As a channel leader, it’s imperative to ensure that your partner managers focus on the right activities, those that fuel the long-term growth and sustainability of your partner ecosystem.
Of course, achieving long-term success hinges on meeting your short- to mid-term channel goals. But if your partner managers are perpetually caught up in handling emergencies and low-value tasks, it’s a clear sign that something in your processes needs attention and improvement.
The Challenge: Administrative Overload
Without proper support processes, partner managers may find themselves bogged down by daily support requests and escalations. Partners invest heavily in their relationships with vendors and expect timely assistance with tasks such as onboarding new team members, managing lead or deal registrations, obtaining quotes for RFPs, and more. While these tasks are important, they can consume valuable time that partner managers could otherwise dedicate to strategic initiatives.
Assessing the Situation: Conduct a Time Allocation Survey
To gain a clear understanding of how your team spends their time, consider conducting a survey that captures the hours dedicated to various activities during a typical week:
- Strategic Planning: Business planning sessions, business reviews, meetings with partner leadership.
- Marketing Collaboration: Marketing planning, joint campaigns, management of marketing development funds.
- Sales Engagement: Pipeline reviews, account planning, co-selling facilitation.
- Support Requests: Assistance with quoting, deal registrations, lead management.
- Administrative Tasks: Managing user access to portals, e-learning platforms, billing systems.
- Internal Meetings
- Other Activities: An open field to capture unforeseen tasks that may impact productivity.
Implementing Automation: A Path to Efficiency
Introducing automation tools can significantly reduce the administrative burden on partner managers. According to Forrester Research, channel managers can save up to 15-20% of their time through the use of partner automation tools, allowing them to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives such as partner recruitment and relationship-building.
Automation can streamline processes such as:
- Lead / deal registrations: the partner should be able to submit these autonomously and they should be forwarded to the right people in your sales org, with clear processes and reminders for follow-up.
- Deal management: automated notifications about deal developments can keep account teams, partners and partner managers informed without manual tracking.
- Renewals: automatically notifying partners about upcoming renewals and cross/up-selling opportunities.
- Access provisioning: ensuring admin users at your partner’s organization can enroll new users to the partner portal, e-learning platform, or any other systems they might need.
By leveraging automation, you can enhance efficiency, increase partner engagement, and improve collaboration within your partner ecosystem.
Conclusion: Empowering Partner Managers for Strategic Impact
By assessing time allocation and implementing automation, you can free your partner managers from routine administrative tasks, enabling them to concentrate on strategic activities that drive growth.
This shift not only enhances the effectiveness of your partner program but also contributes to the overall success of your organization.
For more insights on optimizing partner relationships, consider our consulting solutions here.