Partner programs are an effective way for brands to drive more traffic and increase their sales. By partnering with quality partners, brands can extend their reach to a larger group of qualified customers, thus growing both their and their partner’s businesses. A well-crafted partner program is essential in unlocking the potential of powerful sales figures. For these reasons, brands must invest strategically in designing a comprehensive partner program that meets their specific needs.
Furthermore, they should ensure that their chosen partners have the capacity and resources to fully support the program’s objectives. When done right, a partner program has great potential to generate substantial rewards for the brand, its partners and its customer base alike.
1. Define Your Brand’s Value Proposition: A value proposition is a statement that clearly defines the benefits customers can expect to receive when they use a product or service. It should focus on customer gains and pain points, as well as rank what is more important to them. Through this process, brands can identify exactly who their partners should be and how much benefit each partner may bring.
2. Do Extensive Competitor Research & Monitor Competition: Knowing your competition is key to developing an effective partner program strategy. Take the time to get to know your competitors’ partner programs, so you can better understand the needs of potential partners and identify areas where your brand has the edge over competitors. It’s also critical for brands to make sure their partners are educated and informed about anything their competitors may say about their product or solution. Additionally, partners should be trained to rebut any competitive claims.
3. Understand Your Target Audience and Sales Funnel and Set Clear & Effective Performance Goals: Understanding your target audience also helps you determine what you want in a partner for a customer-centric strategy. Your partner must have customers that fulfil your ideal buyer personas to drive traction to your products. Also, one of the most important elements of any successful partnership program is setting clear performance goals for both parties involved. Establishing expectations upfront will ensure that both parties understand their responsibilities and the criteria for success.
4. Determine Your Pricing Structure: How much your partner takes depends on your products, your traction, and how likely your product is to succeed. Ensure your pricing structure is simple. You don’t want to scare off quality partners through a complicated process. IceWarp, for instance, has a simplified pricing structure based on a “Pay for What you use” that ensures every customer ends up paying only for the services they would be using, keeping it simple for everyone involved (and also resulting in a lot of savings for organizations).
5. Define the Type of Partners You Want to Associate with: Not all partners are created equal. While it might be tempting to enlist every willing partner, it’s important to choose only those that offer a good fit and tangible value for your brand. The success of a partnership and channel sales lies in the value each party gets out of it. So, your channel partnership largely depends on what value you are building for your customers.
6. Create A Customer-Centric Sales Process: Along with setting performance goals for both parties, having an effective customer-centric sales process is key in driving quality leads and revenue from partnerships. While creating the sales process, focus on understanding the customer’s perspective and needs—including pain points or any other criteria that can help increase conversions.
7. Define Motivational Drivers: Successful partnerships require the motivation of both parties. Having the right incentives in place will help motivate partners to invest more effort into driving sales. Here are a few ideas of motivational drivers you can use:
• Build Incentive Program: An incentive program enables partner sales teams to earn extra money or goodies as an incentive to promote your solution. This type of incentive encourages traction for your brand and solution amongst the sales personnel in the partner community. It also encourages partner loyalty and creates opportunities for long-term relationships.
• Joint Marketing Campaigns: Collaborating with partners on joint marketing campaigns is an effective way to enhance visibility and engagement with potential customers, as well as increase lead conversion rates.
• Regular Certification & Training Sessions: Partners must have the necessary tools and knowledge to sell your products or services. Providing regular certification and training sessions can help partners better understand the features of your product or service so they can explain it effectively to potential customers.
• Equip Team with adequate Sales Tools: Ensure sales teams have the right tools needed for success. from CRM software and helpful resources to tracking technology, equip your team with the best sales tools that can help them reach their goals more efficiently.
Once the groundwork has been laid, it is important to ensure that all responsibilities and expectations are clearly defined for each channel partner. This includes focusing on the customer experience and categorizing activities associated with this. A helpful way of doing this is by pinning down the terms and conditions related to each role to clarify what is expected from all involved parties. Finally, internal capacities and systems should be built to facilitate the successful implementation of a channel partner program. This should also be accompanied by a regular review process to identify any areas for improvement or further development. By investing in these proactive measures, businesses can rest assured that their channel partners are equipped with everything needed for success.
