How to Build the Fittest & Highest Performing Channel Partners in your Industry

Your partners may not look like this, but they can become as strong and as fit as the best personal trainer with the use of these simple improvement tools.Your channel partners may not look exactly like this on the outside, but they can easily be as fit and well trained by following a simple to implement process. These athletes work hard to get stronger and more efficient by consistently refining their workouts to remove fat and build hard working muscles. This same approach can be applied to building committed, revenue-producing partnerships.  The stronger and more capable your partners are, the more you can rely on them to develop new revenue without your direct involvement. That allows you to take advantage of the multiplicative effect of a strong and independent channel producing new opportunities on their own.

Turn your Channel Managers into Expert Business Consultants for your Channel:

The #1 advocates for your brand with your partners are your team of Channel Managers. They have the closest relationship with individual partners and have the power to influence and negotiate.  They have three key missions working with their assigned partners to make them fitter and better representatives for your brand in the market.

The Three Key Missions for Channel Managers:

1) Build Stronger Partner Commitment to your Brand: (Performance Management Consultant) Your Channel Managers need to have an effective process to help build collaborative goals and measure performance-to-plan

2) Build More Capable Representatives of your Brand: (Capabilities Development Consultant) Your Channel Managers need to be able to easily assess and provide custom improvement roadmaps to their partners

3) Build More Partner-Led Revenue: (Revenue Development Consultant) Your Channel Managers need to be able to do end user account planning with partners to develop new sales opportunities and conduct QBRs to manage performance

Unfortunately for most channel organizations, these three key processes are managed with the use of ad hoc methods without the assistance of tools designed to assist them. Channel Managers are asked to fulfill these missions without the support of tools and data that can make these processes simple and highly effective. 

Tools that Will help Build the Fittest and Highest Performing Partnerships:

The days of ad hoc, inefficient, and disconnected partner management processes are now behind us. New cloud-based tools are available to build partner commitments, capabilities, and partner-led revenue effectively and in a fraction of the time.

Step 1: Build Joint Business Plans by Selecting Goals, Activities and Tactics:

A highly fit and able partner is one that earnestly participates in a joint business and marketing planning process with your channel management team. This process helps partners and Channel Managers to choose from a set of recommended business goals and select recommended activities and tactics that support the achievement of these goals. Partners are looking for a vendor’s expertise and will almost always select from a set of well-defined recommended goals, activities and tactics that are proven to work. This same action planning process flows directly into marketing planning and the funds request process. Fit partners are the ones that build and commit to an integrated business and marketing action plans that is connected to regular QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews).  

Step 2: Build your Custom Partner Performance Dashboard:

One of the biggest challenges with building fit partnerships is the ease of measuring performance-to-plan. In the indirect channel, data, systems, and processes are just too disconnected to make it easy to measure, manage and motivate on a regular basis. This problem is solved with the advent of the Partner Performance Dashboard system that compiles all data, performance analytics, and performance-to-plan metrics in one simple dashboard. This dashboard provides a wide range of measured program metrics to manage the health of your partner’s business and their achievement of your program goals. Plus, it exports to PPT instantly for sharing both online and in a file format.

Step 3: Score Partners & Build a Partner Capabilities Action Plan:

Fit partners, just like bodybuilders, love metrics. They want to know where they stand with key measures that indicate performance improvement on all levels. A partner life-stage scorecard is the perfect blueprint to help developing partners become highly toned and able. Partner life-stage scorecards allow you to assess partners across a wide range of metrics including, fit, onboarding, activation, and enablement, along with development of sales, marketing, and technical capabilities. This four-step process allows Channel Managers to assess, score, and create improvement action plans effectively.

Step 4: Build End-Use Target Account Plans with Partner Sales Team: 

Time is the most limited commodity for partner sales teams.  They are dividing their time between multiple brands, supporting existing customers and prospecting with new customers. Partner end-user account planning systems help bring together all active opportunities (registered deals), sales leads, and new account planning opportunities in one consolidated view. This system allows a Channel Manager to organize structured end customer account planning reviews with partner sales directors and individual partner sales executives efficiently and effectively. The result of a more organized account planning review is the development of new cross-selling opportunities along with new partner-led deals by inserting your brand’s priorities into your partner’s sales process.

Last 2 Steps for Building Capable and Effective Partnerships:

Knowledgeable and equipped Channel Managers are some of the most valued resources for your partners. Your partners are looking for your organization’s expertise and guidance for building their business. Channel tools like Steps 5-6 help your partners build their business with your brand collaboratively and efficiently.

Step 5: Track, Report, and Manage all Planned Activities in a Comprehensive Task Management Tool:

With partners time limitations, your brand initiatives simply get lost in the shuffle of other priorities. Thoughtful plans, dates, and actions too often get missed or forgotten simply because there are too many other competing priorities and distraction for your partners. A comprehensive task management system provides an instant view on the completion status of all past due, current, and pending tasks defined in the partner business plan. The review and tracking of action plan completion status has never been easier.

Step 6: For Top Partners, Build a Full Partner Profitability Model for Simulating Potential:

Every channel organization has a select group of partners that are “strategic” and represent a disproportionate share of an organization’s revenue. For these top partners, Channel Managers can build a comprehensive partner profitability model with the sale of your brand. Historically, this has been a very labor-intensive process to build partner profitability models. But with the introduction of best practice partner business modelling tools, creating a custom P&L can be completed in minutes.  This multi-year partner P&L can simulate both license revenue and “drag along” partner services. Additionally, it can simulate changes to pricing, costs, products, and forecasts and instantly calculate multi-year partner profitability.  

The Same Tools All you to Manage Your Entire Partner Ecosystem:

These same partner-level tools are integrated with a range of roll-up reporting systems. These allow channel teams to look across their partners and profile, segment, manage, and track their performance

A) Scorecard Reporting:  Individual partner scorecards are also rolled up in an overall scorecard reporting system. This allows channel teams to manage and track the status of specific partner initiatives by partner and across partners. The quick views allow for territory level, regional level, or global level views on the status of partner capabilities for all brand-defined “categories” and “topics.”

B) Partner Potential Segmentation: One of the most important priorities for channel organizations is to segment partners based on a range of “potential” metrics. Any number of partner segmentations can be built with the use of any scored (1-100) metrics with the use of the Partner Potential Segmentation tool. Partners can be segmented with the use of any performance metrics (e.g., performance-to-sales plan) or capabilities metrics (e.g., Vertical market coverage). This allows you to simulate which partnerships may have high potential but are underperforming. It also helps you direct your investment plans where you are more likely to generate a strong return.

C) Partner Management: This partner access and reporting dashboard streamlines the work of channel managers to manage more partners and more tasks in much less time

D) Create a QBR PPT: Quarterly business reviews are one of the most important and infrequently completed tasks. They are simply too hard to pull together with data in multiple systems and not organized to generate a useful report.  The QBR-PPT builder allows channel managers to automatically pull in plan and performance data from all data sources (e.g., sales, pipeline, capabilities, tasks, and activity status) in one place in minutes. A PPT QBR presentation can be built, annotated, and exported in minutes so that each partner is given a review every quarter on a consistent basis

E) Performance-to-Plan Reporting:  A central rollup reporting system is available to review and track performance-to-plan by partner, by channel manager territory, and for all regional levels

F) Plan Acceptance and Approval Workflow: A very important and often missed component of partner business planning is a formalized process for partners to accept their plans and channel executives to approve plans. This integrated partner business planning and performance management system enables partners to “accept” their plan with the use of a DocuSign plug-in and a separate workflow for channel executives to “approve” each partner’s plan. Rollup reporting of plan acceptance and approvals is also provided instantly by quarter

Your partners can be the model of fitness and become exceptionally strong representatives for your brand by following a disciplined process led by your channel team. Your partners are actively seeking your help to build their business model and plans by bringing them your expertise and insights to their business. This formalized partner planning and performance management process is a perfect way to deliver your expertise to your partners efficiently.  Your partners will also give you a disproportionate share of their time because they will appreciate how you helped make them fitter and more effective.