Partner Programs

Assessing Partner Programs Success

Partnerships take many forms today, including strategic alliances, Resellers, VARs, OEMs, Systems Integrators. Successful partnerships are key in today’s world of increasing competition, squeezed resources, and fast-moving markets. Vendors must continually evaluate the success of their partner programs to ensure they are getting value and customers are well-served. To that end, there must be alignment of values, goals, and corporate cultures, with strong management commitment, technology integration, and support provided. Best practices in partner program assessments requires feedback from both parties, as well as end user customers.

Challenges include:
 

• Building a more productive and effective partner relationship

• Understanding the key drivers of health for each partnership

• Ensuring adequate resources and skill sets to successfully grow the business

• Managing multiple partner relationships to achieve corporate goals

• Having metrics in place to track performance of each partnership and ensuring that they are used

• Ensuring increased productivity across all channels to better serve customers

• Preventing partner defections before they occur

• Recognizing and taking advantage of synergies produced by partners working together

Our Solution delivers:

• Partner/Customer feedback: how vendor compares with competitors, ease of doing business with vendor, quality of support,  conflict resolution, culture fit, degree of trust, management commitment, overall satisfaction

• Operational data:  support calls per partner, hours of training, number of leads shared with partners, number of joint sales calls

• Financial data: revenues per partner, pipeline data, incremental revenues as result of synergies of partners, marketing costs of vendor and partner, revenues per product per partner

• Reporting: strengths and weaknesses by specific partner, satisfaction by type of project, comparison of vendor and partner rating per attribute, comment analysis, forecast vs. actual revenues

• Best Practices in partner health assessment programs and dashboard reporting

Business Justification includes:

• Builds more productive and effective partner channels

• Enables vendors to better serve their partners and end users

• Increases revenues coming through the partner channel

• Advances best practices in alliance management

• Increases share of wallet with valued partners

• Track revenues per region, product, segment, partner type, program type

• Enforces partner accountability

• Pinpoints where and how much to invest in partnership management infrastructure and processes

• Identifies the most valuable partners in order to give them more  business and reward them for their performance

• Identifies where there is a disconnect in the perceptions of partners and vendors about how well the partnership is working

• Highlights at-risk partners, providing the opportunity to address their needs real-time

• Addresses causes of partner dissatisfaction, which can negatively impact the end user experience, leading to higher customer defections

• Prioritizes actions that will strengthen alliances, resulting in reduced costs, incremental sales, and greater value for the customer

• Identifies market trends in time to take appropriate actions