Creating an awesome Partner Experience (PX)
Hand on hearth,
Do you deliver an awesome Partner Experience (PX) to your partners?
Are you proud of how you enable, help, and support the partners that are vital for your business?
Are you treating your partners the way they deserve?
The traditional partner and channel business is changing to an ecosystem business where vendors need to cater for direct, indirect, marketplace, influence, technology, and referral partners.
How do you make sure to be relevant to your different partner types? It is not easy.
Speaking to 100s of channel professionals we, @Scalando, see time and time again how IT vendors and ISVs fail to deliver an awesome and engaging Partner Experience (PX) to their traditional channel partners. As these vendors embark on unleashing the power of their full ecosystem community, they will become even more challenged.
Two of the main challenges are;
1 – Siloed responsibility for the partner GTM elements
2 – A completely inadequate tech stack.
Partnership professionals have had to play 2nd violin to the sales, marketing, Ops and IT teams trying their best to patch together the elements they need to execute a successful partner GTM strategy.
Resources might not be under the Partnership Leader’s direct control, however they are great at getting the other teams delivering content, training, and lend their support to the Partner GTM motion. Successful Partnership Leaders are great at aligning, structuring, and orchestrating outside their immediate span of control.
The real issue comes when aiming to execute the GTM Strategy at scale. The IT toolset often made available to Partnership Leaders is not geared for purpose. Either they are offered to use tools that are definitely not focused on their objective or they are forced to utilize legacy PRM software with a far from optimal user experience.
Even some of the most successful IT vendors in the world send their partners down a path of logging into a “partner portal” (read CMS from 2000), which then links to another “learning portal” (read another CMS from 2005) which presents you with some trainings in SCORM format sitting in yet another repository. The user experience is completely broken. It is not uncommon that a Partner AM need to go to several tools just to find basic sales content.
The story gets even more complicated when you want your partners to execute a sales play or campaign. Your company has invested in five to six “best of breed” tools to sales and marketing scale. Issue is none of them work together and all have different access policies. If you are lucky your partner can log in to all, but they will have to dig through tons of assets to find what they need to execute, and you need to wait for someone in corporate to do a report from Tableau to even get any data.
In the end you have a beautiful story on slides, but in practice you end sending your partner an email with the sales play content and then hope for the best when it comes to the execution.
We all want a great user experience ourselves. Simple, easy, customized, and relevant. Why do we then server our partners, who are vital to our business, with a siloed and poor experience based on legacy PRM and a collection of specialized tools for others.
To deliver an awesome Partner Experience (PX) you need to start with a solution built for the purpose. If your partner needs to be sent through a miss-match of linked tools and broken links you will fail. To execute a partner initiative or campaign your partner should only need to go one place. The experience should break down your internal silos and gather the best of enablement, marketing and sales acceleration and serve this on a silver platter to your partner.
Deliver one unified experience for your partners and you will see their dedication build and your business results improve.
Give your partners the experience they deserve!
Reach out to us for a discussion about best and worst practices in building your partner GTM and sales acceleration strategy.