Starting partnership practice for a company can be daunting. Even for some companies when they have a partnership practice but without a proper system can give sub optimal results.
We have laid out 10 step by step methods to scale revenue through partnerships for any kind of business.
Define the KPIs
Inform the team on the strategic importance of partnership channel for the organisation. Better aligned and motivated employees produce stellar results.
- KPIs – Is it for visibility / traffic generation (co-marketing partners), or lead generation (referral partners), or pipeline creation or sales conversion?
- Deliverables in number and value with a clearly defined deadline
- If it is a new practice ramp up on deliverables for the first 3 quarters.
- Similar to any other target setting it should be pushing the team to perform but should be achievable
Allocate the resources
Partnership team should mirror the sales team structure depends upon the KPIs defined earlier. Internal teams should be mapped to support to perform the processes
- Marketing team – partner page, collateral creation, lead generation (to recruit new partners as well leads to newly enrolled partners)
- Sales team – on taking partner qualified leads to convert in to revenue
- Finance – budget for partner commission, time / requirement based bonus, and tools like PRM
- Product – Specific features required by partners
Identify the partner type
Several factors influence the partner type as below.
- Product type (new category, established), frequency of usage (real time, daily, occasionally), industry or horizontal
- Customer size (SME, Mid Market, Enterprise), end user persona / role, niche vs broad
- Geography – regulations, industry
- Revenue opportunity – ARR / ACV
Create relevant Collaterals
Below are the list of collaterals:
- Partner program – incentive structure, recognition opportunities, stages of partnership (Silver, Gold, Platinum etc)
- Customer & partner testimonials, Case studies on partner benefitting from the program, how a partner’s life changed
- Partner branding inside your portal and in social media should be a ongoing process
- Partner agreements for the types of partnership you want to engage with
Partner Reachout
Apart from the regular mediums like emails, Linkedin, below are the specific mediums related to partnership:
- Partner portals like Reveal, Crossbeam helps you to reach out to partners based on ICP, your preference etc
- Reseller contact details can be availed on Clutch, marketplaces / partner pages of larger competing products, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs)
- Relevant slack communities,and events for your target audience
Partner Onboarding and Trainin
Usually neglected but highly impactful step. Though onboarding is an one time effort, training is a continuous process.
- Map the partner organization hierarchy to send relevant use cases, logos won, customer testimonials etc based on the sales executive’s respective geography, portfolio of products etc
- Regularly train the new, and replaced sales executives in partner org
- Include their email ids on product updates and training sessions
- Include CXOs of critical partners in AHM, and company wise updates
- Regularly share sales collaterals (use Zomentum to share it with every partner in one go)
Pipeline Building and Sales Conversion
To create a robust pipeline follow the below steps
- For the first few deals dedicate a resource to accompany the partner sales executives to help them in demos, handling objections, price negotiation
- For any critical logo, large deals assign a senior sales person
- Do a periodical review on pipeline process. Also, instead of questioning / demanding understand their concerns and solve it
- Leadership team has to take a call on who is responsible for deal closure. Is it partnership team or sales team? It should also commensurate with the resources and team incentives.
Rollout of Partner Incentive
Though it is a simple process any delay or disagreement on incentive will diminish the morale of partners.
- If you change the incentive structure, %, target etc ensure personal communication is made
- Be transparent on the status and motivate them, if you run any competition (first 3 will get this etc)
- No direct incentive to partner employees without the consent of partners
- Obtain all tax, KYC related documents during onboarding
- Use PRM like Partnerstack, Allbound for easy processing
Relationship Managemen
Partner is a small ecosystem. Relationships makes or breaks the partner programs as the words spread fast.
- For majority of the partners your product is one among the many. They may sell several products to the same customer. How you to treat the customers is paramount to them.
- However, never reach out to the customer without keeping the partner in loop as they may fear of losing their valuable customer
Tracking the performance
Other than tracking overall revenue metric, below are the operational metrics:
- No. of partners onboarded, active vs silent
- Partners revenue cohort, deals from every partner in volume and value
- % of partners contributing to partner revenue – Is it 80:20? Action taken to improve the ratio
- Put partners in 3 baskets based on volume, and value of deals closed. Track the personal engagement level with the top basket partners.
- Any discrepancies on onboarding and training process
Conclusion
The above methods provide a guidance to start and scale revenue through partnerships. If you have any questions, please select your slot to discuss with us.
