Evolution of Go-to-Market - Partner Enablement 02

In Part 1 of partner enablement, I talked about the Pacman Principal and how 80% of making a partner successful is merely being there for the partner. In this blog, I am going to cover specific enablement activities. Enablement comprises the training and tools delivered to a partner to facilitate the sales of your solution. In a recent article, Reed Hastings referenced the rock-star principal from the famous Santa Monica study. The researchers expected the best programmers would outperform the others by a factor of two to three. What they found was that the best programmer was as much as twenty-five times faster! Reed found that “best programmer doesn’t add ten times the value--he or she adds more like one-hundred times.” We want a partner's sales team to be rock-star performers, enablement is how we assure they can perform and represent your product well.

Many times, I have seen companies focus their partner enablement on what I call, “file, run, setup”. This training focuses heavily on the Sales Engineering team learning how to install and setup the security solution into a customer’s networks or running a proof of value (POV). The problem with this approach is that an install and a POV are often undertaken at least sixty to ninety days after a partner has been signed and enabled. During this period, the partner is very likely to have little to no interaction with your product and will need to have their training refreshed when an install or POV finally materializes. Instead, we want to focus our partner’s initial enablement on aspects that facilitate guiding customers to a POV instead of executing a POV. The best place to determine what initial enablement is needed is to understand what someone selling your solution is facing during the very early stages of the sales cycle. 

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