Insights and Musings: The Evolution of Partner Coverage

I’ve been looking recently at how companies are covering their partner bases, what their plans and desires are, and how these are developing. This is not by any means a ‘structured survey’ of what’s happening but more musings and possible insights, as I’ve been having these conversations with clients, from a perspective of ‘many years’ in channels, and before that ‘many years’ in software sales. I welcome your insights and thoughts if after reading you have an additional point of view. Well, here goes.

“Yesterday”

When I first got involved in managing channels ‘many years ago’ the level of sophistication was all around what kind of resource to align to different types and size of partners. Who would cover which segment and how, and how were segments defined? What other resources, from distribution or vendor desks would also cover these partners?

• How many ‘top-level’ partners could a face-to-face Partner Account Manager (let’s call him or her a PAM) manage? "Three or four significant and active partners with growth plans" seemed to be the answer, at least for selling complex software solutions with services elements. Perhaps a few more for standardized hardware sales. And was their job to drive ‘transactions’ or facilitating partner business growth, or both? They most certainly had to ‘do admin’ to help partners engage with vendor’s tools and processes to show sales and marketing value.

• How many mid-tier partners could be managed by a Tele Partner Account Manager (shall we say TPAM?), in complex or simple sales, and again were they driving business growth or facilitating transactions or both? My recollections going back here were 10-20 or 20-50 depending on territory, complexity and so on. This is also where the questions of tools and techniques for management became big discussions: TPAMs needed to assess level of engagement and outcomes on a much greater scale (by volume and complexity) than PAMs.

• What about the role of distribution? Should the ‘top’ partners be managed and fulfilled directly, and the ‘mid-tier’ be fulfilled through distribution? Did distribution have a role to play in managing partners? My musings on this at the time (and still today) are that where a vendor uses distribution, all fulfillment should be through distribution. Distribution may also facilitate sales transactions. If a vendor wants distribution to proactively cover mid-tier then this needs to be driven, funded (by rebates) and seeded (by funds). I have seen these models work, but usually only at a transactional and territory level not complex sales and marketing.

• And what about marketing coverage? This was always the most mixed and contentious in my experience!

• In the ‘old days’ partner marketing was the poor child of ‘marketing’ campaigns and content had to be taken and reshaped to ‘fit’ the channel. Early outcomes were materials that sold ‘to’ the partners or perhaps could be taken (by then or channel marketing) and recrafted to sell to partners’ customers. Marketing ‘through’ partners began to develop with better aligned content, content-syndication, and of course marketing funded programs and campaigns (from MDF), though to be honest some of these were fairly simplistic and relied more on co-funding outreach to a partner’s customer-list.

• Marketing concierge services came into play to cover the mid-tier of partners and some parts of the long tail. The successful ones were sometimes also ‘dragged up’ into dealing with the bottom of the top tier of partners. These services had access to all the tools the client had available, and often were part of the ‘push’ for better tools and techniques. Managing the bottom of the ‘long tail’ was always a challenge and left out of scope.

“Today”

To be honest, I don’t think the coverage model and deployment of sales resources has changed significantly over recent years – though I am happy to be challenged on this. What I do see is the marketing coverage, lead-generation and sales model itself is changing – though each of these are changing at different rates. Drivers for these changes include the moves vendors are making to digital marketing and digital transformation of their routes to market, meaning more marketing engagement can be made and there is a different expectation on sales engagement. It’s still a subtle shift being talked to in the market but the outcomes become more significant in terms of marketing coverage, tools and techniques, and sales expectations.

The outcomes I’m beginning to see and sense are:

• Top Tier and Mid-Tier PAM and TAM coverage: This model hasn’t changed significantly, except that it is better informed (or strives to be) by business intelligence. Looking for “who are the best partners to engage with for sales outcomes, driven by marketing engage?” The sales model is becoming more of a hybrid business manager using sales and marketing resources to invest in these best partners, and to help them in the last stages of sales transactions. However, these ‘sales models’ must be fed , and this is increasingly where marketing is taking ownership.

• Marketing Coverage: Partner Marketing appears more closely linked to driving these tiers of partners to all be more marketing self-sufficient. The marketing-coverage model is more consistent across ‘top-level’ and ‘mid-tier’ partners and even potentially gets into top parts of the log tail.

• Tools and techniques are being put in place. Platforms are being talked about that will allow partners to be an extension of the Vendors’ marketing engine sand sales footprint.

• Vendors see the need to have ‘all marketing initiated partner-generated leads and activities captured end-to-end and assessed’ in terms of marketing-led through-partner ROI.

• Their aspiration is to capture all of this in a ‘dashboard’, to assess from a marketing point of view what value they deliver to the ecosystem and what ROI they gain from marketing through their channel

• What are the coverage outcomes seen? Again from my perception I see clients and vendors seeking to cover top tier in a more focused manner with discrete resources, and marketing-aligned planning. The mid-tier also uses this same marketing-aligned planning. The tool sets and processes are still largely discrete not connected, but there is growing awareness of the need to move from ‘silos’ to ‘interconnected’ channel management. The vision is the management coverage can be more extensive (Revenue Growth) OR that there will be more outcomes from these existing management coverage models (Stronger ROI).

"Tomorrow"

And yet there is still a gap to close: The outcomes from significant investment in platforms and integrated tools to drive more from the same or more from more are still not clear in conversations I have had with clients. This is a developing area and needs watching. There are references being brought forward by platform companies, but vendors are still waiting – at least in complex technology channels – to be bought over with the ease of use and delivery of desired outcomes. Concepts are good but use cases in similar environments are lacking, especially for ROI on scaling coverage, reach and range. I’m sure this gap will close soon.

What is clear is more vendors desire to see what their value and impact on their partner landscape is: marketing efforts that drive more partner proximity and generate more marketing-led outcomes, and sales efforts that drive more partner-sales footprint.

Knowing what the ‘partner ecosystem’ looks like today from a dashboard helps inform the investments needed and coverage models required for channel marketing success (forward view). Repeating the exercise helps show the return on marketing investment (rear view mirror) to allow tighter alignment and new investment cases. This is an exercise several clients are undertaking whilst in parallel aligning their tools, operational process and building platforms across their silos.

bChannels has extensive experience and real-case examples on building partner landscapes, partner marketing dashboards. We can help you both look in the ‘rear view mirror’ and build a forward-plan to ensure recognize marketing investment for success.

More articles on partner landscape and partner dashboards coming soon. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on bChannels' most recent articles and insights.

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