How to Improve the Partner Experience

When working with your business partners, the way you decide to build your professional relationship with them can go a long way towards improving your own business’s position. If done right, your attitude towards your partners can help improve their overall experience of working with you, which will also help you reap many benefits in the long run. With that in mind, we will try to elaborate on why you need to work on developing a solid partner experience plan — particularly related to improving the experience of channel partners. We’ll also provide you with some suggestions on how you can achieve this, so read on to find out more.

Why Is Partner Experience So Important?

Traditionally, businesses thought that engaging their partners with favorable conditions related to their cooperation (mostly in the commercial sense of providing them with what they’d consider being a ‘good deal’) was enough to ensure a solid professional relationship with them. To this day, some businesses still rely on this manner of treating their partners — which is not ideal, because this approach can prove lacking if not complemented by additional efforts made to improve partner relationships. At the end of the day, coming up with a good partner experience (or PX) strategy will eventually pay off. This is because improved partner experience can help you:

Make the most out of your partners’ potential for generating revenue, as their increased satisfaction will make them more loyal, less likely to churn, and keep them coming back;
Speed up the process of working with your partners and lower their friction;
Give you an advantage over your competitors since partners that have a good experience of working with you are far more likely to choose you over a competing business offering them similar deals;
Increase your reputation, as satisfied partners, will often recommend your business to other potential partners as well as clients, indirectly opening new markets and thereby new revenue sources for you;
Ultimately increase your sales and profitability;
And more.

When done right, your plan of enhancing the experience of your partners will not only help you forge long-lasting relationships with them and increase their satisfaction from working with you, but it will also have a positive effect on your brand in the long run. Follow our advice below to find out how you can improve partner experience with success.

Getting to Know Your Partners

Even by using more traditional partner relationship approaches, businesses have been able to develop multiple criteria according to which they determine what characteristics their ideal (or perfect fit) partners should have. The process of finding a perfect partner fit can vary from business to business, usually including actions such as assessing the owner or managing director of a business partner company, as well as determining partner personas. The more your partners get involved and gain leverage in doing business with you, the more you’ll feel the need to develop a deeper understanding of their partner personas. When doing so, bear in mind that you’ll have to adapt your expectations of your partners according to their functions (marketers, salespeople, technicians, etc.) and the position of their individual employees or team members (sales professionals, managers, CEOs, and so on) in their business hierarchy. Understanding the needs of each individual engaged by your partners’ businesses is key when determining their personas as well as constructing your own approach towards them.

Finding the Touchpoints

While we’re at it, individuals working for your partner businesses can be key players in your favor if you know how to establish a solid contact with them. You can easily achieve this by pinpointing the so-called partner touchpoints. Businesses often focus much of their attention on finding their customer touchpoints — the points through which their brand can get through to their customers. While customer touchpoints can simply be described as the ways through which customers can get in contact with your brand (whether this is online, through a retail store, by contacting customer service, and so on), finding the right partner touchpoints can prove to be a greater challenge. You can view your partner touchpoints as the ways in which individuals working for one of your business partners can maintain contact with your brand. Again, these will often depend on the function each individual holds within the partner business they work for. For instance, a partner providing marketing services for your business will be used to focusing on marketing-related areas (PR, social media), sales channel partners will focus on communicating about sales (retail, online), and so on. If you wish to effectively improve the experience of your diverse partners, the important thing to keep in mind here is that you should try to develop an approach that covers all the different functions of your individual partners.

Guiding Partners Through Their Journey

From beginning to end, your relationship with your channel partners is a process that includes two major phases: recruiting your partners and enabling them to do business with you. The first part of the partner journey — their recruitment — starts when you first establish contact with a partner-to-be and will be complete when you finally reach an agreement with them. During this phase, you need to focus on the potential partner’s business as a whole as well as on its individual team members. At first, you’ll need to reach out to each potential partner, make them aware of your brand and what kinds of products or services you offer your customers. From there on, if a potential partner thinks they have a need to offer your products or services to their own client base, they may start considering cooperation with you. In the end, if they decide it will be in their best interest to have your business as their partner, they’ll agree to cooperate either by signing an official partnership document (contract) or by engaging in a less formal agreement with you, whichever suits both parties best. After having recruited a channel partner, the next major phase of the partner journey is their enablement. During this phase, you have to actively take care of giving your partners the support they need to keep up with the operations that are part of the partnership deal, provide them with the proper tools to do so, and generally give them an incentive to remain loyal to you and continue doing business with you in the future, as well. This can include giving partners training sessions on how to properly provide their client base with your products and/or services, and motivating them in different ways (financially, materially, as well as non-materially) to keep on doing a good job. As a result, partners will feel more engaged by your brand, and keep recommending you to their contacts. Unlike the recruitment phase, enablement doesn’t necessarily have an end; with some luck, your continuous support for your partners’ infrastructure will retain them in the long run and bring many benefits to both you and them.

Optimizing Partner Communication

At any stage of your relationship, the way you communicate with your partners is a key factor, contributing to their experience of working with you. To make the most out of the way you communicate with your partners, you’ll need a consistent partner communication strategy. The first thing you’ll need to determine here is the persona of each partner, and you’ll build your way of communicating with them accordingly. From there on, you’ll be able to set your tone, the messaging medium, your syntax — that is, the way you convey your thoughts, and your calls to action — aimed at each individual partner. Here, you must keep in mind that both with partners having a more formal approach to your relationship as well as with those that prefer to keep the cooperation on a more casual level, you’ll have to make an effort to socialize. After all, your channel partners are your right hand in business, and when all’s said and done, they’re the ones that can make or break the reputation you have among the customers they resell your products and/or services to. Because of this, getting to know your partner businesses and their team members on a more personal level always pays off; personal connections are the best way of guaranteeing loyalty. A partner that feels a personal connection to your brand and the people behind it will be generally easier to get along with, complete processes faster, and with less friction.

Using Data to Personalize Your Message

While many businesses have relied on an intuitive approach when building partner relationships, with the advancement of technology, this way of treating partners is steadily becoming a thing of the past. This is because nowadays, you can gather partner data (though sometimes this can be a complicated process) which provides you with direct insights that can make your partner interactions take up less time and generate more revenue. It’s already a common practice in business circles to make partner data gathering a priority, whether it’s about getting structured or unstructured bits of information about business partners, or both. Modern advances in data science have made this process more accessible than ever before, with artificial intelligence being developed to interpret relevant information about businesses, among other things. Equipped with the proper data about your partners, you’ll have an advantage when building your relationship with them. Here, it’s important that you use this data to develop a personalized approach to each one of your partners, tailoring your message to their needs and showing them how cooperating with you can bring value to their businesses.

Providing Your Partners With Valuable Content

Contrary to popular belief, the content businesses create is not solely meant to be targeted at getting them buyers for their products and services — or at least not always. Many businesses often engage their channel partners with compelling content, too. Of course, knowing how to recruit, communicate with, and enable your partners is already a great start towards improving partner experience. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t compliment this with a well-thought-out content plan aimed at your partners, and ultimately, at your own customers and clients that this content will reach through your partner network. For instance, along with the products you provide your partners for them to resell to end-users, you can also give them engaging content pieces: high-quality infographics, articles, educational whitepapers, and so on. Your partners can then distribute these core content pieces with your mutual customers, to go along with the items you’re reselling through them. Bear in mind that this extra content will also imply extra training for your partners, as you’ll likely have to teach them how to make the best use of it and how to adapt it to their client base in a way that will make it accessible and useful to each end-user. The content you provide your partners with should be interesting and able to capture the attention of its audiences, aside from being practically useful to them. The point of giving extra attention to your partners by providing them with engaging content is that through this process, your customers (as the end-users of your products or services that your partners are reselling) will be more likely to keep your brand and the top of their minds. Next time they decide to make a purchase, they’ll be more inclined to choose you over your competitors because of the added value they get from the engaging content you’ve provided them with.

Wrapping Up

Giving your channel partners a good deal isn’t enough anymore — you also have to take care of improving their experience of working with you. A solid partner experience strategy can help you make the most out of your partners’ potential for generating revenue, ultimately increasing your sales and profitability. You should start by getting to know your partners better, and categorize them according to their partner personas. The more engaged each partner becomes with your business, the more you’ll feel the need to know more about their persona and use it to adapt your approach to them. To do so successfully, you’ll have to try to understand the needs of your partners’ businesses as well as those of their individual team members and employees. From here on, a good approach would be to try to find the touchpoints you have with individuals within your partner organizations. The potential of individuals working for your partners is huge, as they can act as your asset within your partner organization if you can properly use their touchpoints to develop a connection with them based on their personal function as your channel salespersons, marketers, and so on. You should also know how to guide your partners from the beginning of their journey, starting with their recruitment and continuing with their enablement to work with you and offer your solutions to end-users. Throughout your journey together, provide your partners with all the support they need to keep working for you, and you shouldn’t forget to engage them with some compelling additional content, either.