Unlocking new partner growth: Part 1

When the Channel reflects an important and substantial proportion of your business revenues, routes-to-market are shifting, and there are significant market headwinds, what can you do to achieve more with the Channel?

Although we have a number of routes-to-market, a common factor across these is that we still must create partner preference for our brand and solutions.

There are three main challenges facing IT vendors in unlocking new partner growth. In this blog we look at the first challenge – how to “do more with less”.

Challenge #1 – Doing more with less 

Market pressures have resulted in layoffs within the vendor channel teams, and made budgets much more difficult to find for partner acceleration activities.

So how do we do more with less? Fewer people, smaller budgets and less reach.

And with reduced resources we must focus on where we will get the most return from our efforts, short, mid and long term.

Traditionally partners are assigned to tiers based on their spend, accreditations and, on occasion, whitespace but we help our clients by taking a different approach:

1. Create an Ideal Partner Profile (IPP)
2. Research each partner and assess how attractive that Partner is to your business, and what is your relative strength as a vendor or potential vendor to their business.
3. This will enable you to plot partners on an engagement strategy matrix that will deliver the maximum return on activities taking into consideration the engagement channels, tools and programs, and teams available to you.

Profiling your partners:

Some useful criteria for an IPP include:

• Where have we been successful?
• Where have we seen strong profit?
• What characteristics predict success?
• What attributes are the best fit with our offerings?
• What should rule out a Partner account?
• What plays best to our unique strengths?
• What partners do we have advantages in?
• Which industries do we/they work with?
• What partners represent the most value?
• What is the partners growth trajectory and strategic direction?

Read our second blog exploring “challenge two: creating partner preference in a crowded market” and our final blog “challenge three: how to overcome internal silos”.

Talk to us to find out how we can help you unlock new growth from within your partner channels or why not see how we helped Cisco enable the channel to take action at scale.