Optimize Partner Recruitment & On- · PDF fileOptimize Partner Recruitment & On-Boarding The Quick Guide to Partner Recruitment & On-Boarding QUICK GUIDE . #channelchoices The Relayware

Optimize Partner Recruitment & On-Boarding

The Quick Guide to Partner

Recruitment & On-Boarding

Q UICK G UIDE

#channelchoices The Relayware Quick Guide to Partner Recruitment & On-Boarding 2

INTRODUCTION

Recruiting the right channel partners for your business is not always the easiest of tasks. It can take a lot of time, thought and effort to get it right. And, once you’ve worked hard to recruit, you need your partners to maximize their sales potential and indeed want to sell your products / services above those of your competition. But where do you start?

This quick guide will help you plan and navigate your way through your partner recruitment campaign, while offering best practice for your essential on-boarding strategy, allowing you to get it right first time:

1. Channel Programs as a Differentiator2. Your Recruitment Campaign Defined3. Best Practice Partner On-Boarding4. On a Last Note

“Today, indirect channel programs themselves have to be the differentiator, to motivate partners to work with you, rather than your competitors”


1. Channel Programs as a Differentiator

Do you remember those days when companies were able to throw together a few deliverables that were cheap and easy to assemble, dress them up with a logo and brand name and get buy in? Times have changed, business is now more challenging then ever. It was fine when the market was less crowded, less competitive and companies could differentiate themselves through their unique technology. But in the age of technology commoditization and convergence most are now lacking the means to compel their indirect channels to work with them simply because their product is the best or the only one available.

In this day and age, channel programs themselves have to be the differentiator and through them, a company needs to convey actions as well as words that motivate indirect channels to work with them rather than their competitors.

In essence, your partners want to hear that you will:

• Develop products or services that are superior to your competitors

• Create a desire within your mutual customers to buy new products / services orupgrade from existing ones

• Invest in demand generation

• Score them

• Make customers receptive to buying your products and your brand

• Direct customers their way

• Direct them to potential customers

• Minimize channel conflict

• Provide the necessary information, education, tools and resources to assist yourindirect channels in marketing, selling and if necessary supporting your products

• Ensure that the sale of your products / services will prove to be a profitableenterprise

• Make it easy for channel partners to augment your product / services offeringwith complimentary products and value added services


• Ensure your products / services deliver on their promise, that they are ofmerchantable quality and reliability and encourage repeat purchases

• Throughout, be easy to do business with and treat your channels with integrityand respect

A company needs to convey actions as well as words that motivate their channel to work with them out of preference.

• Facilitate collaboration between you and your channels and among yourchannel communities

• Communicate with them when, how and how often they choose to becommunicated with

• Provide easy access to the information, tools and resources they need to besuccessful

The above constitutes your program value proposition. As you can imagine, many of these expectations depend on having a great product, but that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact if you get the other elements of your value proposition right and implement them better than you competitors, it is possible to have inferior products / services but a far more dedicated and motivated channel then they do.

At this point there are two important principles to remember:

• The best recruitment campaign in the world will fail if your partner program isnot compelling

• The notion of ‘build it and they will come’ – having the best program but failingto market it and proactively and systematically drive recruitment will also fail


2. Your Recruitment Campaign Defined

OK, let’s get down to it. You need to recruit your channel partners like you would a member

of your own company or team. Think like a hiring manager. Any other approach would be

limiting. You need to start by documenting the following:

• What’s the purpose of creating this role?

• What’s the context to the appointment?

• What are the goals of hiring this individual (fiscal or otherwise)?

• What resources are to be made available to the individual to assist them in

achieving their goals?

• Which target markets or customer segments will they focus on?

• Who will they report to?

• How will their performance be monitored and reviewed?

• How will good performance be rewarded and poor performance addressed?

• What will compensation and benefits look like?

• By what contractual obligations will the employer and employee be bound?

• Why should the candidate join you instead of another company?

You also need, of course, to establish a candidate profile and a brief to the recruiter. Spending time thinking all this through will reap dividends, ensuring you recruit the right partners for your channel.

Equally, you should not embark on a partner recruitment campaign without ensuring that you are clear on all of the following points:

• Why are you looking to recruit new channel partners?

• What does it mean for your existing channel ecosystem?


• What is the context for the campaign?

• What is it you want your new partners to do for you?

• What targets will be set (if any)?

• How will you establish joint business plans and ensure implementation?

• What resources will be made available to new partners to assist them in

achieving your shared goals?

• Which markets or customer segments should they be targeted upon?

• How will the indirect channel make profit from the relationship and how much?

• What other benefits are on offer?

• By what contractual obligations will the employer and employee be bound?

• How will good performance be rewarded and poor performance addressed?

• How will their performance be monitored and reviewed?

• Who will be responsible for managing the relationship? Who’s their point of

contact?

• What makes your package of offerings better than any other company with

whom you are competing for the indirect channel’s attention?

• What channels of communication will be used to drive the campaign?

Ultimately, your aim is the same – to recruit the best channel partner organizations, sales

people and marketers to work, albeit indirectly for you, to help you take your products to

market at the expense and exclusion of your competition. If you think of it this way, your

recruitment campaign will proceed with greater vigor ad purpose and both you and your

potential ‘candidates’ will have a much clearer understanding of your objectives.

Recruitment Process

Whether you adopt the ‘big bang’ approach to launching a new partner program with an

accompany public relations campaign or the more low key approach of augmenting your


existing partner-base as part of your existing program, it’s important to preface any

communication with messages reinforcing the points we have just examined. Your must

set the context of the recruitment:

• Why you are doing it

• What is will mean for you

• What it will mean for existing channel partners

• And most importantly what it will mean for and how it will benefit those

partners you are trying to recruit

Let’s now focus on creating a low cost and efficient means of inviting partners to join

you and processing their applications.

Mediums

There is no doubt that email has been the de facto standard communication medium for many years but it is in decline and also statistically weak in generating responses. Spam filters and security software have exacerbated the problem. By contrast, Social Media has exploded in popularity as a communication medium. It has a role in channel recruitment in three ways:

1. As a medium for promoting membership of your program in general terms2. As a means of viral dissemination of your program and associated value proposition3. As a means of new recruits re-messaging their participation in your program to their

own social networks

The first two can be achieved through any concerted social marketing campaigns. The latter requires the necessary social through-marketing technology such as Relayware.


Targeted Campaigns

You must remember in order to have whole companies partner with you, you must start by recruiting individuals – companies don’t form relationships with other companies – people do.

It is essential therefore that you gather accurate contact information; names, job roles, email addresses, social ID’s etc. if you are to target the right people with the right message. Sales people will have different motivations to join your program to those of a marketer or support person. You must play to these motivations effectively in your communications if you are to succeed in making your campaign above average in terms of response. This means that you will need to engage in targeted and personalized campaigns using every conceivable communication channel including online, email and social media, segmented by organization type, market focus type and job role type and so on – communicating multiple value propositions to each. This takes time and effort but the results will be worthwhile.

Communications should direct the individual ideally to an online or mobile registration point within which you can gather more information about them, populate and enrich your database, while ascertaining if your judgment in inviting them to join you was correct. The same registration point must be available via your corporate website to catch stray applications that you may not have invited or who missed your recruitment campaign first time around.

By now you will have devised your partner selection and segmentation criteria. You may now begin the process of mapping applicants against them and either approving or rejecting their application. This can be a time consuming and arduous task, which is best automated, especially if your campaign has been a broad one. Needless to say, ensure you have the necessary systems and / or business processes in place before you begin.


3. Best Practice Partner On-Boarding

Imagine for a minute that you are going on a first date with someone in which you have a vague but as of yet unqualified interest. Half way through your appetizer your date starts talking about taking a long vacation together or having children. It would leave you feeling most uncomfortable and ready to run!

Channel partner development is a lot like dating. Move to too fast, too soon and the relationship may come to an abrupt end leaving you wondering what you did wrong. Partners talk often about companies who initiated a recruitment campaign promising a commitment to a long-term strategic partnership. They committed to providing a range of benefits, information, tools and resources to help them profit from the relationship. But the minute they expressed their interest, the company insisted on training them, certifying them, setting revenue targets and joint business planning. They want them to close poorly qualified sales leads and register deals. Incentive programs followed and meanwhile partners want to flee!

So, what is a new recruit likely to ask you?

• “I’m interested in partnering with you - what now?”

• “I may have a short-term requirement to sell your products but let’s see how

it goes”

• “I bought into your value proposition but I need to see how you deliver”

• “I like your story but let’s experience the substance”

• “I don’t like or I’m loosing interest in your competitor, can you do better?”

You get the idea. What you do in the coming weeks and months will set the tone for

the coming years. Prematurely introducing programs or initiatives that require partners

to make more commitment than they are ready to give, or which requires them to make

investments that you can’t or won’t match, may turn them off. Before channel partners


can reasonably be expect to be proactively selling or marketing your products, you need

to nurture them through a number of steps. The relationship lifecycle illustrates the

steps to consider:

• Before you can optimize indirect channel performance, you need to be able

to manage and measure performance

• Before you can manage and measure performance, you need to be able to

provide adequate service and support to facilitate it

• Before you can provide service and support for sales, marketing and

customer service activity, you need to facilitate collaboration in those and

other areas

• Before you can collaborate on sales, marketing and customer services,

partners must be sufficiently motivated and / or incentivized to work with

you

• Before you can incentivize and build loyalty with partners, you need to have

adequately developed and ‘enabled’ them to perform the tasks you require

of them

• And before you enable them, you need to recruit and then on-board them

so they feel sufficiently ready, willing and able to invest the time, money and

resources necessary

Going back to the earlier analogy of on-boarding as a courtship. A succession of small

steps taken at the partners own pace towards a close and lasting partnership in which

both parties have made a significant investment of some sort has to be the way

forward.

Really well executed on-boarding strategies work like this:

• Immediately after registration, send them portal and (if you have one)


mobile app download instructions and login credentials together with a soft

welcome pack

• Prepare your portal and mobile app so that they display welcome content

and short video tutorials on how to work with the company

• Consider a “how to use our online tools and resources” video tutorial

• Invite them to update their profile and share their own interests in the

partnership to help your targeting

• If they don’t engage immediately, be prepared to follow up very frequently

by automated time-triggered mail, push messaging and by telephone in

those early days while they still remember why they took the first step

• After the first portal or mobile visit, track their activity constantly. Applying

scoring and nurturing techniques to segment your channel base into usage /

engagement / activity-level groups and target them with communications

designed to increase activity

• Make ongoing use of time- and event-triggered communications e.g. they

did X today, so in Y days they will receive Z, using email and social updates

• Use social media to deliver short teaser messages – video clips on YouTube,

Tweets and photos on Facebook, but always take them from there to your

portal to access the full story where you can track their activity

• Introduce next steps at a pace that’s suitable to use the usage /

engagement / activity-level group

• Introduce training gently. No tests, certification or anything too onerous to

begin with. Get them used to watching short, interesting video clips of no

more than 5 minutes to wet their appetite

• Ensure that there’s a tangible benefit for them in completing any task that is

consumptive of their time and resources

• Re-enforce the partnership value proposition regularly

• Ensure that portal / mobile content is tailored not just to channel partner

organization and individual profile but to an individuals usage /


engagement / activity-level. Partners should see content that feels like it

was created for them

• Content should be designed to encourage them to take the next step in the

relationship

• Encourage them to enroll in and interact with your communities

• Keep communicating regularly with messaging and content relevant to their

usage / engagement / activity-level group designed to lead them into the

next stage of the partnership

• If they falter or appear to have lost interest, you may be moving too fast or

too slowly for them

Re-engage directly and ask them for their feedback so that you may understand what

you can do better to help them to the next level. Effective on-boarding costs time and

money. But it’s worth every penny and every moment you invest. Because if you fail to

execute well, the rest of your program will typically have an audience of less than 20%

of your channel partner base. The remainder will fall by the wayside and most likely

they will be working proactively with your competitors. Statistically, partners who are

well nurtured during the first 6 months stay with you and go on to deliver higher

performance for longer. The key to long-term success however is how well you take

the next step, enablement and development - watch out for our next ‘Quick Guide’.

You now have a model to build and execute your own successful channel partner recruitment and on-boarding campaigns. Execution and delivery are now the key to expanding your sales, growth and return on channel investment. So, don’t delay. Make it a priority to initiate change in the way you recruitment and retain your partners. We’d love to hear your success stories, so don’t forget to share!


4. On a Last Note

Relayware is a SaaS based Partnering Automation company and can help you simplify, co-

ordinate and optimize your channel partner management on many fronts, not just

recruiting and on-boarding partners. Some of the leading global companies including

Lenovo, Sony, Tata and many more deploy Relayware as their Partnering Automation

solution. So, whether you want to enhance your:

• Partner Portal• Partner Sales• Partner Marketing• Partner Training

... there's a packaged solution ready for you. And best of all, it integrates seamlessly

with your CRM system and is priced in a way that lets you choose what’s right for you right

now, yet scale as your business grows and evolves. Simply call us on 1 201 433 3331 for

more information or visit our website www.Relayware.com

Don’t forget to download your copy of “The Quick Guide to Partner Motivation” and “The

Quick Guide to Partner Engagement” below:

About Relayware

Relayware is a leading SaaS-based partnering automation company, serving hi-tech, manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services and insurance companies around the world. Providing a comprehensive range of partner-centric applications, including partner portals, training, sales and marketing packs that unlock

the key to partner productivity. Relayware delivers greater

Partner engagement, productivity and return on indirect channel investment. At the core of Relayware is the Partner Cloud, a platform for deploying and integrating the communication tools that simplify and extend partner processes beyond the enterprise.

Motivation Guide

Engagement Guide

http://www.relayware.com/Relayware-Guide-to-Channel-Partner-Motivation/

http://www.relayware.com/Relayware-Guide-to-Partner-Engagement/

Documents

Optimize Partner Recruitment & On- · PDF fileOptimize Partner Recruitment & On-Boarding The Quick Guide to Partner Recruitment & On-Boarding QUICK GUIDE . #channelchoices The Relayware