Which Channel Partners Should I Invest In? Download Partner Scorecards.
Invest in the Right Channel Partners for Your Business With Existing & Recruit Partner Scorecards
Partnering is an art. It takes a great deal of time, money, and effort to grow a lasting and successful partnership. Channel partners are not born overnight.
For this reason, it’s extremely important to ensure you are not haphazardly spending valuable time recruiting and nurturing the wrong partner. All of this brings us to the golden question: How do you know which partner is right one for your business?
There’s two critical use cases when it comes to analyzing which partners are worth your team’s time and energy:
Recruiting net new partners:
It can be overwhelming figuring out where to start on your partner recruitment journey, but the key to making partners your competitive advantage is ensuring that you put in the appropriate work upfront to recruit the right partners for your business. Leverage Insight's Partner Recruit Scorecard to put some structure around your recruitment process and ultimately make the most out of your efforts. Every business is different, and therefore so are your needs. Be sure to customize the criteria as you see fit.
Evaluating existing partners:
Likewise, regularly assessing your existing partners is crucial. We would recommend leveraging both an outward-facing tiered program that delineates requirements (along with benefits) for each partner level as well as an inward-facing Existing Partner Scorecard. We would recommend investing in an internal assessment exercise at least bi-annually and potentially quarterly when just starting out.
As for your external-facing partner program requirements, we would recommend updating those with promotions and demotions based on requirement meetings annually. This way, partners can continually self-assess and understand where they stand. It’s always a good idea to give them a heads up if they are close to meeting a key requirement for promotion but aren’t quite there yet (likewise for demotion).
Keep in mind, your program requirements should span beyond sales. You should include key partnership growth elements, such as enablement certifications, co-marketing participation, and investment in joint GTM strategy and IP creation. Just like the Partner Recruit Scorecard, be sure to customize the Existing Partner Scorecard to your current business needs.