Partner Program Tweaks For an Outsized Impact On Your Channel Program

If you’re like most partner professionals, you’re always on the hunt for a silver bullet — that ‘one partner program tweak’ that will dramatically change the course of your career.

We hate to break it to you, but there’s no secret sauce.

There’s no ‘hack’ that’ll magically transform your partner program.

There are, however, a series of tweaks you can make to ensure your program grows and evolves sustainably. And we know they work because real people have had real success with them.

Keep reading to learn why it’s critical to keep enhancing your partner program and recommendations from people who’ve scaled partner programs before.

Why Is It Important to Keep Tweaking Your Partner Program?

You’ve heard it many, many times before: there’s always room for improvement. And that’s true, but it’s not the only reason your partner program shouldn’t be static — it’s also because everything around your program is constantly changing.

Competitors put out new features that could threaten your partner strategy. They may even try to poach your best partners.

Prospects’ palates for certain co-marketing tactics morph over time. Conferences fall in and out of fashion.

End customers’ buying behavior and budgets change, so the way you and your partners work with them may need to change, too.

If you’re not adapting to these changes, it’ll be hard to retain your partners (and your pipeline). So, how can you roll with those punches?

5 Tweaks For an Outsized Impact on Your Partner Program

Partner Program Tweak 1: Introduce Co-Selling

If you’ve been nurturing a referral program but seeing some stagnation — and you’re not quite ready for a full-blown reseller program — it may be time to consider co-selling.

Per Matt Driscoll at Spur Reply, “Partners have deep expertise in specific industries. They have deep connections with end customers. That knowledge and those relationships can be super helpful in structuring a deal with your sales team.”

With a co-selling motion, you and your partners are joining forces:

• Bringing each other more leads.
• Putting both teams’ brainpower on the sales cycle.
• Offering potential customers two complementary products or services in a single deal.

Because of that, many companies that try a co-sales motion not only increase their close rates but accelerate their time to close. Win-win.

But there’s a catch: getting sales folks to buy in is tough.

In their minds, it doesn’t make sense to share a deal with a partner when they could go after a much larger deal on their own — even if you know they could be making a lot more money by taking all the super warm opportunities coming their way and sharing the responsibility with a partner.

So before you test out this strategy, you need to think hard about how your internal incentives will change.

“I like to say, ‘You can’t tell salespeople what to do. You have to incentivize them to do what you want them to do,’” Matt explains. “This isn’t easy, but in a co-sales motion, I recommend trying to make both reps and partners whole.”

This may mean changing your quotas or even creating a bespoke solution for each deal. Whatever you do to try to hit comp neutrality, make it transparent. Otherwise, you’re asking for pushback (from your sales team and your partners).

Need some tips for establishing co-selling rules? Check out our guide to channel conflict.

Partner Program Tweak 2: Get a BDR Team

If your partner program is humming along, but (1) you’re not growing as fast as you want to be, (2) you don’t have time to go out and find new partners, it could behoove you to think about forming a business development team.

BDRs (business development reps) are often reserved for direct selling — you see this a lot at SaaS enterprises. You download one white paper, and boom, there’s someone in your inbox asking you if you’d ‘like to learn more about their software’ or there’s someone calling you up to ‘chat about your CRM needs.’

But they can also apply to partnerships. Brian Wichinski at Cloudian shares, “We have traditional BDRs who work collaboratively with our field sales counterparts. They cold outreach to get meetings for the reps, who then gauge customer interest. If there’s some there there, we pass through to our channel partners.”

Reading this, you may be thinking about this as a volume play, making it a good candidate for outsourcing. And that’s what Brian thought, too. At least at first. 

“We saw an uptick at the beginning, but then our meetings steadily decreased. So we brought a BDR in-house. After getting them up to speed, they got the same number of meetings in 3 weeks as the outsourced team did in 5 months.”

Besides scheduling more meetings, working with someone in-house helped Brian hone their outbound messaging, measure the response, and adjust accordingly. He hopes to continue scaling the team so that there are pods of 1 BDR, 1 inside channel account manager, and 1 solutions engineer per region.

“I want to get to the point where I can say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a list of 10 potential partners in your region. Go research them, get some context, put some meetings on the books, and close those deals,’ and have the pods actually go and do that.”

Another pro? BDRs can one day switch from more of a sales-type role to a full partnerships team member. Read more about that transition here. 

Partner Program Tweak 3: Revamp Your Partner Enablement

Most partner programs have a fairly standard partner training program you point them toward resources for:

1. Understanding how your partner program works (rules of engagement, discounts, MDF opportunities)
2. Learning how to use your product (videos, interactive demos, sandboxes)
3. Selling your product (template decks, one-pagers, co-branded collateral)

And that’s great. But in many cases, that’s not enough.

“Enablement shouldn’t be a check-the-box exercise. It should be revisited as your products and services change,” Matt reminds us. “And it should include best practices for retaining customers over time. Remember, a partner’s engagement may go well beyond an initial sale or implementation. You really need partner enablement for the full customer lifecycle.”

This is where it pays to be friends with your customer success team. Those people know how to foster greater adoption, boost end customer engagement, and close upsells or cross-sells. More importantly, they know the signs of a not-so-healthy customer and how to bring them back to life.

“Get partners access to back-end product data and teach them to read the reports. Point out the KPIs that should be going up or down over time and offer actionable strategies (think, ‘if X, then Y’) to get customers where they need to be.”

You might also want to outline situations when it’s better for partners to contact someone on your team when tackling an upsell or another end customer issue so there’s a better chance of closing that deal or saving the end customer.

Think you may need to hire someone to do this work? Here’s what to look for in a partner enablement manager.

Partner Program Tweak 4: Jazz Up Your Incentives

You already know this, but it bears repeating: Just because you build a partner program doesn’t mean partners will join it. You have to convince them that the returns will be worth their time and effort.

A good way to do that upfront is to offer some kind of incentive. Think: discounts, MDFs, or SPIFFs.

“Speaking from my experience, SPIFFs are an excellent way to get partners’ attention and motivate them to engage with your product, to come back into your portal and register a deal or referral,” says George Klippel at Ateme.

He advises taking a look at the current margin on your closed-won deals and seeing if there’s any wiggle room that you could give to partners that would push them to sell through you instead of a competitor.

Emailing all of your partners about new quarterly or bi-monthly offerings and marketing them in your partner portal is a good way to keep your product or services top of mind.

Hoping to streamline your deal reg process this year? We’ve got seven tips for you.

Partner Program Tweak 5: Explore High-Value Coalitions

If you’re in a market like martech, cybersecurity, or even construction, you’re not the only vendor in a customer’s tech stack or supply chain.

Yet, if a customer is looking for a solution to a multi-step problem, they have to do the work of researching each tool and fitting them all together. That’s a huge opportunity for you and your partners to jump in.

Matt notes, “People are already looking for a set of tools to help them accomplish something, but there are a lot of risks with Frankensteining a solution. If you can present customers with a bundle(aka a partnership with two or more partners) that’s been proven to work out of the box and you have case studies or testimonials to back you up, that’s going to be 1+1 = 3 situation.”

To start thinking about new coalitions you could form, talk to your current end customers. Ask what tools or hardware they use day in and day out. What services would’ve been useful when onboarding your product?

Compile a list of vendors that they reference — not only will it be a great starting point, it’ll help you keep customers at the center of your partnership strategy.

Bonus Partner Program Tweak #6: Implement a PRM

For small programs, you can probably make do with a basic Google Workspace subscription. You’ve got Gmail to share information, Docs for building out rules of engagement and partner agreements, Forms to collect deal registrations, referrals, and MDF requests, and Sheets to track partner progress.

But the more partners you onboard, the more potential customers they’re going after, and the more incentives you start to offer them, a basic Google Workspace is not going to cut it.

“Not having a portal causes so much confusion,” George points out. 

“Partners are constantly trying to dig through emails and find who to contact about what. In an effort to get what they need, they reach out to sales, marketing, channel managers, you name it. It just wastes everyone’s time.”

When some sales are competitive, and you need a quick turnaround for an RFP, that wasted time can mean the difference between closing new revenue and not. To scale your partner relationship management, you need a centralized repository where you can:

• Easily share information via a resource library, training, and certification
• Allow partners to create their own co-branded materials
• Point partners to approve:
  • Business plans
  • MDFs
  • Deal registrations or Referrals (and sync them with your CRM)
• Distribute leads to partner organizations or individuals
• Communicate important updates to all your partners at once

George highlights, “Bringing in an easy-to-use partner portal with deal registration (that has a tight integration with Salesforce or HubSpot) and co-branded collateral has had the most impact on the partner programs I’ve managed in my career.”

Not to toot our own horn, but the PRM he chose was Channeltivity — a partner portal with everything you need to run a successful channel program.

Want to see all that our platform has to offer? Schedule a demo to see if we’re a fit.

Still doing some PRM research? Use this checklist to guide your evaluation.