Al Biedrzycki
Ramp Director of Partner Marketing
It all really depends on the partner types, what's at your disposal in terms of distribution, etc. but a few guiding principles and examples I can share:
1) You want to build for scale. While doing the one-off webinar might drive some initial impact with your first few partners, that's not a scalable benefit. Think about how you build initiatives that can scale as your grow your program and more partners enter the mix.
2) You want to have a strong POV on how you measure success with partner engagement. It's often difficult to draw a through line between partner engagement activity and channel sales outputs. For example, it might be hard to draw a strong correlation between a partner attending a webinar and then referring a customer 60 days later. To get better at measuring impact, we're looking to build a partner engagement health score at Ramp. This health score will be built on the most likely activities that drive partner referrals (i.e. completing certification, attending a webinar per quarter, etc.) Then, our team can have targets on driving up the health of our partner ecosystem. It gives us a target we can actually influence and one that is more closely tied (through data) to bottom line business outcomes.
All being said, 1:many trainings, certifications, and other educational programming that scales has proven to be super effective. Training not only enables the partner and keeps them engaged -- you can also use it as a lever for more program benefits. For example, completing a specific training or certification on a potential service offering could unlock a partner being listed in a certain directory placement as one featured for offering that service. This ties back to the distribution benefit which is a carrot for driving the desired partner behavior.