Partnerships NOW: Volume 5

Welcome to the 5th edition of Partnerships NOW! We are excited to bring you the latest insights in partnerships with this month’s theme in the realm of partner personalization.

In today's ever-evolving business landscape, personalization is no longer just a buzzword; it has become an indispensable tool for enhancing productivity and driving better outcomes within partner programs. We all understand the pivotal role partners play in an organization's success, and by tailoring their experiences, we can unlock their full potential to better serve customers.

When strategies and resources are aligned with the distinctive needs and goals of partners and customers, the full potential of personalization is unleashed. Greater engagement, loyalty, and success become tangible outcomes, driving growth and prosperity for all stakeholders involved.

As always, we extend our heartfelt gratitude to our esteemed contributors from various organizations: 微软 , Spur Reply , Is Inspired , The Lexington Group , AchieveUnite , Research in Action , AvePoint , Sherpa , and PartnerPath . Their expertise and support have enriched this month's content, making it a truly valuable resource for all. We hope you find this month's content both informative and inspiring.

Wishing you a successful and personalized journey ahead!

What personalization strategies or tactics have you found most effective in providing an excellent partner experience?

"Enable the person. We as an industry talk about developing partnerships between organizations – between a technology vendor and a solution provider. However, the relationship is really between people; often a partner development manager on the vendor side and the practice owner at the solution provider. When we talk about enablement we say 'the partner' is enabled to successfully market, sell and service a solution but we mean individuals at the partner company are enabled. Each of these individuals has their own background, skill set, interests, and career goals and they also may have different or unique ways of learning. Some may like to watch webinars in the middle of the night, and others may learn better in person-to-person training (that four- or six-legged sales call). And what they’re learning – marketing, sales, technology, services, customer success – should be personalized to their role, needs, and goals. In your engagements with a partner, by which I mean the people at your partner company, personalize the way you talk to, enable, teach, and engage them.

Partnering should always be personal. Whether over Zoom, email, or in a meeting room, consider not only how you deal with your partners in terms of their unique businesses but also the individuals within those businesses." - Diane Krakora , PartnerPath

"It is all about PREPARATION. Building a personalized experience into your partner management system has numerous benefits, not only for the partner, who feels better understood each time they log in; but for yourself as the manager of the partner relationship. However, before attempting to solve your partners’ problems pro-actively, you should always start by interviewing them, creating surveys to understand their curiosity and hesitations, creating personas, analyzing application heatmaps, and developing a well-honed understanding of the goals and frustrations of the users in your partner application.

Personalization can be costly and time-consuming and should never be your default approach. That said, it helps you to meet partner needs that would otherwise be impossible without sacrificing usability, learnability, and the emotional need that your partners have using your system. Personalization also pushes you to figure out what is important about your application for your users – and what is not." - Peter O'Neill , Research in Action

"When it comes to personalization, there are two main aspects to focus on. The first is the human aspect; you want your experience through partnerships to demonstrate that people enjoy working with individuals they like. This extends to knowing your partners' likes and interests outside of work, as well as significant events in their lives. By building this rapport, you can seize opportunities to send them a special email on their anniversary, or a congratulations kit when they welcome a new child. This helps partners feel valued beyond mere transactions.

Personalization in the workplace centers on the premise that people's time is valuable. Communication is most effective when it aligns with their natural voice. For instance, training modules on your partner portal might differ significantly for a technical individual versus an executive. By properly labeling content in your portal, users can find information suited to their level and preferred style, making it more likely they will consume and utilize that information in the future." - Sam Valme , AvePoint

"Personalization strategy starts with an understanding of the unique content, features, and benefits aligned to the program and the various partner selling motions. It is impossible to personalize something that has no differentiation. In a welcome message, you can add someone’s name to your partner experience, but that is not enough. True personalization provides the user with the things they care about and need to be successful with easy one-click access. This takes putting your partner hat on and understanding who is in your partner's audience and what drives their business. Personalization falls into two categories: vendor decided personalization, & partner determined personalization. Most companies only accomplish elements in the vendor category of the personalization that they want for partners. This typically looks like segmentation for things like partner type, tier, and role.

Imagine if you could let partners personalize their experience. Tesla recently released an update that allowed drivers to customize the user interface with the items they wanted quick access to. This was quickly adopted by Tesla drivers and provided a simple enhancement to the user experience. Personalization is truly amplified when users are put in control of what they see and where they see it.

A pivot toward enabling partners with configuration and personalization opportunities empowers them to take ownership of their experience and provides vendors insight into how systems are being configured. Additional insight can be drawn by looking at the data from profile reports on the configurations being made. Similarities may surface among roles, partner selling motions, or other partner profiling specifics that will provide valuable data to enhance the partner experience. If you are worried about partners getting access to elements they shouldn’t, don’t fret. In this scenario, vendors control what is in the partner toolbox but the partner controls the on/off switch for the various tools based on what they care about.

Effective partner experience personalization should combine vendor determined and partner determined personalization taking a crawl, walk, run approach to personalization can uplevel your partner experience immensely." - Raegan Wilson, MBA , Spur Reply

"Sometimes we think about our partners only as a reselling (or referring and influencing) entity. The fact is they are a collection of individuals: owners, sales and marketing leaders, as well as SMEs; plus, folks on the engineering and support teams.?They all bring different skill sets and value to achieving sales success to the partnership. Get a deep understanding of their world. Interview them to understand what they need to be successful, what motivates them – what will draw them to your programs and enablement. Then segment and tailor your communication and content to align with these preferences. You want the messaging to resonate with these individuals – make them look forward to your communications. Adjust the cadence and format for all your interactions with them from regular meetings to concise emails to entertaining newsletters. Be flexible, seek feedback, and use those insights to adjust. " - Kristine Stewart , The Lexington Group

"Effective personalization strategies and tactics play a crucial role in providing an excellent partner experience. By tailoring interactions and offerings to meet the specific needs and preferences of partners, you can foster stronger relationships and drive mutual success. Some key strategies for achieving this are comprehensive partner profiling, customized communication channels, tailored product/service offerings, partner portals with role-based tracks, and personalized training or learning paths. By implementing these personalization strategies and tactics, you can create an exceptional partner experience. This, in turn, leads to increased partner satisfaction, stronger partnerships, and mutually beneficial outcomes." - Jessica Baker , AchieveUnite

What are some ways to measure?the impact of personalization efforts?to engage with partners in a more targeted and relevant manner?

"Personalization, especially online, can be relatively inexpensive. For instance, sending a congratulatory email for a life event costs nothing. Although sending an actual gift may impact your marketing budget, if marketing is effective, such high-potential or high-dollar-value items or gift baskets should already be part of your budget. These expenses should be tracked against the revenue brought in by that partner. Even if a partner is still developing, understanding their total addressable market (TAM) can justify such investments.

On the business side, with tools like Impartner, you can monitor how many people are accessing different assets and training. By examining which organizations are accessing your content, you can easily measure if more partners taking advantage of your assets are actually generating more revenue." - Sam Valme , AvePoint

"Measuring the impact of personalization efforts is essential to assess the effectiveness of engaging partners in a targeted and relevant manner. Some ways to measure this impact: partner satisfaction surveys, personalized offer conversion rates, engagement metrics, and qualitative feedback with focus groups or interviews." - Jessica Baker , AchieveUnite

In what ways would you recommend categorizing partners based on their specific attributes, such as performance, expertise, or market focus?

"Categorizing partners has moved way beyond tiers, metals, and categorization by revenue alone. At least 25 critical attributes of a relationship with a partner can inform segmentation. AI allows way more sophistication in this area and, if done correctly, can deliver partner segmentation and personalization at scale for exponential growth. Indeed, a new era of partner performance optimisation is upon us. Sherpa's new AI-powered assessment and predictive modeling platform can show you the way. " - Tom Perry , Sherpa

"Personalization is simply guesswork if you can’t intelligently segment your audience by leveraging real user data. Users’ history, date and time, level of engagement, location, friends, followers, and a host of other data points can be used for building their profile from which you can segment and implement unique functionality and UI design flows. The main aim of user segmentation is to group them into categories. For example, some partners may be focused on reselling a particular product line of yours, or just into one distinct customer segment. Others may be more interested in leveraging the reselling of your products into a value-added services opportunity. The segmentation and solutions you come up with will be unique to your application and will give direction to your personalization efforts.

For that reason, designing the right sets of milestones and rewards is important. Designing milestones for users to reach creates a sense of achievement while offering rewards and can push them to increase their engagement with your system. As a result, they will end up taking actions that benefit you, for example, joining promotion programs, or booking places for a training or even end-customer event you are promoting. Progress milestones also improve usability by allowing you to keep things simple for beginners while unlocking advanced content for hardcore users. Many games and gamification techniques fall into this category of customization." - Peter O'Neill , Research in Action

"When I consider categories for partners, I think about the role, partner type, geographic and vertical markets, and classification of our partnership (tactical vs strategic)." - Jessica Baker , AchieveUnite

"At AvePoint, we primarily categorize our partners based on the types of businesses they run. This includes managed service providers, managed security service providers, value-added resellers, large account resellers, and system integrators. We also categorize partners based on their industry expertise, such as those in the defense industrial base held to regulations like CMMC. Identifying partners held to specific regulations or in certain verticals ensures our teams can address the real-world challenges they face when servicing their customers." - Sam Valme , AvePoint

What challenges or barriers have you encountered when tailoring communication resources for partner groups?

"Communication within the partnership starts with feedback on preferences and requirements including frequency, content, languages, cultures, etc. Challenges and barriers that can impact communication alignment.

• Too much or too little information: information is overwhelming with partnerships receiving a large or not enough that can’t be consumed easily.
• Non-tailored communication: information is generic and not personalized to the audience.
• Not factoring language and culture: partnerships are global and adapting content including translation and culture awareness needs to be incorporated.
• Inclusive considerations: partnerships may prefer certain types of communication (emails vs phone calls vs. text messages vs. social) along with consideration for role type (partnership vs. sales vs marketing roles).
• Technical challenges: variations to technology that each partner groups use can hinder effective communication.

Tailoring communication resources for the partnership can impact the growth and success of the alliance." - Brian Galicia , 微软

"One significant challenge with tailoring communications is attempting to address everyone at once to capture market share. We have grappled with this internally and are continually striving to improve. It's usually better to start with a single persona or audience. This might mean focusing on managed service providers (MSPs) due to their large potential impact on your business. Once you've assessed your business and identified the audience that will most significantly impact your bottom line, focus on specializing your communication with them before moving on to the next group." - Sam Valme , AvePoint

What resources or tools are most helpful for implementing personalization in partner communications?

"To serve personalized content, you need suitable storage and delivery tools. For marketing purposes, we use several in-house tools to send items like gift cards or gift baskets to top partners when they hit certain milestones. For training and marketing assets, we leverage the Impartner platform, specifically the asset library, journey builder, and certification modules. These solutions help us construct seamless journeys for our technical resources. Additionally, syncing this information into our Dynamics CRM instance allows us to run Power BI reports to verify that those utilizing our training are generating more revenue." - Sam Valme , AvePoint

In a recent?blog via Forrester , analyst Phyllis Davidson calls out that "we’ll eventually get to a place where AI-generated B2B content and experiences are personalized to the in-the-moment needs of the audience." How do you anticipate?the adoption of AI to affect partner communications?

"AI will drastically change the way we do all of our business with partners, including communications. Personalization will be taken to a new level with micro-role delineation, habits and other preferences coming into play. For example, AI can learn that a person is most likely to open an email on Monday morning, and that they prefer videos over text, and really only care about events in the UK. All the vendor has to do is feed information to the AI engine and the curated content drops to the right person at the right time about the right subjects." - Jessica Baker , AchieveUnite

"Hopefully, we can leverage technology to communicate more efficiently in the future. Humans have historically struggled with effective communication in digital settings. Text messages or emails can often be misinterpreted due to tone or punctuation. If AI can help us identify our audience and ensure we're using the correct language and tone, it will significantly enhance our communication. This ensures that we maximize our time together and drive projects and initiatives forward more effectively. Also, I used Chat GPT to help summarize all these responses :)" - Sam Valme , AvePoint

"For fun, I decided to ask our resident expert on AI, ChatGPT, this question. I've included the answer verbatim at the end of this article. I wanted to provide a natural intelligence view on AI and its impact on the partner experience, with all of the faulty logic and assumptions that come along with it.

What really resonated with me about ChatGPT is this statement: “While AI holds great promise for partner communications, it's essential to strike a balance between automation and human touch. Building and maintaining strong relationships with partners still require human empathy, creativity, and strategic thinking. AI should be seen as a tool to augment and support these efforts, rather than replacing the human element entirely.” Anybody who has worked with me knows that I’m passionate about three things: creating a personalized experience for partners, meeting partners where they are doing business, and the underlying data that makes this possible.

While AI will allow us to understand more about our partners' learning patterns, our customers' buying patterns, and what the fastest path to revenue is from a data perspective, understanding how to use that information in the best way to support stronger relationships and provide better results for people. This continues to be the secret sauce as well as the foundation of good data and information on which AI can work.

While I dream of a world where experiences are “personalized to the in-the-moment needs of the audience” and am excited about the possibilities of AI, experimentation and human intellect are still the key to make sure the partner relationships continue to be fostered and not destroyed through faulty AI assumptions or dehumanized approaches. So, we are proceeding with cautious optimism as we work with our customers to navigate and embrace this change.

From ChatGPT:

The adoption of AI is likely to have a significant impact on partner communications in several ways:

Enhanced Efficiency: AI can automate routine and repetitive tasks, such as data entry, analysis, and reporting. This automation can free up time for partner communications professionals to focus on more strategic and value-added activities, ultimately improving overall efficiency.

Improved Personalization: AI technologies, such as natural language processing and machine learning, can analyze large volumes of partner data and extract meaningful insights. This information can be used to tailor communications and engagements with partners, leading to more personalized and relevant interactions.

Advanced Analytics: AI-powered analytics can provide deeper insights into partner behavior, preferences, and performance. By leveraging this data, organizations can better understand their partners' needs, identify trends, and optimize their communication strategies to foster stronger relationships.

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants can provide instant support and information to partners, addressing their queries and concerns in real-time. These automated systems can handle routine inquiries, provide product information, and even assist with basic problem-solving, ensuring partners receive prompt assistance.

Predictive Analytics: AI algorithms can analyze historical partner data and external factors to predict future outcomes, such as partner churn or potential growth opportunities. This foresight can enable organizations to proactively address issues, optimize partner engagement, and seize new business possibilities.

Language Translation and Localization: AI-powered language translation tools can facilitate effective communication with partners across different languages and cultures. These technologies can help overcome language barriers, allowing organizations to expand their reach and connect with partners globally.

Data Security and Privacy: As AI becomes more integrated into partner communications, ensuring data security and privacy becomes crucial. Organizations must implement robust security measures to protect sensitive partner information and comply with data regulations, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).

While AI holds great promise for partner communications, it's essential to strike a balance between automation and human touch. Building and maintaining strong relationships with partners still require human empathy, creativity, and strategic thinking. AI should be seen as a tool to augment and support these efforts, rather than replacing the human element entirely." - Gina Batali-Brooks , Is Inspired