Aircall VP of North American Channel Sales, Tiffany Dunnon Partner Program Strategy

The partner team works with marketing to decide which partners to have create a closer 1:1 marketing GTM together. Within that plan your marketing person works to help promote the collective value prop - this could be in many ways - social and exposure on social, customer newsletters, case studies, and incentives of our partners solutions or incentive to our IT partners to sell our solution (solely or with another integration partner). You can also invest in a partner “directory” connected to your website so prospects can see who your top partners are and what they specialize in as it relates to your product.

If you are looking to measure how well your partners are performing, take a look at revenue they produce for you, # of deals, average deal size, # of sales reps within the partner that are selling your solution (ie partner penetration), and those downsteam partners that produce (if that’s applicable). If a partner brought you one deal a quarter, ask what it would take to get 1 a month? How can you co-invest in your joint success? You still have to figure out the ROI of that channel to measure its effectiveness over other channels/partnerships you invest in. It’s also important to understand how much revenue your solution represents to the partner. Depending on the type of partner, a good rule of thumb is to be 10% of the partners’ business. If you don’t make up 10% of their revenues they may not care as much about having a strategic partnership. Make sure you understand why the partner should sell it? Why should they care? What does it help them solve? Does your solution represent a larger deal, better solution, stickier solution to help with retention? Those answers and creating an ideal partner profile (IPP) will inform how you want to GTM and which partners to pursue. Create a scorecard so you can evaluate your partnerships on an ongoing basis. With the strategic partners, agree upon KPIs that you measure together and meet on a consistent basis to ensure you are both meeting or exceeding those expectations.

It’s super competitive so a compelling partner program has many facets. First, how can they be profitable with your solution and can they add any services to increase profitability? Those services could be before the deal, in addition to the core deal, or after the sale. Besides profitability, marketing support (in the form of assets, campaigns, blogs, incentives, lead generation) would be the second most important element to your program. I’m seeing more interest in exposure and how the partner can get more exposure and access to your network of other partners and customers. I also have seen executive alignment with your execs and yours on a consistent basis work well. Most importantly, ask them what they like about other programs and do your research around your competition. The internal partner teams and your partners can give you many of the answers.

Partners can provide reach and scale. Partners come in many flavors but they are helping you either 1) enhance your product or service 2) be an extension of your direct sellers or 3) give you access to their ecosystem of partners, or a combination of those three. For direct sellers they can get you access to their customers - if done right the sales reps who work with partners will get exponentially more opportunities into their funnel, leading to more wins and commissions! I’ve seen some reps who want to control the whole process and those are the ones that don’t see the value of partners and won’t be as successful IMO. The partner will give you access to their customer base in return for you being a great closer. If you are working with technology partners, think about the ecosystem of partners that sell their tech as a core business, and how your solution can be an effective up-sell or add-on that in turn can provide them more sales and higher retention.

Facts and data will help you prove the case. Showing a business case that supports reducing the costs to the business by off-loading services the partners can provide. Most internal support teams are limited with their resources so share how partners can take on those services to help them achieve their goals (retention, resolutions, call time etc). Also showing either in-house or industry data around retention of customers through partners. Normally better retention rates are possible through partners which means (in SaaS) billings continue longer and the CLV is more valuable to the company. Share how specific partners are driving value for your competition.

I have leveraged a BDR team to call out to partner lists or internally generated lists. You could give them a chance to go after deals that were “no shows" meetings or fizzled out for some reason. Sharing specific customers for them to upsell post-sales services they provide in return for new front end opportunities. Joint events that you sponsor or co-sponsor on a local level have been good ways to economically generate leads. In any arrangement, be sure that you both get something out of it.

Getting to action and their first deal quickly will get that partner activated quickly. Depending on resources I like to have an “onboarding” guide or person to get them through the first hurdle of understanding your product. Make sure the program is spelled out simply and can be easily accessed so they know what they are getting/giving becoming a partner. Share best practices of your most successful partners. First you have to educate them and they have to commit to some education. You can make it light, in short snippets, and interesting (think video!). Once they educate, agree to help them get their first deal - perhaps give them one as a gift. You can also send them some cool swag for becoming a partner and taking the first education event. Create an incentive for that partner to sell their first deal or their first few deals. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Consistent touch points - stay in front of them with interesting industry information. Invite them to your communities. Again, give them exposure i.e. linkedin post welcoming them to the program with a little shout out to something they excel at in their space.

Great question! Partner program’s aren’t going to be successful unless you have executive buy-in and cross functional leadership buy-in (product, CX, TS, Marketing, Sales, Ops). Why? Because the program is going to provide benefits and you will need resources and investments from those teams to make the program successful. As an example, partner programs provide marketing benefits. Marketing benefits such as co-marketing material, incentives, lead sharing, events, content, campaigns, resources etc are coming from the marketing or sales budget so having their buy-in is critical to the success of the program. Think about how your program could help the internal teams achieve their goals, not just the overall revenue goals of the company.

Comp neutrality is critical. The partner teams will not be successful, plain and simple. And partners won’t want to work with the sales teams because they will be afraid the reps will take the deal directly. You need the CRO or CSO alignment to be sure it’s written in the rules of engagement and the sales comp plan. This is non-negotiable in my book.

Attribution between sales and marketing is always a difficult conversation. Partner marketing should have a separate budget so you can measure the benefit from these separately from direct company marketing. I recommend you ask for budgeting for a specific project based on an agreed upon ROI that marketing wants to achieve. If you can correlate the success of the project based on leads and closed won deals it will set you up for further budgeting and investment. You could also ask for sales or partnerships to fund an initiative if marketing won’t budget for it. Once you prove success you can figure out how to go take it from there. One other tip, show how competition is using marketing and how it’s effective with their partners.