STEP ONE: MAPPING THE PARTNER LANDSCAPE
It’s very easy for a business looking to scale indirect channels to jump right from Goal Setting on the left, to Partner Recruitment on the right. That’s almost bound to fail. It’s characterised by the following: ‘we found some good partners informally, let’s just go find some more’.
What this misses is that informal partnering is based on existing relationships, and on happenstance, coming across a good business to work with. That’s not scalable. It’s also higher risk. Too many businesses become disillusioned because informal partner relationships just don’t work out.
Lowering risk, and building in scalability, means taking some simple steps to get partnering right.
The first step, mapping the partner landscape, is about information gathering. There are three sources of insight, coloured yellow in the illustration. The first source is internal. What do we as a management team believe that successful partnering looks like? What solutions does it focus on? What types of customer is it likely to reach?
The second two sources are external. Talking to existing, or potential partners is important, to find out what they are seeing, and what they are looking for. And marketing insights, particularly competitive insights might be part of the mix.
The Partner Landscape is a brainstorming exercise. List all of the partner types that could be relevant and define them. What markets will they help us access? How do they make money?
STEP TWO: IDENTIFYING PRIORITY PARTNER TYPES
In green in the illustration, the ‘long list’ that makes up the landscape, is now evaluated to identify the highest opportunity partner types. This is usually done using a simple scorecard approach. The goal is to find one, two or three partner categories that are likely to succeed. No more than that.
The chosen priority partner types may or may not include partner types that have cropped up in the course of informal partnering. It’s easy to ‘overweight’ partner types that are familiar, and this should be avoided.
Part of the evaluation process will pull in thinking from the blue area of the illustration, the partner proposition. Opportunity partners are companies that help us drive sales by accessing new customers, for us or with us. But they will only do this if they too see opportunity too.
STEP THREE: THE PARTNER PROPOSITION
In blue in the illustration, we split the proposition into two important components. One is the commercial proposition, how does the partner make money with us? The other is the value proposition.
A common mistake is to over-focus on the commercial proposition. It is not enough for partners to be able to make money working with us. They need also to see that the partnership can grow their business, by extending their offer, or making their existing offer relevant to new markets.
The proposition needs to be tested. This means going out into the market and speaking to partners in the target profile, presenting the proposition and gathering feedback. Expect a mix of outcomes. Some partners might want to know more and become recruitment leads. Others will provide valuable insight to help us refine the targeting and the proposition.
STEP FOUR: SCALING RECRUITMENT
If all goes well one or more partner categories will emerge where the proposition resonates, and where we can scale. We will have chosen the partner types we focused on based, in part, on the opportunity to find many partners ‘in profile’.
A key requirement now is to document the ‘partner journey’. What we mean by this is that the process, and associated content to engage and enable a partner must be in place. This does not mean heavy resource investment, in people and systems. It means being clear on how we move partners from interest to selling, and having the supporting content and tools in place to support them. Too many interested partners fall away because that journey is not clear.
NEXT STEPS
Although simple and achievable for most businesses, the steps presented here benefit from experience and expertise. Working with a specialist will get it done better, and it will get it done more quickly.
Kovendi offers proven templates for partner landscape assessments, and scorecard models. We know how to gather partner and market insight. And we are experienced in testing value propositions with partners.
Scalable indirect routes to market can be transformational for any business, particularly when they move to Phase 3 partnering, and away from informal approaches. Contact Kovendi to discuss in more detail how this can impact your business.