Managing Your Partners
I help tech companies grow.
There is a lot of very good information available on how to set up, recruit and manage a partner channel. Hans Peter Beck’s best selling book ‘Building Successful Partner Channels: in the software industry’ and Donagh Kiernan’s TenegoTV are great examples. I don’t intend to replicate any of that material in this post, but rather I’d like to focus on what I see as the critical success factor of any partner channel – how you lead your partners.
There are 2 key elements to leading your partners. The expectations and challenge you put on them and the support you give them to achieve those expectations.
The Support Challenge Matrix from Giant describes this in visual form.
Like all good infographics in the IT industry the top right quadrant is the place where you want to be with your partners seeing the opportunity that working with you provides and that they feel empowered to seize that opportunity. Let’s look first at the errors that prevent you from being there.
The most common error I’ve seen is the assumption that the majority of work in building the partnership has been done once the partnership agreement has been signed. If you make this mistake, you have abdicated the management of the partner and they will be apathetic to you and will have low expectations of the partnership. Signing the deal is the tip of the iceberg. The bulk of the work – training, enablement, joint sales and market activity, the regular review meetings – these all have to happen to make the partner feel supported and challenged.
The second most common error is to demand a lot of the partner while providing little in return. While a dominant vendor (e.g. Microsoft, SAP) can dictate what is expected of their partners and change the rules of engagement to suit their own business needs the same is not true of smaller ISVs who are more depended on partners to make the market for them. Partner enablement needs to be more closely adapted to the partners capabilities rather than just the vendors requirements.
The final error is to fall into the trap of always giving the partner what they ask for without gaining a corresponding commitment to action. If you make this mistake, you can guarantee that a lack of sales will always be your fault. Vendors tend to make this mistake if they started the partnership by abdicating the leadership of it, and then try to rectify the situation purely by providing the partner with incentives and not gaining commitment from the partner.
How do you ensure you start in the top right quadrant and stay there? Do your research. Understand your ideal partner, ensure your partner proposition and partner management strategy match both yours and your partners business needs and keep challenging them and supporting them to be the best they can be.
One final point. Your own default leadership approach will heavily influence how you lead your partner channel. It is well worth reflecting on this to ensure you don’t allow your own tendencies to distort how you manage your partners. This post expands further on this theme.
The Support Challenge Matrix was developed to help leaders lead their team more effectively. Your channel partners need to be treated as members of your extended team and managed as such.
For more info on the Support Challenge Matrix and leadership try this videohttps://www.giant.tv/users/sign_up/csgiant21/episode/support-and-challenge-matrix. Registration required.