Partner programs start, evolve, and grow through market changes, product changes, and partnering team changes. Your partner program challenges are further compounded by changing leadership, different approaches, and structures. Channel leaders are constantly under pressure to deliver results while managing their partners, their team and coordinating activities across their organization.
If your partner program has the potential to scale your company’s market reach and revenues, then you have the opportunity to structure for exponential scale through a functioning partner network.
1) It’s all about you, rather than your partners
• Is your partner material all about who you are, what you do, and what you are looking for in a partner?
• Is your company’s language about partners all about what they can do for you?
• Do your company expect partners to report to you monthly?
• Do you ask partner companies to change their business plans to suit your plan?
If you reviewed what makes it easier for your partners and continuously make small changes, you would make your partner program relevant for more partners.
Suppose you made subtle changes to become more partner-centric in your language and approach without significant investment or organizational change. In that case, you could change how your company works with partners.
If you identified your company’s cultural and partnering mindset challenges, you could address what are presenting barriers to your partner program’s success.
2) Short term thinking, with partners and partner resources
• Is partnering tactical, opportunistic, and deal-by-deal for your company with no long-term approach developed as your partner program?
• Is your partnering team operating as partner sales support or even a partner support function to your direct sales team?
• Does your company expect partners to know how to market and sell your product with limited support from your company?
• Do your partners, and your partnering team often feel unappreciated and unheard?
Can you select one or two ‘good’ partner companies that represent the types of partners you want, and you can justify investing in supporting them to deliver greater success?
Can you identify common barriers within your partner companies in generating leads and selling more of your solution to make a case for investing in solving some of these barriers?
Can you identify opportunities with selected partners to include in your current marketing campaigns or that aligns with your company’s current priorities?
3) Push rather than support Partnering Approach
• Is it your company’s approach to negotiate targets with partners, with financial incentives on reaching targets?
• Are your partners regularly missing their agreed targets, and then they are being blamed for lack of success?
• Are you micromanaging partners, wanting to control every lead, and taking over sales to bring deals through?
• Are you regularly under pressure to produce more revenues from partners with limited investment in your partner program development?
Can you determine how well your customer proposition fits into each of your partners’ businesses while assessing the number of possible relevant opportunities per month, quarter, or year?
Can you determine what activities your partners failing at in meeting their sales targets, why, and what can fix this?
What activities or priorities compete for your partners’ salespeople’s time rather than focus on your product?
4) Lack of cross-company common approach, understanding, and terminology with partners
• Are there different views on partnering across your company with different approaches to partnering for different regions, different products, different customer types, or others?
• Is there a lack of common understanding of what your partner program is with varied structures and terminologies used in working with partners across your company?
• Are partners sometimes mistakenly treated as customers in a sell-to-sell-through or service provider partner model?
• Are opportunities lost with the partnering team sometimes excluded from partner discussions?
Can you gather the varied views, partner approaches, and terminologies used across your organization and create a plan to align with the various teams?
Can you identify the leaders and influencers in your organization to help bring a standard approach across your company?
Can you identify and highlight the lost opportunities with partners and create a case to address and reset the partner relationship where appropriate?
5) Lack of replicability on company-wide partner approach
• Does your company rely more on individual salespeople’s capabilities than structured sales processes to deliver sales results?
• Does your company rely more on partners’ ingenuity and expertise than on your structured partner supports for partner sales success?
• Do a focus on deal-to-deal and short-term results limit your opportunity to define your company’s standard approach to partners?
• Is your partnering process development slow-moving or stagnant, with limited time allocated to build a structured approach?
With some buy-in from key stakeholders, can you establish a possible vision of what is achievable with your partner program?
Can you map out a journey, with initial baby-steps is needed, with clear validation milestones to justify further investment into partnering resources?
Can you identify comparable or competitive companies that have an operating partner program to demonstrate the possibilities for your company?
If any one of these sounds like your company, don’t despair. You are not alone. Many companies have these partner program challenges to some degree. Your company’s culture directly impacts your partner program’s success, but when you can identify the barriers, you can start rectifying them to create success.