How do you approach motivating partners to engage in your partner program? What do they want and how do you give it to them?

The second question answers the first! Find out what they want and give it to them. So many things in our working lives are much easier than we build them up to be in our heads. Managing someone is easy; care about them, learn what they care about and then try to help them get it - if they aren't capable of getting it, even with your help, then focus your time elsewhere. Partnerships are identical to this! Sales, partnerships, management, dating... Care about the other person. Learn what they want. Honestly evaluate whether you can provide what they want. Do what you can to make that happen... Generally speaking, what our partners want most often is additional revenue - we help them gain that by providing introductions to our clients and amplifying their marketing through our own social channels, email marketing, etc.: irl events are also huge for us and sponsoring partner events is a great way to generate some reciprocity for the leads they send us <3

TLDR: Ask them, listen, and build what they need. I love this question, but there is no simple answer here because the answer will be different for every organization. The method to discovering this, however, is pretty standard. You need to ask them what they need. They will tell you exactly what they need from your platform to be more successful. The key is to listen and build (within reason) what they are asking for - and also listen to their business workflows. Building what they ask for and gating it behind “joining” the program will give you the best results. Example: The #1 thing that Glide Experts asked for when I first joined Glide was a way to receive revenue sharing for existing Glide users. To give a little context, when I first joined the only way to get revenue was if someone used a sign-up affiliate link. There wasn’t any real way to have revenue sharing for teams that already had a Glide account. So - I built this into Glide, and now if you join the Experts Program you get automatic revenue sharing on teams you join. Long answer - but I hope it helped. ;)

I've found that service partners are typically motivated more by a bit of healthy competition than by money. At the end of the day, the service partners looking to be motivated are the ones typically aspiring to become your top partner or within your top tier. It's important to create clear goals for them to accomplish every month/quarter/year and then be sure to acknowledge their stellar performance in a relevant way based on their preferences - some appreciate public recognition where as others prefer private.

Partner motivation is critical to getting sponsorship and a partnership kicked off, and personally I find this easy as long as you are working with the right partner, and you can understand their goals, objectives and where your partnership fits into their business. I think too many partner leaders focus on things that are important to them, but may not be important to partners. Take the time to learn about your partner, their mission, vision and values and their goals as an organization and their goals as a company, business, and team level. The better you can understand their goals, the better you will be able to articulate how your program and your company can help make them successful. Maybe they need customer introductions or MDF funds or a listing on your website - take the time to do discovery and ask questions to find out what is important to THAT partner.

Be different. I don't like to talk about the standard, cookie-cutter benefits of our program. I like to talk about the ease of partnering up. The benefit of having a partnership in place with an iPaaS vs. having to come up with your own integration strategy and having to build native integrations. I like to talk about the customer's experience and/or the prospect's journey throughout the process - going from a partner referral to entering a co-sell motion. The partner wants to know that the customer or prospect that they are referring will have a smooth journey, and thats the point I like to touch on.

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.

I'll start by answering this question with a point I've made throughout this AMA: ask your partners what they want. This is a 'smack on the forehead' moment that I've found with a lot of partner managers, but the better you understand the motivators of those around you, the better you can tailor your offerings to cater to them. Some things I've found to be very value-adding to my partners include: Marketing lift (Signifyd has an incredible marketing team that's incredibly supportive of Partnerships, so we're able to produce a lot of content/provide heavy lifting on co-sponsored events) Co-sponsorship efforts ($, lead generation) Co-selling efforts Certification (public recognition, market legitimacy) Lead generation (creating opportunities to get partners in front of customers) These elements are baked into Signifyd's partner program to ensure that any partner that engages with us is invested in our partnership!

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.