Kelsey Worsham

Successful B2B businesses understand that buyers now lead the buying process, and sellers need to meet buyers where they are.

A successful Partner Portal launch requires more resources than expected. It will depend on help from many internal departments.

When you’re not one of the usual suspects, it can be hard to get the mindshare and sales you need. So how do you overcome this obstacle?

Having a documented marketing strategy will help your team stay on the same page.

You need to find a way to measure the experience and success of your partners as well as your internal stakeholders.

QBRs are the hub-of-the-wheel of any strong partnership. However, they are rarely done, executed poorly, and take lots of effort.

Investing in partner enablement is necessary in order to ensure your channel understands your solutions.

Most partners will point you to activity metrics such as impressions, clicks, or number of leads to evaluate their performance.

If you aren’t engaging regularly with your partners, it can be challenging to know what they are thinking.

Having a documented marketing strategy will help your team stay on the same page.

Absolutely, conferences, trade shows, and conventions are great opportunities for partner engagement.

Most partners will point you to activity metrics such as impressions, clicks, or number of leads to evaluate their performance.

How long it takes to recruit a partner is dependent on a number of variables, such as how easy it is to deliver a vendors proposition.

Giving leads to your channel partners might seem like the perfect solution to your through-partner marketing challenges.

Start by thinking about what empowers the success of your own direct sellers, then go from there for your partners.

Account-based marketing (ABM) “focuses on a few large and important accounts that hold the greatest promise of adding to your bottom line”.

First, never forget that your partners are businesses in their own right. They have their own brand guidelines, datasets, and strategy.

Hiring a concierge service is not a trivial decision. They will become plugged directly into your channel revenue.

Vendors can help their partners grow their business with ZiftONE in different ways. Here's a quick checklist to follow.

Like with all third-party services, defining a scope of work is critical for managing expectations and budgets.

Besides a better go-to-market alignment with partners, there are many benefits to a concierge service like freeing up internal resources.

A partner marketing concierge is a third-party agency – like Macro – that acts as a natural extension of your team.

Nobody has an exclusive partnership with channel partners. If they do, you're going to put more into recruiting than you need to.

Oftentimes, successful salespeople will get an immediate ear when suggesting you.

Remember you're looking for. Each channel partner has sales and technical resources, and each resource has customers.

Look at the partner directories for other companies whose products work well with your own.

The channel partner will onboard them to their company.

Onboarding is the most important thing we do with channel partners. If you get it right you've just grown your company.

First the management. Ask them what they want you to do with the SPIF. Some may want you to pay it to them.

A Sales Performance Incentive Fund (SPIF) rewards salespeople for selling your product. These are usually "bonuses" offered.

Cash is good short term. Support growing their services business has long term beneficial impact.

Those that expect it are the ones you should not accept into your channel program because they can limit your business unfairly.

Absolutely. Great relationships are built on shared experiences. Shows can be an opportunity to connect in-person.

You know you're partners when you've become friends. You are on a first-name basis.

We call them "partners" for a reason. Partners share a tangible interest with us. We make money when they make money.

There are companies that offer channel enablement services.

You waste invested time and money when you don't enable partners. It's like expecting a battery operated toy to operate without batteries.

Enablement always includes encouragement. You want to build your partner's enthusiasm about selling your products.

It would be if all you wanted a channel partner to do was sell your products. Without marketing that would be, at best, difficult.

Enablement programs go beyond training about those products and focus on what you want your partners to do; namely sell them.

The most important first action any marketer takes is targeting. They want to direct messages to those who will take best advantage of them.

As with most things, your best approach is education and enablement, with a careful focus on what they will get out of the learning.

Be in constant contact with those partners who show promise. Be extremely available both over media and in person.

The requirement to do so must be clearly spelled out in your partnership agreement.

It's more than likely they'll stop doing business with you long before you stop doing business with them.

Those who put your resources to great use are showing you their potential.

Great performance is how your channel partners should be earning more attention and resources.

Anyone who is not using the platform is simply not fulfilling the definition of a channel partner.

A channel partner who refuses to share information with you has probably been poached by another vendor at some point.

Marketo is a marketing automation system, or a customer experience management solution as they refer to it.

Carefully. Many partner executives and owners will not appreciate you paying commissions and incentives directly to their salespeople.

As with many things, the time to make a change comes when you determine that you aren't getting what you need from your current platform.

There are a few reasons why Zift may not be right for you, starting with the amount of money you're willing to spend.

No matter what size or shape of program you have, you will need a platform to manage your partners.

This approach can result in the exact system you want with practically no compromises for vendor limitations.

A comprehensive all in one platform will generally cover the entire journey your program will take.

These solutions generally address your needs for launching a partner portal and many of administrative requirements.

You may have heard of different systems. Ultimately, there is a wide range of product capabilities to consider.

Channel programs come in all sizes, so your approach to managing your partner community may be different from another supplier’s approach.

There is always a tendency to consider “build it yourself” or building a solution inside an existing enterprise CRM

Demonstrating how your products can significantly increase the sale of partners' own services makes your product more attractive.

Partner engagement managers are the tactical connection between partners and enablement resources that help them gain expertise.

Most partners are open to considering any vendor-partner who is willing to provide new servicing opportunities, training, and more.

Ultimately, every company should integrate as many of their systems as possible no matter what they are.

As long as your PRM offers available APIs, you can integrate with any system that surfaces similar APIs to enable connectivity.

Marketing, so long as your marketing organization clearly recognizes that Sales is their customer.

"Free advice is usually worth the price." Remember that everything is always based on value.

It's always best to prepare the platform before you launch the program.

Time must be allocated for data normalization and transfer from a variety of sources. Users must be trained.

Quality PRM systems offer application programming interfaces (API) which enable you to interface them with other systems.

PRM is a strategic platform and the decision to deploy is usually a C-level responsibility.

It's possible to assemble workarounds to use CRM or SFDC as a base, but they will result in higher expense and lower effectiveness.

Effective security is achieved through a chain of systems protecting a chain of events. The software application is only one.

One of the worst ways to recruit is open and promote the program to all comers. The best channel is hand-picked.

You only get one chance to make a great first impression. Take the time necessary to properly and thoroughly onboard partners.

Onboarding is the first and most crucial investment you will make in each partner, so time should be taken to onboard thoroughly.

Channel conflict becomes your problem when two or more of your channel partners are turning to you for help in pursuing a sale.

Ask yourself why you want those contacts. Do you plan to call on them yourself?

The stickiest partner portals are designed with partner experience and partner engagement front of mind. They are built from the partner up.

You want your PRM to enable you to keep track of partners' efforts to sell your products and services as unobtrusively as possible.

Demand generation is a major cost for channel partners. Defraying some of that cost by providing valid leads is a great way to help.

As with anything else there are two ways to scale; scale up or scale out.

Develop a program that will help your new channel partners understand why they would want to partner with you.

PRM pricing ranges widely with many charging between $5 to $50 or more per seat per month.

Look at it this way: How many partners will you have? How many salespeople will each partner have on average?

Effective channel partners become a proactive part of a vendor's "family."

CRM systems are designed to help manage every stage of the building and maintenance of relationships with customers.

Adoption is best promoted by showing users the value they'll receive.

Helping partners promote and sell their own services around your products will be the best, most effective incentive.

There is no "cookie cutter" for channel partner development. Each channel partner is different, and strives to be so.

Channel partners are best trained as members of your own company. They must learn the strategy behind your products and services.

You have an opportunity to leverage systems to consolidate partner data in your Partner Relationship Management (PRM) system.

You should have your rules for use of logos and marks in your partner agreement and a publication readily available for them to consult.

Given that you expect ROI, you should be actively working with your partners to identify what they're doing with your investments.

Unconditionally yes. You're an investor giving them capital to effectively promote sales of your products and their services.

The two categories of content needed are generally referred to as "to-channel" and "thru-channel."

Utilizing Market Development Funds – also known as MDF – is a great way to pay for activities related to your channel.

Many channel partners don't have marketing staff and often turn to outside agencies who might oversell them to increase fees.

This depends on the management of a channel. Some vendors will measure channel partners just by sales volume.

The channel becomes an extension of a vendor's sales organization and, also an extension of their delivery and deployment operation.

In the early going you want to see partners requesting assistance, MDF, scheduling training, and pursuing your CAM for meetings.

If your program is well-developed to incentivize and motivate partners, you will find answers in your partner's pipeline.

Benchmarks vary widely by many different vectors.

Begin with the investment in staff to manage channel partners, which can be attributed 100% to your cost of channel.

If partners can produce a reasonable profit directly from sales of your offerings, that partnership is viable.

As one team. Properly managed, partners become an extension of your sales engine and should consider and conduct themselves as such.

Think of revenue as a pie. One big slice is the manufacturer's fully-burdened cost of manufacturing.

What will executives invest in? Things that produce a good return. You need to be able to demonstrate that to executives.

The most important KPIs exist along your sales process. How many leads has demand generation produced?

Your channel partner program provides certainty that partners know what they can expect from you.

Heavily! You'd be wise to leverage the customer contact your best partners enjoy to inform everything you do: New product features.

Every qualified partner has salespeople with access to existing accounts. Partners can provide immediate access to these accounts.

Channel sales managers supervise the activities of channel sales representatives, which can include assigning them to specific accounts.

Channel sales are referred to as "indirect" because the people doing the selling aren't employed by the company that makes the products.

Channel partners vary in market segmentation by size, by vertical industry, by geography, by private, government, and more.

Channel executives are measured on the sales volume produced by all their partners.

Build a compelling business case for prospective partners showing how much additional revenue they can drive through your product.

Their role is to increase their partner's productivity. Helping them do so begins with choosing partners with the potential and enthusiasm for selling your solutions.

The best channel account managers work closely with each of their partners to help them manage the growth of their business.

The actual number depends upon the complexity of your products, the saturation of the available markets, and other factors.