The Challenges of Managing a Partner Network

There are some key challenges for any sales organisation dealing with and managing a partner network. Managing Partners involves much more than product training and quarterly incentives. It requires a mutual business strategy, training, mentoring, and support on how to sell your product effectively in a complex sales environment.

Building and gaining mutual trust and understanding of a win-win working relationship is the beginning of having effective communication. Being able to communicate in a common language regarding the status of key opportunities and the state of the sales pipeline are critical to enable the joint development of winning deals and market development strategies. Failure to develop a common framework for such communication results in poor resource allocation, lost deals, and inconsistent revenue performance.

The Partnership Matters

Just as the Pareto principle suggests that 80 percent of your revenues and profits often come from 20 percent of your customers, a similar relationship exists within the partner network.

You regularly depend on the high-performing key Partners to make your yearly numbers and, without whom, your company revenues would surely suffer. In the direct selling world, significant time and energy is spent managing these key customer relationships. In the channel, however, much less attention is paid. Failing to deploy a consistent methodology and process to manage these “high performer” Partners is a recipe for disaster.

Having the right conversation at the right level with a clearly understood and mutually agreed upon business plan is critical. The plan should have action items assigned to owners and have a regular cadence for follow up, review, and update.

Maximising the Partnership

Let’s talk about maximising partnerships. Developing and optimising a partner strategy is fundamental to maximising partnerships.  Using a structured systematic methodology for approaching the planning process ensures that a comprehensive plan can be created, tested, designed and deployed. Careful attention should be paid to the details of market segmentation concerning products, customers and partners and incorporating the market dynamics involved in successfully delivering a product.

Focusing on factors that will deliver maximum impact is key to successful execution of the partner strategy and selection of the Partners who will achieve partner goals.

At Wahoo Learning, we understand the challenges but also the benefits and rewards of effective partner programs, and can help support your training and certification needs.

For over 20 years we have been supporting companies such as CommScope, a major supplier of network infrastructure products globally, to support their global Partner Programme. With over 20,000 courses sold into the partner network annually, CommScope and their partners have recognised the value that training has brought to their relationships.