Large vendors with significant market share and recognized brands have the luxury of attracting new partners with almost no effort, almost organically. The challenge for them is to ensure they stay relevant to current partners, filter through the noise of bad applicants who don’t match the desired profile (how they want their channel to evolve), and spot the “diamonds in the rough” that appear from time to time. In addition—of course—they must strengthen ties with the largest ones, especially top consulting firms and regional-to-global system integrators.

Small vendors don’t have this luxury. Nobody will knock at their door, and trust me—I have been there! If you are at this stage—the ground floor, so to speak—you need a solid strategy.

The Strategy

The strategy itself is built on several pillars:

• An attractive partner program
• Tools and processes: training, support, lead registration, ordering (if reselling is an option)
• An effective partner recruitment campaign

Partner Program: The “No-Brainer” Test

One of the first partners I pitched to was an ISV that had launched a payment solution for fuel cards, making it very easy to refuel at a discount for company fleet users. It was a particularly good fit alongside our CRM software at the time. However, one of the reasons we didn’t end up signing this particular partner was that our partner program, in its early version, was simply not attractive enough.

I remember speaking to the CEO of that company. One day, he told me something along these lines:

Joining your program should be a no-brainer for your partners, and I feel like it’s not.

The first partners you recruit will make an investment of time to learn how to work with you, your products, and how to integrate them with their solutions and service offerings. This comes at a cost, and on the other side, there is the risk it won’t work out, and the company will just decide to shut it down after a few months. You either have a no-brainer proposition, or you won’t get much traction.

This doesn’t only mean offering competitive financial incentives, such as discounts or rebates, but also showing how your partnership helps partners win more customers or increase revenue per customer. There should also be a clear commitment to supporting your early partners’ growth: co-selling, co-marketing, lead sharing—these should all be on the menu.

You might also like: Top reasons why your partner program is not working and how to fix it

Remember that if done correctly, partners will align their own sales, marketing, delivery, customer success, and support resources with your commercial strategy. Even under very competitive financial incentives (which you will need to commit to in most cases), it will still be a much faster way to scale up your revenue without a proportional increase in fixed costs. We will address partner program economics in another post for more details.

Tools and Processes: Simple and Effective

Trying to recruit partners before having at least the following is extremely risky: your effort to recruit new partners will inevitably clash with the lack of any supporting tools and processes. This is where you should be investing your time and attention initially – it will pay off:

• Partner training: Up-to-date courses and documentation covering key sales and technical topics, with the possibility to track progress for each partner user. Partners will need to take resources off profitable projects to do this, so be respectful of their time and make it useful.
• Partner support: A simple way for partners to submit their issues, requests, and questions, with a clear Service Level Agreement (SLA).
• Quoting/Ordering: If your program involves reselling, it must be quick and easy for partners to get a quote, potentially extend it, and finally place an order.
• Lead sharing: Most programs will have some kind of lead registration process, but it can go both ways. The vendor should also look into feeding leads to partners to benefit from outsourcing service delivery and focusing on product leadership.

The fastest way to implement the above is usually through dedicated Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software. More on this in the future.

Partner Recruitment

Once you have an attractive partner program with a no-brainer proposition for prospective partners, and a few systems in place to ensure they land smoothly after they sign up, it’s time to launch an actual partner recruitment campaign.

We want to get some early traction, but we also don’t want to outgrow our partner management bandwidth and put our first partners in competition with each other – at least, not too much.

The process involves:

• Defining a clear target partner profile and the target personas we will need to address
• Building an online section of the website promoting the partner program with clear calls to action
• Using social media (LinkedIn) and search engine ads to put it in front of the right audience
• Actively reaching out to the most interesting prospects in each territory
• Pitching the partnership, removing blockers, and signing partners
• Onboarding partners, making sure they sign a plan, get basic enablement, and collaborate

Partner Hunting: The Art of Recruitment

Partner hunting is an art that requires a special kind of profile. As discussed here, companies just starting to implement a partner strategy won’t necessarily have the chance to employ a dedicated partner development manager. Regardless, whoever is tasked with recruiting new partners will need a few qualities:

• An understanding of your software offering and key use cases
• An understanding of the partners’ business model, their professional services, solutions, and how your software will allow them to extend or introduce new ones or penetrate new markets
• The capability to address at least some basic technical questions, especially those related to integration (example: what kind of APIs are exposed for partners to use, etc.)
• Networking skills and a “go-getter” attitude
• The ability to listen and find creative ways to position joint value propositions

---

Are you a mid-sized software vendor looking to recruit your first partners? We can help! Click here for info.