More Partners Or More From The Same Partners?

The mechanics of ‘propensity to buy/buy more’

I’ve written before (Partner Recruitment Basics - Starting off Right) about starting off right when it comes to recruiting partners. Once you know why you are recruiting, and that you need new partners to do so, how do you figure out who is worth investing time in to nurture, onboard and recruit?

The nature of recruitment is that should always be a mix of recruiting net-new partners and re-recruiting selected existing partners. If you follow our Recruitment Basics as part of any recruitment exercise, then you’ll have an idea of who could do more from your existing partner base. You can apply the same process when it comes to new partners also. And you can do both in the same exercise, saving time and effort particularly when recruiting at scale. We call the outcome of this process understanding the Propensity to Buy or Buy More.

The Attractiveness Index

When it comes to assessing this Propensity, we can think of it as a measure of how attractive a partner is to us – and very importantly, us to them. Let’s call that their Attractiveness Index. The higher the attractiveness, the higher the propensity and likelihood that any conversation will have a positive outcome. Adopting a scorecard to create this Index, and applying it consistently across your partner base can pay dividends when it comes to assessing partners current and future objectively, consistently and at scale. There are three main elements to cover:

• Partner Reach – what coverage does a partner offer you into the areas you need?

• Partner Capability – what skills (technical, sales, marketing) does the partner offer?

• Partner Affinity – what is the appetite of the partner to work with you?

Who Makes The Cut?

Attempting to create a full scorecard for every partner is a difficult mission. Conducting a full assessment takes time. Appetite is best assessed by talking to the partner. Calling is expensive and is inefficient if not targeted. So how do we go about this sensibly?

The best approach is to think of your recruitment (and ‘re-recruitment) in the same way as your sales or marketing opportunity pipeline. At each stage, a partner becomes better qualified, with only the best potential partners making the final cut. Earlier cuts can be made against broader criteria.

‘Rule of Three’

In our recruitment and re-recruitment work, we use cuts at three stages.

A first cut can be made on a few simple stop/go criteria. At this stage we qualify out those partners with whom we know there can be no future conversation, at least for this exercise. We use criteria that we know we can capture consistently and without need for complex research or conversation.

For example, for existing partners we can use sales out analysis to give us an idea of partners who are growing revenue AND are showing loyalty by buying frequently. If our goal is to develop partners who clearly are growing or want to grow, then we can exclude any partner who buy only occasionally and/or are not exhibiting sales growth. For net-new partners, we could opt to understand who works with our strongest competitors and exclude them immediately, recognising that there are easier opportunities to go after first.

The second cut is then a smaller group of partners who we seek to qualify in. We continue to use our scorecard, this time extending our research to look at what the partner does, how they position themselves to customers and what scale they might offer us. We then rank those partners based on scorecard performance, and can prioritise those who offer best opportunity. We might take all partners into our final exercise, or if we have a big enough list, only some.

Our final cut is then done once we have assessed the partner appetite. We now have a good picture of the partner and can engage in intelligent questioning based on our understanding of where our channel value proposition may fit in their business. We can add this into our scorecard to produce our final Attractiveness Index, with handling of partners appropriate to their Propensity to Buy or Buy More – those for now (recruit), those for later (nurture), and those who are negative today (educate). Nothing is wasted.

Every Conversation Has Value

A final note. It’s important to recognise that even with a robust approach, there is no guarantee a partner will say ‘yes’. Your proposition may not be as strong as you think. Yet you’ve made the effort to identify that partner as having potential. Don’t throw these outcomes away. Follow up with those who say ‘no’ is every bit as important, continuing to educate and nurture until they are ready to take that next step.

bChannels exists to inspire, guide and grow our customers’ partner networks. We use a scorecard methodology to evaluate current and potential new partners built on over 15 years experience. We’re recruiting partners both at volume for large businesses down to in-depth analysis to find best fit partners for smaller vendors to establish a footprint in new territories. And nurturing them for the future as well. We recruit in every major region around the globe using local speakers based in region. Read more at http://www.bchannels.com/inspire

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