Driving value with partners

Building a solid partner business takes years - it is a journey and in my experience totally worth the investment. Throughout my professional career I have always worked with partners, depended on them and stood by them. At one point I also worked at a partner, which provided me with material insights into what motivates and drives a partner.

A lot of product vendors normally show up at a partner, demonstrating the technology and hoping for the best - perhaps an incentive to boost a bit of attention. I have been that vendor, I have also listened to multiple vendors trying to pitch technology to me and my team when sitting on the other side. Many vendors are also extremely tactical in their engagement, focusing on the quarter at hand to close the deal they need to make their number. So how do you really drive value through your partners? How do you make them want to be joint at the hip with you?

What I have found through my years in managing sales teams, partner sales teams and driving end customer relationships, is that there are a some key items that are fundamental to consider in order to deliver value to your partners and ultimately grow your business as a vendor. I will try and call out some of them here, albeit not a perfect nor complete list.

• Innovation & Differentiation. Does your technology help the partner to innovate - and more importantly differentiate their offering with their customers vs their competition (note, not your competition > the partners competition)? If yes, you need to help visualize and demonstrate this value to the partner to accelerate the joint value proposition
• Profitability. Partners live on margin and they normally hate vendors coming in the last minute of the quarter with a "baked deal" and more or less dictating the margins to the partner. If a partner - and many are going down this path - even traditional resellers - provide managed services, reducing the cost of service delivery immensely increases profitability and helps to differentiate further. It also increases stickiness with customers and helps create further opportunities adjacent to your technology that can be instrumental for the partner to improve their margin/profitability opportunity, their wallet share and relevance within their customer.
• Partner Intimacy & Involvement. Partners should be included earlier on in the sales cycle - even if it is a vendor originated deal, in order to increase intimacy with the vendor & partner sales teams and set a foundation for future opportunities. This is also a great opportunity to accelerate knowledge transfer and build up competencies around your technology with the partner. It is not about "us and them" > building partnerships is about "us", as one team sharing one mission and goal. Ultimately is is about building trust.
• Service creation is a necessity when faced with the digital transformation. The journey to the cloud & SaaS truly forces traditional resell partners to embrace more and more services approach in order to maintain profitable and ultimately survive. Living on very slim margins based on tech resell on the cloud marketplace of choice will not be enough to keep the lights on in their business.
• Trusted Advisory. More or less every partner I meet say they want to be - or already act as the trusted advisor with their customer. Through your value proposition you should be able to visualize how the partner can focus on customer value through innovation, differentiation, cost optimization and ultimately align with the customer business outcomes - not technical features.
• Direct touch. Many vendors have direct sales team. If you are a 100% partner centric organization, eg all your business flows through partners and you do not take business direct, you have a direct "touch" sales team. As it implies, your sales team definitely touches end customers, however, partners need - and should be involved early in the sales cycle. See point above on partner intimacy & involvement. As a direct touch rep, ensure to dedicate time to spend with your key partners in your region. You will be surprised of the intimacy it builds up and how new potential leads and business will flow your way.

Next to these you obviously have slam dunk topics such as partner business plans, marketing activities, providing/feeding leads and opportunities to the partner, call out days and what have you. These are simply day to day activities I would expect on every partner manager or direct touch sales person to do as part of their role in engaging with their partners. This is the needed investment you need to make in your partner to start the engine up in the first place.

If you think about the above topics I am certain you will find a higher degree of partner involvement and commitment! These are some of the mantra′s I live by in working with partners. With every new day comes a new opportunity!

Let me know your thoughts.