September 9th, 2003

Partnerships represent a quick and easy way to dramatically expand your market reach. Hold a few seminars, sign up some partners, ship them some product and head off on the quota buster trip. Right?

Wrong!

The work begins after the contract is signed

In my experience, the work begins after the partner is signed. Back in the 1995, I joined an Internet startup and after doing some brainstorming with the head of sales about our partner strategy, I took on the job of building our partner program. Five weeks later I not only had the basics of a partner program in place, but I had managed to get 150 prospective resellers to a presentation at a hotel ballroom in NYC. The team worked hard to coordinate our activities with PC Expo, a major trade show, and I was pleased with the showing.

After the presentation, a number of resellers approached me with the unexpected question of "now what?" I didn't have much of an answer. In our rush to get to the event, we had not given much thought to the steps that should follow!

Attracting and signing partners is easy. Just make them promises about your wonderful partner program and all the leads they'll receive as soon as they pay the initiation fee. They'll flock like lemmings to the sea!

Enabling Partners

But enabling partners - empowering them to generate significant revenue with your products or services - is hard work.

And this work must continue for as long as the relationship is active.

Hmm...work...relationship...active. That sure makes sense! You wouldn't expect the relationship to be successful if you stopped putting in an effort!

Many companies dramatically underestimate the amount of time and effort it takes to build an effective, profitable partner program. Most assign one or two people to build the program, recruit, manage and train partners, and expect to reap the benefits in a short six months.

Success

To be successful, the work...and I do mean work...falls into four major categories:

• Identifying the opportunity for partners and understanding your unique value proposition for them. Hint - it's not what you think it is and it sure isn't the value proposition that works for your direct end customers.
• Developing a good basic set of partner programs
• Selecting and recruiting the "best partners"
• Working with the top 20% of these to help them generate more revenue

While most companies spend 75% of their energy and budget on recruiting, you can get a far larger payoff by focusing on getting the value proposition right and in working with a select few partners.

Here's the bottom line - a good partner program takes at least two years to establish. And it takes a well defined process of engagement to ensure that the relationship is profitable for both parties.

Thanks for reading!