Elevate Your Partner Program

No matter where you are in your partner program journey, there is always the opportunity to take your program to the next level. Maybe you just started your channel program, or you are a seasoned channel professional taking on new projects; the tips in this article will allow you to meet your goals faster.

Program Vision

As you build a successful channel program, you will need to have a vision for your partners. Your vision should clearly outline the benefits for partners to work with your organization. Your partners need to understand why they should work with you over your competitors and the level of commitment you have to their success. A clearly defined vision for your partners will help manage expectations while building trust. Communicating your vision to partners is an ongoing task, starting with your partner recruitment materials and leading into continuous communication with current partners through your Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution.

Recruitment Strategy

Partners want to work with companies that make it easy for them to do their jobs. Creating a partner recruiting strategy requires a clear understanding of who you want your partners to be and how you will handle recruitment. You should develop your ideal partner profile criteria and determine the best ways to get your brand in front of them. A few ideas for determining an ideal partner may include industry experience, complementary technologies, regional or geographic coverage, or an existing customer base. A channel program that consistently recruits the right partners for their organization can achieve greater market coverage and satisfy revenue goals.

Partner Onboarding

An efficient onboarding process is essential for building a successful partner program. Your onboarding process should have procedures to automate and checklists for tracking progress. You can speed up the onboarding process by automating partner agreements and NDA distribution and enabling electronic signatures. Utilizing your PRM will allow you to deliver, sign and store necessary documents, avoid lengthy negotiation periods, and get partners to start selling faster.

Partner Sales Process

Moving forward with a partner program means your company has likely experienced success selling directly to customers. You are ready to scale your products/services and expand your company’s reach. The partner sales process has unique components and needs to be independent of your direct-to-consumer process to be successful. While the partner selling process is different, you should reuse your existing sales process’s key elements to meet your partners’ needs. Once you have established your partner sales process, your partners will need to be trained. Communicating your training requirements and learning materials to partners can be facilitated using a full-featured PRM solution.

Marketing Materials

Your partners should have access to a library of finalized marketing materials to build awareness of your products/services. You should store the materials in a centralized location, ideally within your PRM portal, that partners can access on-demand without jumping through hoops. The library of marketing materials available to your partners should include your most up-to-date brochures, white papers, news article, videos, and podcasts. Your partners should have the ability to share marketing materials across social media platforms to increase engagement. Partners with the appropriate marketing materials will keep their pipelines full and help you meet your revenue targets. 

Building a successful channel program has many moving parts, and utilizing the right tools could be the difference between exponential growth and stagnant sales efforts for your partners. Channeltivity’s cloud-based PRM solution is easy to use, fast to set up and empowers you and your partners with the tools to accelerate growth. As you grow your channel program, check out our eBook “How to Build Strategic, Competitive Channel Programs: Smart Advice from 7 Channel Experts”.

The Channeltivity team would love to learn more about your organization and give you insights into how our platform can help elevate your partner program.