View AMA
Question
How does your marketing team usually work with your partner team to promote partners to customers?
Answer
At Caspio, we're fortunate to have a Marketing team that believes strongly in supporting Partners, and we do that through running joint webinars (one a month), press releases, social media posts, blog posts, and an actively maintained partner directory - besides call outs in our newsletters. We also actively support partners who want to run co-branded campaigns with marketing collateral and assets. Our guidance to partners is bring us any idea you have and we will be open to listening and implementing it as long as it can add value to our customers.
Question
What are the first things you would recommend a partner manager do when building out a new program from zero to one?
Answer
Understand the true win-win-win in a partnership for all the parties involved: for the vendor, their partner, and their joint customers. Often each party is looking for quick leads or referrals in a one-way direction, and that doesn't always work out. Negotiate internally if needed to ensure that the partners get something more than just a commission on your deals.
Question
What are some ways to increase the adoption of tech partners/integrations with your existing customer base?
Answer
Caspio provides open REST APIs along with exhaustive documentation and clear in-product callouts for integrated services besides covering it in our documentation. We have some exciting plans in this space which we will be announcing soon to make it even easier to integrate with us and build joint solutions – we encourage potential tech partners to reach out to us from our Partners page with ideas.
Question
How do you approach motivating partners to engage in your partner program? What do they want and how do you give it to them?
Answer
The most important thing that partners look for is the potential to grow their business by partnering with us, and towards that we help them with various co-marketing and co-selling motions. We have also removed all the friction from partnering with us, so that partners can easily sign up, get certified, be listed on our directory, register deals, use partner collateral and win recurring commissions. Post-sale as well, they know that their customers can rely on our outstanding support so they don't have to spend too much time on support and maintenance, but can rather focus on adding value.
Question
What sales materials do consulting partners generally need to discuss your product with their clients?
Answer
The Caspio Partner Portal provides our consulting partners with all the collateral they need to discuss our offering and their joint solution with their clients: presentations, pricing sheets, case studies, value propositions, demo apps, and more!
Question
How do you know if your partner enablement strategy is successful?
Answer
Eventually the true North Star metric is partner-sourced and influenced revenue. But towards that, we have other enablement indicators such as how many certifications partners are obtaining, how many deals they're registering with us and the pipeline value, etc. The actual revenue that partners themselves are deriving is not always possible to ascertain, but in lieu of that, when we see our partners hiring for more Caspio developers on their rolls, and when we hear positive feedback from them on how they were able to win deals or execute projects faster or cheaper with Caspio, that's great anecdotal evidence as well!
Question
What is the benefit of partner training and having partners get certified?
Answer
For our solutions (consulting) partners, we provide free training and certifications, and they can obtain the Silver tier and be listed in our directory only after obtaining at least one certification. For them, having the benefit of a Silver partner logo and being able to claim that expertise in front of customers is enough value to get certified. And when they have been using Caspio for a while, the certification itself isn't too difficult to obtain.
Question
What milestones or initial goals are good ones to set up for ISV partners after they complete and integration and become an official partner?
Answer
The leads and pipeline that both partners refer to each other are a valuable metric to keep track of. Towards that goal, some initial milestones can be generation of joint solutions, case studies, and articulating the value of the combined solution vs. other offerings.