with you and “signs-up”

For further reading there's some interesting insight in research available from CRN on the recruitment phase of the partner journey.

Enablement & Retention

Deeply focused at an individual-level enablement and retention begins immediately on "sign-up" and if you are successful in forming a long-lasting relationship with your new partner it need not have an end point. There are three components:

• Animation/Enablement – Partner needs training, enabling and motivating to resell
• Loyalty – Partner frequently and actively repeat purchases and resells
• Advocacy – Partner spreads the word about your brand & products

Being able to map the journey allows businesses to create a more consistent and repeatable channel process. It helps better identify gaps or weaknesses for future improvement.  

USE a data-driven approach that focuses on the individual

Partner data is growing exponentially, although access to it can be cumbersome. Realising the full revenue potential of partners and shortening the timeframe in achieving it is dependent on easily accessible and interpretable intelligence.

Using intuition or personal experience is no longer an acceptable way forward. Being able to collect and rapidly process both structured and unstructured information is now the channel imperative. Moreover, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science will only further the ability to provide interpretation.

The key to success is how data is used to provide contextual, personalised and a value-orientated experience for partners.

DELIVER compelling, contextual and personalised channel content

It’s all well and good having a clear understanding of who to target, where to interact with them and what they are doing but not having a strong content management plan with compelling and valuable content will undermine any PX.

Still I see only a handful of vendors with a clearly defined communications and content plans for their channel and all too often they take a largely reactive approach to delivery. We have to be flexible, the pace of and changes in the market dictate that, but clarity in content and communications planning is a must.

Gartner recommends using data to maximise success, partner insights to spark ideas, analytics to facilitate continuous improvements and delivering content that is contextual, customisable and accessible. If you're a member you can access more on this here.

Above all the content must be compelling. It must be interesting, insightful, useful or even humorous. There are a wide variety of delivery vehicles and making sure the right ones are used for each and every persona will determine success.

In summary

Partner Experience is a broad and at times complex. But a well-designed and executed strategy will differentiate you in the market and provide the platform to realise the potential of your channel.

We've been working recently with our clients to help them evolve their partner experience if it's an area that interests you, you're thinking about a redesign or your looking for tips on execution, please feel free to reach out!