The Golden Rules of Enticing Committed New Partners

goldenrule

So how can a vendor entice new partners that will be good for its business? Here are a few tips:

Make It Easy To Work Together
When I was an alliance manager, I worked with a handful of vendors. The ones whose products we sold most had programs that were easy to navigate. This meant approachable partner guides and platforms, easy-to-navigate reporting processes and portals that didn’t require a PhD to navigate.

Lead Generation
If you ask solution providers what they want more of from their vendors, it’s support with lead generation. It’s key to hooking your partners and keeping their loyalty. This doesn’t mean just delivering your partners a list of leads or a generic e-mail campaign produced by corporate. Instead, lead-generation support is best done with partner-specific marketing support including guidance on optimizing their presence in the online communications sphere. It also means template campaigns for partners centered on the end customer. Plus, customizable materials are essential to partners feeling supported in their lead-generation efforts.

What’s In It for Me?
This one’s a given. If a partner sells your competitor’s product and makes more money, yours will only be sold when a customer demands it. Make sure you have great margins, rebates and incentives that you can easily communicate to potential new partners.

Once you’ve hooked new partners, two key tips I offer to let only the good ones into your channel program are:

Vendors who have the happiest partners don’t focus on how many partners they have. They prioritize what they’re doing for their partners and they only take on partners they’re sure they can collaborate with. Have you found ways to entice and keep winning partners that I might be missing? I’d love to hear more ideas.