Out with the new

Recruiting new partners should not be a bigger focus than building up existing relationships, argues Mike Morgan

Analysis by Aberdeen Group suggests that 52 per cent of top vendors are deploying strategies around partner recruitment.

Thirty-eight per cent are focused on growing business through existing partners and 28 per cent have a strategy for empowering their most successful partners.

It is far easier and arguably more important to retain, develop and use existing business relationships, whether customers or partners than create new ones.

The truth is that many vendors with large, two-tier indirect channels don’t know or don’t care about 80 per cent of their partner community.

Also, partner recruitment is comparatively easy to do; results can be immediate, easily quantifiable and implementation relies upon basic marketing principles.

Yet holistic partner relationship management is complex and requires different skills, expertise, infrastructure and business processes.

In the IT industry it is not uncommon to see anything up to 95 per cent of vendor sales coming from as little as five per cent of the partner base.

Are resellers really that bad?

Either the top partners are exceptionally large, exceptionally good or they’re selling exclusively for the vendor and the rest are exceptionally small, exceptionally bad or they’re selling for the competition.

Or perhaps, could it be that the vendor has failed to exploit the potential of the vast majority of their partner community?

When pressure mounts to grow channel revenues, the easy option is always to recruit rather than develop in the hope of finding a few more ‘gold’ partners.

Before embarking on a recruitment campaign, vendors must plan for the aftermath.

All too often channel partners tell me the same thing: “The vendor spent a great deal of time, effort and money recruiting me and then…nothing!”

Unless a vendor has a partner relationship management strategy and the means to implement it, they can not manage the partner lifecycle.

If they fail to work well with a new partner, the reseller probably won’t perform well and most will join the 80 per cent under-achiever group.

Thus in twelve months time, vendors will be recruiting again.

For a vendor, trying to find a handful of potential top performers can be like seeking a needle in a haystack and if they know about such partners already, the chances are they will be working with the competition and will be hard to convert.

Vendors need more information

Many factors influence the success of a partner strategy. Yet a common theme is a lack of data upon which to base key business decisions.

Many vendors simply do not have enough intelligence on their partners and if a vendor lacks essential information about their actual and potential partner network, it will be impossible for them to begin to formulate a cohesive partner program that will facilitate the partner lifecycle and take advantage of partners’ capabilities.

Yet time and time again, we encounter vendors trying to do just that.

Even when such data does exist, vendors are often restricted by the lack of accessibility to and holistic visibility of the data for the people in that organisation who need it because the data rarely resides in one place and in a consistent format.

Vendors need to put information at the heart of their partner strategy – and develop the right combination of reliable systems, processes and procedures to capture, manage, share and use that data.

Then they will:
Recruit and retain the right partners more easily
Communicate and build relationships with them more effectively
Develop them to their true potential
Support them to a highest standard at the lowest possible cost
Manage them to ensure that business goals are achieved.

If vendors got things right with their existing partners, they might not need to recruit new ones after all.

Mike Morgan is COO at partner relationship software provider Foundation Network Limited