Reducing Effort for Better Partnerships

How understanding and minimizing unnecessary effort ensures value creation for vendors and channel partners

Successful partnerships between vendors and their channels must create value for everyone involved. That’s the core premise of the Value-Based Partnerships Strategy that I have mentioned in previous articles.

After sharing a simple yet powerful way to determine the right margin to share with partners and a tool to design successful partnerships, the Value-Based Partnerships Strategy Canvas, now comes the time to talk about Effort.

High effort levels often reduce channel partner engagement and satisfaction, which negatively impacts the value generated by the partnership.

In this article, we are going to explore practical examples of the effort that partners need to dedicate to generate value from a relationship with a vendor, and how that can be addressed in order to design a successful value-based partnerships strategy.

What is Effort?

We understand effort as the activities that are needed to create value for those involved in a partnership. Some of it will be positive, improving the chances of success, but too much effort will decrease that value substantially.

There are other names that are often used to describe this concept, like friction or barriers, that, in my opinion, are limited and don’t consider everything that a channel partner must go through in order to generate value from the partnership with a vendor.

When a channel partner starts to work with a particular vendor, there’s effort, which includes the time and resources that need to be dedicated to:

• Be onboarded and enabled by the vendor to sell and support their solution

• Reach out to potential customers and motivate them to purchase the product

• Convert prospects into paying customers of the solutions from the vendor

• Support the customers during the implementation and usage of the product

Each one of these stages in the partner and customer lifecycles requires channel partners to invest in the relationship with the vendor in order to generate profit from it. The higher the effort, the lower the value they will capture from the relationship, and vice versa.

Onboarding and Enablement

This is the initial productive phase in the lifecycle of a vendor and channel partner relationship where the vendor systematically integrates the channel partner into its ecosystem.

The Onboarding and Enablement stage focuses on equipping the partner with the necessary tools, knowledge, resources, and support to effectively market, sell, and deliver the vendor’s products or services.

At least, that’s the general understanding of this stage. Little is often said about an important fact: that the onboarding also works the other way around. The channel partner needs to adjust their processes and systems to incorporate the new vendor into their portfolio.

The channel partner then needs to invest time and resources — effort — in learning the vendor’s products and getting their organization ready to sell and support them. All of this is an investment both parties make in each other, without any tangible return yet.

This stage is the most important in the relationship between vendor and channel partner, setting up the partnership for potential success or immediate failure.

Onboarding programs need to be built with the above in mind. They need to be effective and efficient, avoid unnecessary complexities, and cover not only product and technology aspects but also the processes that will support the relationship in the future.

In the shortest possible time and with the lowest hassle:

• Expectations need to be clear,

• Technical Integrations (i.e., between CRMs) need to be made easy,

• Roles and Responsibilities must be explained and agreed,

• Sales, Marketing and Support topics should be reviewed.

A vendor needs to make sure that anything the onboarding program covers doesn’t require unnecessary effort from the channel partner and is tailored to their possibilities and mutual expectations.

Once the onboarding and enablement are done, the channel partner should be ready to start approaching potential customers for the vendor’s products.

Pre-Sales

The Pre-Sales stage encompasses all the activities and interactions that occur between a business and a potential customer before a purchase decision is made.

When a channel partner starts to approach new customers, they need to:

• Understand the customer’s needs,

• Demonstrate the value of the vendor’s products,

• Guide the prospects through the decision-making process.

The onboarding and enablement should have prepared them for this, giving them all the tools and knowledge they’d need, as well as clearly defining what their role would be — and the vendor’s — during every step of the process until a potential customer is converted into a paying one.

By the time channel partners start to approach potential customers, the distribution of effort between them and the vendor should be clear. Typical questions that will need to have been answered already are:

• Who is going to be the main responsible for generating leads?

• Is the channel partner expected to approach their existing customers matching a clear ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), or are they supposed to find new opportunities outside of their customer base?

• Will there be materials and tools available — like ready-to-use email templates or customizable sales decks — that will make the channel partner’s job easier?

• Will the vendor deliver Demos, Proofs of Value, and Proofs of Concept, or is the channel partner expected to do that?

The answer to each one of the above questions will determine how much effort the channel partner will need to put into converting leads into paying customers, and with that, how much they will need to invest of their time and resources in order to do so.

If the channel partner is expected to generate their own demand, prepare or adjust materials and tools, and deliver demos and POCs, their effort will be high, and the reward will need to justify that.

The more the vendor supports their channel partners during the pre-sales process, the higher the chance they will invest their time and their people in acquiring new customers.

Left to their own devices, channel partners will need to make too much effort to generate value from the relationship, which will then translate negatively into the overall value captured by the partnership.

Conversion

The moment that both vendor and channel partner have been working hard to reach: the potential customer confirms they want to purchase. Believe it or not, this is still a stage where things can be far from effortless.

Not every vendor has the most user-friendly and simple process to convert opportunities into paying customers, and that can add unnecessary work for their partners.

Expired quotes, complex contracts, unclear terms, unexpected changes in payment conditions, cumbersome systems. A step that should be as straightforward as possible can still become a nightmare.

Channel partners work with multiple vendors, and each one of them has its own processes. Unless the solution is being sold very actively by the channel partner, they will not know every little detail of the conversion step by heart.

Vendors can reduce the effort by streamlining their ordering process and making sure they are ready to assist their partners in the process. They can’t expect the channel partners to do the heavy lifting of adjusting to their systems and expectations.

When processes are too complex, the effort becomes too high, and this can be discouraging for partners, creating a bad experience with the vendor that can make them reconsider working with them, or at least, actively complain about it, affecting the vendor’s reputation.

A vendor should never underestimate the value of delivering a great experience at the moment when they should be celebrating getting a new customer rather than signing an unexpectedly long terms and conditions document.

The conversation stage needs to be as effortless as possible, following logical and simple steps, ensuring any channel partner can go through it without hassle.

Post-Sales

The customer has been finally signed, and both vendor and partner celebrating this success. Then comes the Post-Sales stage, which includes, to name a few of the many things that happen at this point:

• Customer Onboarding

• Product Delivery and Implementation

• Customer Support and Success

• Loyalty and Retention Activities

As anyone can see from the above list, there’s quite a bit of effort going on here. The first big question is: who is expected to do what during this phase? What are the responsibilities that the vendor and the partner have, and should have been agreed upon in advance?

While it’s obvious that the most advanced technical support, the kind that covers complex issues, needs to be delivered by the vendor as well as product updates, there isn’t a unique recipe for how to handle the rest of the post-sales process.

The role of the partner — as well as the tools needed to fulfill it — should have been defined during the Onboarding and Enablement phase mentioned above. However, that doesn’t mean that the effort the partner needs to dedicate to onboarding and supporting a new customer is fully clarified or justified.

The quality of the customer onboarding processes, as well as the quality of the product itself, will determine the amount of effort the partner will need to dedicate during this phase. This will have a direct impact on the amount of support the partner will need to provide during the post-sales stage as well.

The key in this stage is determining who will be primarily responsible for managing the relationship with the customer and ensuring they stay satisfied enough to continue using the product in the future.

There’s not one unique recipe for how to implement the roles of vendors and channel partners during the post-sales stage. Unless clarified in advance, there can be hidden pockets of unnecessary effort that the partner might not have anticipated when entering the relationship with the vendor.

Cumbersome implementation processes, product issues, unclear customer support or success responsibilities, and ineffective retention processes will not only have a negative effect on the vendor-partner relationship but also on customer satisfaction and their continued use of the product.

This is a stage in the customer lifecycle where both the vendor and the partner need to work together, with clear roles and responsibilities, to maximize the customer lifecycle value by reducing the likelihood of churn and focusing on up-selling and cross-selling when possible.

Something that vendors don’t often take into consideration during this phase is that partners will most likely not only be selling their products to their customers, but also solutions from other vendors, so issues could have a higher impact on the partner’s business than on the vendor’s.

Reducing the Channel Partner’s Effort

Considering what we have been discussing so far, reducing the channel partner’s effort is key for vendors to ensure successful partnerships that generate value for everyone, as well as satisfy and delight their customers.

Vendors need to design their partner programs, processes, and activities well in advance of starting any engagement with the channel, and do it in a way that makes the roles of each party very clear when it comes to their involvement during the customer lifecycle stages.

That initial definition of who is expected to do what will already reduce the partners’ effort, so they aren’t left wondering along the way or encountering unexpected issues.

Then, depending on the stage, there are different strategies that vendors can implement, which will depend on how they are planning to work with partners. There is not one way to reduce effort for each stage, as it will depend on how the roles are defined.

The most important thing is to understand that channel partners are all different, they work in diverse ways, and support a variety of other products. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

There are, however, activities that vendors should carry out to ensure they are aware of what topics are causing unnecessary effort for their channel partners, such as:

• Regular, Clear, and Concise Communication that focuses on what partners need to know in order to fulfill their role and understand the vendor’s products.

• Partner Check-ins and Reviews that are not only focused on reviewing performance but also on sharing insights, addressing challenges, and identifying opportunities for growth and collaboration.

• Partner Communities where they can share best practices, success stories, and collaborate, with the vendor involved enough to ensure there is the right level of engagement.

• Partner Satisfaction Programs where the vendor is regularly assessing the satisfaction of their channel and collecting feedback on how the relationship can be improved and the effort reduced.

• Partner Advisory Boards that aren’t focused only on the partners with the highest sales, but represent the different types of organizations the vendors work with.

The above will help vendors to understand their channel partners better and identify where there’s unnecessary effort that must be reduced to generate more value for everyone.

Reducing effort — and friction — for their channel partners requires involved vendors who understand that the value captured by the relationship will increase as long as the partners can thrive and don’t waste unnecessary time and resources.

Well-structured partnerships will enable a vendor to scale and reach segments and territories that would otherwise take too much effort. To make them successful, the channel partners need to see their effort transforming into results, and vendors will win more as long as their partners do as well.

---

For more on Value-Based Partnerships Strategy, check out the free e-book. If you have done so already and want to start applying its principles, you can use the free Miro board that will guide you through the steps to create strategies that generate value for everyone involved.

In the next article, we will explore the third key element to designing partnerships that create value for everyone involved: Delight. Stay tuned for more.