The Importance of Partner Management

Having a strong channel partnership can make a tremendous impact on your business. If it’s a good channel partnership, it can scale your company to a new levels & heights. If the channel partnership is bad, it can cost your company not only valuable time but money too. How effectively achieve channel partner management is a topic that is not discussed in depth and has not been tough enough times. The main reason for this is each company has different types of channel partners and different requirements for each channel partner looking at the kind of products and services they cater. Yet, there are many things that are common to successful channel partner relationships such as communication to the channel partner, relationship building with the channel partner, trust, transparency & also mutual interest. Here I am listing down some tips to help you make sure you are on the right track towards building a successful channel partnership!

1. ?Create a shared partnership vision and roadmap: Before you formally finalize your partnership, you need to make sure that the channel partner and your team are well aligned. Do Share your visions with one another, including targets and the milestones. ?This may help you to save yourself from some unexpected surprises. Make sure that you share your Company’s vision, plans and at the same time transparent too. It will help to create a higher level of commitment not only from the channel partner but also from and any other stakeholders.
2. Be transparent with the channel partner: As mentioned, transparency is one of the key pointers to maintain a successful channel partnership. If you encourage transparency and open channels of communication with your channel partner, both you and your channel partner will have a better opportunity to work and succeed. Be honest about your own weaknesses, as well as your opportunity strengths. If the channel partner is required to deliver some successful sales, providing the channel partner as much information as possible about the company, industry will increase the chance of them closing the deal. Once the channel partner trusts you and receives high-quality results from the channel partnership, they will invest think to more time and resources in your business more seriously, resulting in making a more lucrative channel partnership and increased future success for both of you.
3. Always know your channel partner’s strengths and weaknesses: It is always good to know the respective strengths & weaknesses of your channel partners as each one are different from another. It may be that you have one partner who is better at closing sales and another partner who is better in finding new sales leads and opportunities, it will require you to work with them in different ways in order to get the best results. As a Channel Manager make sur that I try to determine each partner’s capability and how it differentiates it with the other channel partner. For example, I have a channel partner who excels good in providing awesome presentations, so I always prefer that this channel partner presents to potential clients. On the other hand, there might be another channel partner who is good in generating and identifying the prospects I would prefer that I use their strength in this direction and will use my team member from channel sales team to help them to quickly close the deal.
4. Always communicate effectively: This may sound obvious but it sound surprising to know that number of promising channel partnerships have fallen through because of sub-standard communication. Perhaps the channel partner may be doing a great job, but if it is not communicated to you and therefore, there is no way for you to know their activity. A great way to overcome this is to schedule a scheduled calls on a fixed day of the week with your channel partner and also to make sure you receive a regular updates on any activity being done by the channel partner which are relevant to your company. If you do so the, communication will help you to increase the accountability and will also help you to suggest new ideas and approaches to the channel partner, which may have been previously missed by any means or way.
5. It is always good to know when to say goodbye: Managing a channel partner (and most often pool of partners parallel) may take lot of time and of yours. In number of cases, it can result in a wonderful outcome of success for both sides of the channel partnership. When managing a channel partner, you create close relationships, and sometimes even friendships. So, sometimes it becomes very hard to say goodbye to a channel partner who is not performing well, in spite of a positive personal relationship with the channel partner. Always remember that by saying goodbye to this channel partner, you are not only taking out more time to manage other more successful partnerships but also you would have time and learning to bring new channel partners onboard, but you will also be aiding and encouraging the channel partner to create other channel partnerships that may be more beneficial for them too.