Contact Tenego today at info@tenegopartnering.com to find out how to potentially increase your Partner revenues by 20%.
Do any of all of the following describe your company?
1) your company has a number of partners reselling and/or implementing your product in various regions around the world
2) you typically secured or recruited these partners through meetings at trade shows, people approaching you with an interest or through connections or introductions in the market
3) in hindsight you probably spent too much time and effort assessing their capabilities, getting their agreement and dealing with initial challenges in getting them up to speed
4) some of the partners you chose to go with only produce one or a very small number of opportunities at the start and they died away slowly
5) some of your partners are great at meeting prospective customers but very poor at closing deals. They just seem to get lost somewhere when it comes close to clinching the customer support
6) you have some partners that are highly proactive, some that are very slow with occasional enquiry or deal and some that work in bursts
7) you likely have developed, through your experiences, a gut instinct of what type partner is right for your company, it may be difficult to describe but you’ll know it when you see it.
8 ) you may have been naturally attracted to the largest, most successful, leaders in your industry. The ‘if onlys’ in your business plan. The Game Changers. You may have spent time chasing and courting but not really making progress.
9) You may have even secured agreement with a big brand, to find that it barely progressed in the past 2 years.
10) You may have become dismayed and cynical about partnerships; “partners don’t work for our business”!!!
How well do you know/understand:
1) your Partners’ businesses?
2) their capabilities, what they currently sell, how they sell and who they mostly sell to?
3) how much time they spend and how much money they make from your target customer type?
4) if their current capabilities and business model matches what’s required for your business?
5) what incentivises each of your partners according to their business models and objectives?
6) your sales and deliver process steps, what it really takes to sell and deliver your product?
“SO”, I hear you say, “where might the 20% increase come from”:
1) The Market Opportunity
Everything should be based on the opportunity in the target market. The total market size, what share you can win and how you will beat the competition.
• Do your current partners within these markets have sufficient reach to cover the market?
• Are they reaching their targets?
• If they’re not reaching their targets, are the reasons valid?
• What is needed to improve their success?
• Should you be added more partners in this target market to get full reach?
2) Your Partners’ Capabilities
Something like; “…accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference” OR “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”.
In accepting the real capabilities of a partner, then is it worth supporting them with the extra capabilities they need to sell your product? They may only have great relationships with your target customers, but unable to sell software. They may have 100’s of your type of customer but are not credible in dealing with your target decision maker.
The capability you need is what is needed to sell your product.
3) Partner Performance Expectations, Measurement and Incentives
Resulting revenues and sales targets are not enough. The measurement of success is too far away and too easy to explain why progress is not being made.
With what is needed to sell your product being clear, seek to put in place activity metrics and targets accordingly. You should know how many customer leads will produce a deal and the necessary activities along the way. Train your partner for those and measure accordingly.
Targets are difficult to set at the start in order to be reachable and profitable for all.
Commissions and bonuses need to be defined according to what behaviour you want from your partner.
4) Partner Supports – make it easy for them to sell
Remember you are building a Partner Sales Engine, so you need to think longer term in your expectations. Focus on building their capabilities for the long term while progressing to win deals and grow your pipeline. Yes, you do expect much from the partner, but allow them to grow into it. You don’t want to do their job, but you do want to give them a good start.
The easier you make your product to sell, the more effective your partner will be. In each stage of what it takes to sell your product, seek to where you can provide support to make it easier or faster for your partner to become successful. It may be in market intelligence, prospect lists, lead generation ideas, pre-sales capabilities, supporting the partner sales people at the right time, proposals, contracts etc.
5) Competing Partners OR Exclusivity
It’s good to give room for a partner to get into the market and start building a sales pipeline and sales success. It’s good to show the opportunity, good to start building success based on this opportunity but it’s not good to leave too much room for non-performance. Good support, activity targets and tight management can produce results but the fear that competition is “eating your lunch” can be a great incentive.
Competing partners is not always a bad thing. Make the expectations clear. Try to be consistent and transparent in dealings with partners. You can have clear boundaries or deal registration agreements to manage behaviours but activities and targets are always there to keep track of partner performance.
Exclusivity can be the ultimate comfort but also a great incentive in giving a whole market or segment to one partner. Tight controls on activity targets are very necessary as terms of any exclusivity clause.
Remember, you are building a Partner Sales Engine. In the same way that your company has learned to sell directly with full control of your team, your company needs to learn how to sell through partners. Always be mindful of building a partner sales process that works for your business with all the supports that will make it work. Think scalability and removing high cost expertise at every step in as far as possible. As in all business process, seek to de-skill and accelerate growth of your partner network when you learned what works.
Contact Tenego today at newsletter@tenegopartnering.com to find out how to potentially increase your Partner revenues by 20%.
Contact Tenego today at info@tenegopartnering.com to find out how to potentially increase your Partner revenues by 20%.
