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Partner Recruitment – Where’s ‘The Catch’?

  • Tony Watkins
  • Feb 21, 2017
  • 2 min read

I have a thorny problem I wrestle with when I’m talking partner recruitment with clients. They place high expectation on us to generate quality results. If you’re paying, that’s reasonable right?

So is it also reasonable for me to have a similarly high expectation of what they do with those results when we hand them over? After all, the real ROI is what happens AFTER that initial introduction isn’t it?

Sadly, the reality is that all too often, vendors don’t figure out who is going to follow up or how, until the potential prospects are a list in an Inbox somewhere, moving further and further down the priority list with each incoming e-mail. All that effort – and marketing dollars – wasted.

Even worse, failure to create buy-in up front can result in misunderstanding of the goal, lack of engagement during the process and in recipients of prospects not knowing what to do with those lists. They do not know why or if they even meet their specific requirement ‘in-country’, versus what was felt to be needed at regional or even global level.

So why does it go wrong? It’s what a colleague of mine calls ‘The Catch’. Or rather the lack of one. It’s a failure to have in place the right people, resources and processes to ensure that any partner recruitment exercise has the buy in to make it essential to the success of the channel plan and not a standalone activity. It’s rushing to execute on activity assuming prospect handover is the end point. It’s not thinking about who else needs to be involved to ensure a successful follow up.

No ‘catch’ and however good the work we’ve done, it won’t go anywhere. And that bothers me. A lot. It makes me angry to see precious marketing spend squandered on a poorly thought through initiative.

All of this seems a fairly damning view of an industry that pays my mortgage. So why am I risking being outspoken? Simple, I care very deeply that every recruitment exercise we do has life beyond the project and delivers great results for the customer. If it doesn’t, there’s a very real possibility that it’s down to the lack of ‘The Catch’. And with our involvement tied to the success of what happens after our handover, I’d rather you save your money than us risk our reputation and damage a client relationship.

This is not an ask. It is an impassioned plea to anyone ever asked to embark on a recruitment exercise. Get buy in from every stakeholder before you start. I want to give you great results. And I want you to do great things with them.

Remember this. Next time you recruit remember to ask ‘Where’s The Catch?’ before you start. Successful recruitment is every bit your responsibility as it is mine.

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