Endue University Business

Core foundation of a healthy channel partnership depends on the value that you bring to the partner and how it assists in their bottom-line revenue.

But how would you measure the value? For successful partnerships, the value is not determined by the quarterly revenues but focusing on the longer-lasting and profitable customer relationship, different channel programs which identifies communication, incentive activities to boost sales, and overall strategies that extends the customer lifecycle.

Responsive Website Design

Core foundation of a healthy channel partnership depends on the value that you bring to the partner and how it assists in their bottom-line revenue.

But how would you measure the value? For successful partnerships, the value is not determined by the quarterly revenues but focusing on the longer-lasting and profitable customer relationship, different channel programs which identifies communication, incentive activities to boost sales, and overall strategies that extends the customer lifecycle.

Most challenging areas of the partnership revolves around 3 roadblocks:

• Difficult to connect and ensure partner participation
• Partner teams are not trained on products or training programs are not aligned with today’s standards
• Improper marketing and Go to Market strategies

How to adapt to the new standards of partner journey:

The B2B buyer’s journey is constantly evolving and it is more important than ever for any channel partner to evolve and adapt. In order to adapt, you would need to focus on 3 key areas:

• Digital buyers’ journey: Enabling and empowering the customers to focus more on research, evaluation and the selection process. This process should be activated throughout their decision making.
• Partner Experience: This can make or break things. You need to represent your brand value with confidence and a proper structure. How you talk about your vision and what that would translate into partnership value, will pave the road for kick-starting your journey. This will prepare the core fundamentals of the partnership: continued trust, ongoing sales and partnership end users customer retention.
• Retention: You cannot sustain the partnership retention based only on the product. An established recurring revenue from products that constantly requires implementation and up-sell, you cannot have an aging established process. Constant re-calibration is needed to train, enable and incentivize partner organizations to address critical touch points at the most important stages of the buyer’s journey and continue the process even post-sale to demonstrate value and respect to the end user.

Today’s partnership is more about implementing Behavior Based Partnership Programs:

Align with the partner to create a never ending B2B buyer’s journey. Even though it seems over-whelming to thoroughly plan every stage in an ever-changing market, certain behavior based programs can certainly empower partner staff in believing in the product and more importantly the process. Certain behavior process once demonstrated should be rewarded with business growth incentives.

Aligning with the Buyer Journey

Incentivize partners to research, learn and focus on the end users buyer’s journey and what is critical to them and what motivates them to make the purchase. What is their preferred method to do the research and ease of buying? Understanding the critical areas of the buyer’s entire buying process would help in investing on those technology-based behaviors and rewarding the partner team, once those behavior is maintained.

How do we construct Behavior Based Programs?

It’s not just about sales rewards. When you talk partnership, it is about continued trust, relationship and constantly adapting to their business process. If the focus is about incentivizing the partner only on solo sale outcome, then it will always fall short on maintaining and rewarding partners for the global business solutions and future growth metrics.

The focus should be shifted to grant incentives on partner behavior rather than on traditional transactions. This is critical to driving channel success and overall loyalty.

One size doesn’t fit all

Construct a personalized and relevant behavior-based model: Create campaigns that fit’s the partner’s business vision. Your brand vision should remain a constant, which is the HUB of all information and now you create different spoke of segmented marketing to the partner’s end users. This will create a more refined approach and an incentive program for the partner to activate the sales or up-sell program.

Education is the key: Be consistent, structured and repetitive

To enable partners team to be your cheerleader, you need to invest your time and effort in creating an educational program that is consistent with your vision and product. Structure the educational program in a way, that has a very specific message of what you are trying to convey and what is the desired expectation from the program. This will improve your overall brand reputation and partner advocacy goes up. This directly increases the rating of your partner experience, thereby resulting in a constant revenue increase.