Partnership training isn’t just for the C Suite, VP’s or Managers, it is a joint collaborative effort which is extended to the front-line operational resources.
The process needs to be incorporated into the daily sales and operational effort as part of the core. Failing to do so, will make the overall partnership growth vulnerable and lose momentum, thereby impacting the quarterly targets.
To continue growing the partnership, it is also important that leadership regularly assess and improve.
To continue growing the partnership, it is also important that leadership regularly assess and improve.
What is your current strategy for partnership development?
Does your current partnership team have the skill levels to meet the objective and vision?
Or do you feel the need to start from scratch?
Every partnership team must build their growth strategy, one that is completely individualized to your customer to meet their unique needs, and to address these questions.
We will discuss some broad principles that will serve for developing a partnership development plan, even if you are catering to different clientele. The base core principles will assist you in building a growth based partnership.
- Assessing partners needs and gaps
- Designing a partnership development curriculum
- Identify and create growth opportunities
- Measuring progress with constant evaluation and feedback
- Sustaining partnership development program
- Evaluating success and incentivizing those success parameters
STEP 1: ASSESSING PARTNERSHIP NEEDS AND GAPS
The first step should always start with assessing where is your current partner in terms of solving the business problem, that your partnership will bring value. What resources are currently in place who manages this program and what more is needed to develop the partnership.
Here are some baseline questions that you should always ask your partner, before you begin any new model:
What is your current partnership program management?
How successful are you in maintaining the sales channel growth (YOY) with your current model?
Do you have an intent to grow more than what you are currently measuring?
If yes, are there any known gaps that you are trying to address?
How aggressive do you want to be in your approach?
At first glance, it would seem that your partner is content with the current model and does not intend to make changes, that is already known to their resources. But if you start with the vetting questions, you will certainly be able to open their minds to certain areas where they are struggling and their program may not be that impactful, as initially thought
So, how do you demonstrate and understand the gaps in the process?
The best place to start will be from the managers and operational resources, who are responsible for customer delivery.
You need to define what kind of gaps are you looking to find, in order to make a development proposal that will be mutually beneficial to both partners. It is important to categorize gaps into 3 areas: current product ability, What are the strengths, and what are the weaknesses. What more does the end user expect from their overall experience dealing with the product?
STEP 2: DEVELOPING A PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT CURRICULUM
Developing a partnership development curriculum is not a simple process, hence it is crucial to develop one that is customized to the partner and addresses the gaps that were identified during the first screening. It is important to prepare a model that is less resource dependent and focuses more on technology.
The curriculum should be developed using an objective- based approach rather than simply following instructions and procedures. This will help partner operations team to develop goals and objectives for themselves. Once they reach certain goals, the incentivizing model steps in. The development curriculum should also include specific outcomes that are measurable and assessable.
STEP 3: IDENTIFYING PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES
Once you’ve developed a partnership development curriculum, you must look at the opportunities to develop within the sales pipeline. This could include attending and sponsoring partner conferences and conducting specific product and process-based workshops for the sales and operational teams.
STEP 4: MEASURING PROGRESS
The final step in the partnership development plan is to measure the overall progress. How will you know whether or not the partnership model is making progress? What key performance indicators can you use to check if you’re progressing on what you want to implement and improve?
The first person to take the lead in measuring progress will be the partner liaison. A partnership development plan should be focused and measuring metrics to be clearly defined, so it is easier to convert the revenue dollars into numbers and thereby into text for improvement.
Many partners may not want to assess the growth as their priority was moved to some other critical problems and the partnership growth was not as expected. In that case, they should be committing to a plan that allows breakdown of goals into micro goals. They must assign an executive sponsor for the partnership, who will be responsible for any resource constraints and work towards achieving the micro goals for each quarter.
STEP 5: SUSTAINING PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Once you have developed the partnership model, it’s important to work out how to sustain working model and ensuring growth. How do you keep getting feedback to constantly calibrate the model and keep the development going?
To do this, partner liaison should schedule a high level partnership assessment session with you to ensure the goals are met, and any incentive program is not impacted.
Leadership should take responsibility to evaluating the growth and success, that will allow the program to sustain and create a path for further fine tuning the development process.
If you find the program stuck in some kind of grid lock, you’ll want to take some time out to reflect on what’s not working and how you can calibrate the model further to meet the partner’s timeline and effort towards making it succesful. The best way of doing this is to break each goal down into small chunks and focus on one thing at a time. This will help you to get through the goal rather than feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of it all.
STEP 6: TESTING YOUR PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
Once you’ve worked on developing the partnership program and put them into practice, liaison and leaders must test the model and understand the working structure of the same.
As leaders, it is important to regularly review the steps taken and ensure that success has been achieved. It’s also important to ensure that results are measured so you can determine where improvement can be made. It may be that leaders will want to continue focusing on the same partnership concepts that are known to them or they will be open to improve and implement something better in place.
STEP 7: MAINTAINING YOUR PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
For the best results and most successful partner development process, leaders must maintain their commitment and upkeep their partner development plan. They must continue improving upon what have been set as baseline for sales and then go beyond that by achieving certain measurable targets for that quarter.
By reviewing the partnership progress regularly, leaders can work out where they need to improve and how best to do it.
Partner teams must be willing to take the time to review the overall model with numbers achieved every six months, so they can continue the process improvement.
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