Partners play an invaluable role in helping companies expand their reach and revenue. According to the people at Motivation Excellence, investing back into your partner relationships through robust support and channel incentives drives exponential business growth over time.
Provide Excellent Partner Support
Prioritize providing partners with strong support as they represent you directly with end-customers. Establish clear service level agreements defining response times and channels from live chat to phone. Designate internal reps as primary contacts for channel inquiries. Set up a partner portal offering training materials, marketing assets, reporting dashboards and FAQs all in one place. Making partners’ jobs easier earns their trust and satisfaction.
Gather Input and Feedback
Partners work directly with customers and prospects. Solicit their input through surveys, focus groups and informal suggestions to understand pain points and opportunities from the outside-in. Ask what additional tools they need to improve sales cycles or customers’ implementation experiences. Acting on input makes partners feel valued while optimizing processes.
Provide Marketing Assistance
Offering co-branded customizable marketing materials gives your partners expertly crafted collateral to use without added workload. Share email templates, social media posts, banner ads, sample newsletters, and thought leadership content easily tailored with partners’ logos and contact information. Make yourselves invaluable to channel marketing efforts. The more you help partners market, the more business you both earn.
Incentivize Top-Performers
Leveraging human nature’s inherent competitive spirit, implement contests, bonuses and overachievement rewards for standout partners who excel based on sales volume, product registrations, customer satisfaction or other key performance indicators. Then spotlight winners publicly across your digital channels. Incentive programs attract fresh partners while motivating existing ones to keep striving.
Offer Sales and Tech Support
Provide exceptional sales and technical support coverage to backup partners’ teams directly. Staff a partner support line to promptly assist their sales reps in responding to inquiries or objections. Operate a priority technical support queue partners can escalate issues to for fast resolution if their own engineers need backup.
Feature Top Partners
Publicly showcase top-tier partners as models for what success looks like. Spotlight their results and growth in case studies, press releases, website listings, account manager presentations, and leadership updates. Peer recognition activates a natural desire within the broader network to emulate what the rock stars are doing. And featured partners feel valued while gaining exposure.
Facilitate Networking
Enable valuable connections across your partner ecosystem through networking events. Host an exclusive online partner conference with chat opportunities. Use virtual meeting tools for breakout sessions facilitating peer knowledge sharing. Arrange meet and greets when partners have shared accounts. Strategic networking leads to exponential growth.
Make Info Shareable
Equip partners to speak fluidly about your company by providing shareable digital asset packages. Email templates they can forward to prospects, intriguing social posts, slide format product overviews, third-party report summaries touting your solution’s value proposition and ROI models to validate the numbers for customers. Content toolkits make partners’ lives simpler while controlling your message.
Listen and Adapt
Partnerships only thrive long term when they evolve to meet partners’ changing needs. Check in often, listen closely and respond with empathy. Monitor feedback and usage metrics to spot what’s working versus roadblocks. Implement enhancements addressing top concerns even if it means reallocating resources or budgets. Partners who know you’ll respond to their needs reward such commitment with fierce loyalty, driving growth upward.
Conclusion
Growing via partners requires nurturing a robust support ecosystem enabling their success. Prioritizing partner relationships leads to exponential expansions of market reach, revenue and innovation for both sides far beyond what either could achieve alone. Invest in your partners and growth will surely follow.
