Do you feel as though your partners are not as engaged as they could be? If so then you will know how frustrating this can be. You may feel as though you are doing everything you can to try and keep them interested but somehow things aren’t working in your favor. If this is the case then take a look below to get some top hints and tips.
Why is Partner Engagement Important?
Partner engagement is so important because if your partners are not engaged then this means that they are not putting in their best work, so you aren’t able to capitalise on the best results.
How Can Employee Selection Help Employee Engagement?
By choosing the right partners to work with, you can eliminate any growing pains from the get-go.
How do you Establish a new Working Relationship?
Making sure that your partners understand the vision that you have is very important. If you can get them onboard then this will help you to ensure the best result when it comes to your sales platform.
Keeping your Partners Engaged
Remember, just because your partners are not logging onto your portal, this doesn’t mean that they are not engaged. Companies work with over 20 other vendors on average and this means that they are not able to log into your portal all the time. Can they?
The truth is that actually, they can. Measuring what a partner is up to in the background, when they are not logged into your systems is crucial but at the same time it is incredibly difficult. Unless you are carrying out everyday calls with them then you may never be able to achieve this. The problem here is that this is as bad as micromanaging and it will stop you from being as productive as you could be over the long term. Having weekly check-ins at the beginning of the relationship can help you to maintain the general flow of your business and it can also help with the deal flow as well. If you try and do anything more than calling your partners weekly then this could be working against you.
Why Do New Hires Leave?
Did you know that on average, around 50% of new hires tend to fail within the first year and a half? This relates to those who choose to employ directly through their own company. If you look at things a little deeper here then you will be able to see what happens when you go ahead and create a partnership It is vital to know that this partnership is only ever going to succeed if there is some kind of mutual benefit involved. Every party will be working for free until the fruits of the labor they are putting in, become apparent. The issue is that employee failure rates tend to be high even with the employee being widely compensated for the work that they are putting in. If you take away any form of compensation then you may find that even more partners end up failing in the first 18 months and this is not what you want. The fact of the matter is that only 1 out of every 5 parters that you choose to hire will succeed. The fact that only one out of five will succeed, doesn’t mean that you let go of the other four. A lot of companies often say that they have 1,000 partners who are working with them but only 100 of them are doing much. This is around a 10% activation rate. This isn’t actually bad when you look at the grand scheme of things.
How to Be Successful
If you want to rocket your chances of being successful with your partners then you need to try and make sure that you look into lead distribution and also selling. Segment some of your leads so that you can explore them with new partner activations. You also need to try and work with your partner in unison so that they then feel confident with their own ability to use your products. You will end up losing around 25% of your margin but at the end of the day, you will end up with a team who are motivated and who have transacted in the first 3 months. This means that they are very likely to transact again if you do the math. The aim here is to ultimately make sure that every partner you have is transacting as soon as possible.
If possible you need to try and allocate some kind of seed fund for all of your marketing and your development funds. It may be that actually, you don’t have anywhere near enough leads to really push your partners and work with them. In this instance, what you can do is try and explore the idea of seed funding for your marketing so you can use this with your new partners who are coming in through co-marketing you can then do a split of 50/50 so you know that both sides are investing. This will generate leads that can easily be worked by your partners and it also shows them that you are willing and able to invest.
The Right Structure
Another thing that you have to make sure that you get right is having the right structure. You have to make sure that the vendor supports them when it is needed the most. If you do not have the right support then the partner may well end up feeling a bit unconfident about whatever it is they are doing, and what it is they need to do. If you have a partner support system then this will eliminate a lot of the issues and it will also mean that access to resources and even training can be done without friction. By doing this, you will surely see a huge boost in your partner engagement while also ensuring that things run smoothly for your company.