This post is #7 in the series, Starting in Partnering: What most Tech CEOs get wrong. Click here to read #6 “Partner Agreements: Over Protecting Some Future Pot of Gold – Starting in Partnering: What most Tech CEOs get wrong”
Partner Enablement is one of The Three Pillars of Sales Partnering Success, and the most misunderstood and neglected.
Partner Enablement provides a great opportunity for in vendor’s Partner Proposition, especially when competing for the partners against very large vendors’ partner programs.
I remember one Vendor CEO’s response when I suggested how they could help their resellers be more successful in their Western European markets with market intelligence on customer opportunities in the market; “That’s the reseller’s job, not ours”.
The great missed opportunities I regularly see in Partner Enablement:
• Thinking that Partner Enablement is the same as onboarding training
• Too much too soon in onboarding training. Thinking one-size-fits-all bootcamp style training is sufficient to enable partner success.
• Too little too late for partner marketing and sales support. Waiting for mistakes and execution frustrations before realising more help is needed.
• Underestimating the effort in onboarding and supporting a partner to success. There is much effort in codifying what works in generating leads and what brings success along the sales process, and much omitted and assumed to be understood.
• Underestimating the elapsed time that it takes to get the partners’ salespeople active. Vendors often forget how long it takes for their own new salespeople to get up to speed, and they are full-time employees. Consider then that partners’ salespeople have current products to sell and targets to meet, and the new product is extra work and may be seen as a distraction.
• Not aligning onboarding training and supports to the partner’s business and capabilities. When a Vendor has a poorly defined sales process, then this brings great challenges in how to delegate sales process stages to a partner, according to the partner’s capabilities.
• Not clarifying the onboarding plan and go-to-market plan before signing an agreement.
The big challenges in a Vendor’s Partner Enablement activities are:
1) Failing to understand that Partner Enablement is about making it easy for the partner to sell your solution
2) Failing to understand the partner’s business properly to determine where you can help them
3) Failing to understand and capture what is required in your own marketing and sales process, so that you can enable others.
When your partners are not working, how do you determine why and if your poor partner enablement is the cause? THEN, what is the solution?