Managing Partner Success

Overview

Channel success is driven by partner success. How you manage your partners and help them succeed is the critical factor in how well they perform. From recruiting the right partners to guiding them through a clear onboarding journey and supporting them, partner management is the foundation stone of your channel program.

This article provides an overview to help you understand the elements of partner management and how they come together.

User Profile

Channel Marketing Leader

Scenario

TAMCO is a data security provider. They are creating a partner program to meet revenue goals and expand their reach.

Using Unifyr One, the Sales and Sales Marketing teams are using Unifyr One custom fields to capture partner information, managing, and motivating partners using Partner Groups and Tier programs. Additionally, they will be using two Unifyr One features to register prospects or invite contacts to the partner program.

Objective

This year based on projected revenue growth, the channel team has set a target of increasing new partners by 15% and losing no more than 10% of existing partners to churn. To do this, they will create ideal partner profiles, segment their partners into different groups based on their revenue potential, motivate existing partners with a tiered rewards system, and grow their new partner pool by 10%

Contents

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Create Custom Fields to Describe Partners

The first success factor in any channel program begins before you even open your Unifyr One environment. Through consultation with your Unifyr One team, you will have profiled the characteristics of your target partners. 

Unifyr One requires some basic data about each partner. This includes a name and a distinct email address. Beyond this, there are some standard fields that capture optional information like street address and phone number. 

To capture information that corresponds to your partner profile, you should create Custom Fields. This information can be added to the data collection form that new partners will fill out as they join the program. The data can then be used to segment your partners as needed. 

Segment Partners into Groups

Once you have created your custom fields, you can use them to segment your partners into groups. Groups simplify partner management by allowing you to apply actions to multiple partners at once, based on a selected characteristic. Without groups, updating a large number of partners would be time-consuming and labor-intensive.  With groups, you can quickly and consistently apply any changes or send communications to all of the partner members.

Unifyr One allows you to use standard or custom fields as the basis for groups and you can create as many groups as you need. This allows you to manage your partners with as much granularity as you need for a specific purpose. Each partner can be in multiple groups.

You can define your partner groups before recruiting any partners. Alternatively, you can add partner groups later as needed. For more information, see About Partner Groups.

Motivate Partners with Tier Programs

Partner groups are useful for differentiating between sets of partners but they do not provide the motivational benefits of progression.  Progression is an important element in keeping your partners engaged and striving to improve their performance.  You will need to keep veteran partners active and growing their pipeline at the same time that you will need to support and nurture new partners as they find their footing in your channel program. 

Partner Tiers allow you to explicitly lay out a path for your partners with clear milestones and a plan for reaching the next level.  A tier is a stage within the progression. You determine which activities the partner must complete to progress. Once the accomplishments of one tier are achieved, the partner is automatically promoted to the next tier.  

You can use a combination of onboarding, partner groups, and partner tier programs to control what content your partners can access, and when. This can be managed automatically through rules that dynamically add or remove partners to segments as appropriate.

Recruit New Partners

Once you have put in place the necessary elements to manage partners, the next step is getting candidates who match that profile recruited into your channel program. 

Unifyr One allows you to recruit partners in two ways.

The first method is to promote your channel program on the logged-out side of your partner portal. Typically, you will do this by publishing pages that describe the benefits of your channel program for partners, lists your requirements for joining partners, and offering a registration form. Examples of all of these pages are provided with Unifyr One and described in the Standard Pages article.

The second method is to send prospective partners an email invitation.  This approach is described in the About Partner Invitations article.

Additionally, if you have existing partner relationships, you can import them into Unifyr One using the Manage Partner Data with Bulk Operations capability.