7 Things Changing the Partner and Reseller Channel in 2020

,

2020 has already proven to be a remarkable year. Not just for the world at large but also for partner and reseller channels.

Staying ahead of the curve is crucial to your business success this year and beyond.

In this post, we’ll explore the seven trends changing the partner and reseller channel in 2020 and give you tips on how to adapt your partner and reseller relationship strategies.

Customer Experience is King

Forget the old customer acquisition funnel. Customer engagement no longer stops with the purchase. It’s an ongoing lifecycle with increasingly important metrics for success like usage and renewal.

Being great at sales is n0 longer enough. Instead successful partners will need to incorporate activation, adoption, expansion and renewal of the product to the sales motions. 

How to take advantage: Incentivise enablement initiatives to get partners investing in customer experience processes.

Servicing of Micro Niches

It is no longer enough for partners to specialise in generic verticals. Instead, end customers are seeking out partners with hyper-specialised skills focused on business outcomes.

Solution provider business will need to adapt by becoming more unique and specialised so as to be differentiated.

How to take advantage: Enable micro-vertical solutions which include training on adjacent technologies and highlighting potential service opportunities.

Increased Complexity

Creating a complete solution isn’t easy. There so many moving parts in an IoT solution – all the hardware, software and services involved to satisfy end customers needs.

To ensure continued success, solution providers will need to work together and merge their diverse skills and specialisations.

Some of these solution providers will transact and will join your partner program to progress up the partner levels. Other solution providers (next-generation partners) will not transact and possibly won’t even join your official partner program.

How to take advantage: Foster partner-to-partner ecosystems.

New Generation of Partners

Traditional VARs or Systems Integrators are no longer the default trusted advisors to new buyers in the era of cloud-delivered products  New types of partners have emerged, such as Managed Service Providers and cloud solution aggregators like AWS.

Financial advisors, marketing consultancies, and even insurance agencies are coming into technology ecosystems influencing customer buying behaviours.

The majority are not interested in managing the transaction but are looking for the downstream, high-margin services of implementation and integration.

How to take advantage: Pursue a low-key relationship with these influencers and create ways for them to engage in the partner ecosystem.

Focus on Services

The margins partners are making in reselling hardware and software is getting tighter. It’s difficult for this activity alone to make an impact on profitability. In response, solution providers are focusing their efforts on consulting, business process optimisation, provision, configuration, outsourced management and support services. Naturally, this can lead to conflicts with your own professional services organisations, which also vie for those lucrative high-margin services.

How to take advantage: Clarify what services opportunities partners and resellers pursue and what services only your business is to provide.

Digital is the only Marketing

68% of B2B customers prefer to research solutions online and 62% make final decisions solely through digital content. By the time an end customer even engages with sales, they are information-rich and close to making a buying decision. Pretending digital marketing doesn’t work is no longer an option.

Unfortunately, most solution providers are comfortable with traditional marketing, so are woefully lacking the skills and resources to be successful marketing online.

How to take advantage: Shift partner marketing funds and resources to only support digital marketing efforts.

Effects of COVID-19

The rapid proliferation of COVID-19 across the globe has strained business relationships. The long-term effects of this global pandemic are as yet unclear. One thing for certain is uncertainty. Therefore, a genuine shift to data-driven decision making is highly likely.

Furthermore, lockdown restrictions have seen an overnight shift to remote working. This will make regular communication via video conferencing calls between you and your partners essential to business success and improved relationships.

How to take advantage: Implement a partner experience platform to leverage data and improve communication with partners and resellers.

In sum, if you’re unwilling to adapt from traditional thinking and take advantage of these trends now you will be left behind in 2020 and beyond.

Advance Your PX Today with Follco

As we’ve covered, it’s crucial that you understand these trends and use this information to shape your partner and reseller relationship strategies.

Do you need to forge closer links with your partners and keep your lines of communication open at all times? A Partner Experience platform is what you need.

Here at Follco, we offer businesses the ability to create feature-rich communication platforms that keep your partnerships operating at peak capacity. Ready to boost your critical PX metrics? Visit our website to learn more and get started with Follco today.

 

/0 Comments/by

How to Use Interactive Content to Engage With Your Partners

,

Interactive content has been dubbed the ‘future of marketing‘. We think it’s also the future of partner engagement.

The main reason is that it is an effective lead generation tactic. 

It can be a gamechanger in helping your partners pitch your product and strengthening partner relationships.

To grow your partnerships in 2020 and beyond, you should consider mastering interactive content. In this post, we’ll define interactive content and explore how you can use it to engage partners and resellers.

What is Interactive Content?

Interactive content is content designed to engage users through their participation. In other words, to get a result the user needs to interact with the content.

An effective producer of this content is HubSpot. They create free educational content specifically for their niche, but to access the content users must fill in their information and the content is emailed to them.

How Interactive Content Engages Your Partners?

Nearly 90% of people prefer more visual and interactive content. Furthermore, it performs better compared to regular content, and it’s not hard to see why.

Interactive content can be highly immersive by creating a unique user experience. It encourages people to compete, compare, test themselves, consume information faster, and achieve faster results. 

How Can You Use Interactive Content?

Here are some practical ways you can use interactive content to engage your partners and resellers.

Use quizzes to recommend new products

In outcome quizzes, answer choices are associated with one or more possible outcomes and users are assigned a final outcome based on the combination of answers they select.

Create polls and surveys to show you care

Polls and surveys can help you gauge the general opinion surrounding your niche industry and your tool in specific as well. Interactive polls can help you with your market research and check customer satisfaction levels. 

Employ chatbots to offer around-the-clock service

A chatbot is a tool that has conversations with users without the need for a person to manage it. Chatbots can answer the most common questions your partners have about your product. 

Offer calculators to demonstrate value

Interactive calculators can be used to solve tedious estimates and cost calculations quickly for prospects and users. Calculators can be used for lead generation, sales qualification, or increasing customer loyalty.

You can create calculators to provide personalized estimates of how your affiliates can benefit by associating themselves with your product.

Create a great native app to drive deeper connection

A feature-rich native app can help deliver exceptional brand, partner and reseller experiences. Follco can help you to deliver exceptional experiences that scale your channel partner programme.

In conclusion, interactive content can be a powerful tool in attracting new business partners and ensuring continued success with your existing partners. Done correctly, it could become a lead generation and referral marketing machine. 

Boost Your PX Today with Follco

At Follco, we empower businesses to create industry-leading secure private communication portals that boost engagement and communication. You can quickly get started with our platform to spin up a personalised and feature-rich portal.

Our platform empowers you to create a personalised platform that champions your culture and brand while offering a one-stop-shop for communication with your partners.

Ready to improve your partner experience today? Get started with Follco today.

 

/0 Comments/by

Four Steps You Can Use to Improve Partner Retention

A single amazing partnership with another company can transform the fortunes of your business. That partnership could lead to higher revenues, new opportunities and fruitful feedback.

If you’re going to get the maximum value possible from those partnerships, though, you’ll need to retain your partners for as long as possible. This will give you the opportunity to nourish your relationships and allow them to flourish.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at why partner retention is important before we explore four techniques that you can use to improve your partner retention rates.

Why Is Partner Retention Important?

Before we dive into four techniques that you can use to improve partner retention, let’s outline exactly why it’s worth putting in the effort. Here are four key reasons that partner retention is critical to your business:

Boost your revenue

The lifetime value of a customer is essentially the amount of money that they spend with your business during their time with you. Acquiring new customers is expensive, which is why every business should work hard to improve partner retention and increase the lifetime value of its customers.

Attract new customers

If you take care of your partners, there’s a better chance that they’ll become advocates for your brand. This means that they might spread the word and play an important role in helping you to generate new referrals for your business.

Strengthen your brand

Your prospects will often spend a lot of time researching your business before they put pen to paper and make a purchase. They’ll take a look at things like price and product details, of course, but they’ll also monitor whether or not you’ve managed to satisfy your existing partners. Bolster your reputation in this area and you’ll be sure to seize success.

Secure trusted feedback

Whatever product or service you offer, it’s important that you take care of your power users and listen carefully to their feedback. Retain these customers and you’ll be able to access valuable feedback that keeps your business operating as effectively as possible.

Four Techniques to Improve Partner Retention

Now that we understand why partner retention is so critical to your business, let’s take a closer look at four techniques that you can use to keep hold of your customers.

  1. Share timely updates

According to American Express, 33% of Americans say that they’ll consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service. While you’re operating in a B2B context, a similar dynamic reigns: it’s critical that you minimise poor experiences to retain your partners.

The timeliness of updates and replies can have a big impact on the satisfaction of your partners. This is why it’s so critical that you make sure to inject timeinless into all of your communications – reply to questions quickly and share updates as soon as possible.

This type of timely communication will show your customers that you care about them and that you value their partnership. 

  1. Keep your lines of communication open

There are few things more frustrating in the world of business than struggling to get in touch with somebody. We all know what it feels like to get stuck in a loop making the same call again and again, or sending emails with no response.

If you neglect your partners in this way, they’ll be sure to look for greener pastures and pursue an alternative provider with better levels of communication. To make sure that doesn’t happen, make sure to keep your lines of communication open.

You can do this by investing in the appropriate tools and team members. If you create a large and efficient customer service team, your partners will get the responses they need when they need them.

You could also use a PX platform to create an effective and predictable way to share updates and messages with your partners.

  1. Reward partner loyalty

By working with your business, your partners are placing a lot of trust in you – it’s critical that you earn it and reward their loyalty.

There are a huge number of B2B loyalty programs around the world. Businesses use these programs to show their partners that they care and value their custom. Some businesses might offer discounts on their products or services, for instance, or give some customers preferred access to new features.

Saasquatch has put together a great exploration of B2B loyalty programs. There are lots of great ideas that you could pursue to reward your customers and elevate your customer retention rates.

  1. Build stronger relationships

If you’re going to retain your customers, you’ll want to take every opportunity to build stronger relationships. To do so, you should sit down with your team members and map the customer journey. You can use that map to identify where to make interventions.

Here are just a few techniques that you can use to build stronger relationships with your partners:

  • Send birthday messages
  • Share offers on a regular basis
  • Check in on your customers with regular surveys
  • Give timely and transparent updates

All of these little touches can help you to build authentic and enduring partnerships that drive value for your business.

Use a PX Platform to Execute These Techniques

A feature-rich PX platform can help you to make each of those steps a reality. Ready to learn more?

Request your Follco demo today to learn how our feature-rich platform can help you to deliver exceptional brand, partner and reseller experiences to boost your partner retention rates.

/0 Comments/by

Five Reasons to Invest in a Partner Experience (PX) Platform

Few factors are more critical to the growth of your business than healthy partner and reseller relationships. Those thriving relationships can open new doors, expand your reach and unlock a host of other exciting benefits.

Given that’s the case, are you doing enough to manage and nurture those relationships? Engaged partners are one thing, but you want fanatics.

If you’re going to create those strong ties between your partners, you’ll need to invest in a high-quality partner experience platform. This tool can help you to deliver exceptional experiences that scale your channel partner programme.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at Partner Experience (PX) and five reasons you should invest in a PX platform.

What Is Partner Experience (PX)?

Before we dive into the main reasons to invest in a PX platform, let’s go through a quick definition of PX and what it can do for you.

Essentially, PX can be defined as the result of every factor and initiative that exists to make your partnerships amazing. Relationship-oriented businesses use a PX score to reflect the quality of their partnerships and shape their strategies going forward.

A PX score can be used as the ultimate metric to measure how you should approach your partnerships and which interventions are most appropriate. If you would like more general information around PX, be sure to read our piece on PX and how it can benefit your business.

Five Reasons to Invest in a PX Platform

Now that we’ve got a better idea of PX and what it means, let’s take a closer look at the five reasons you should invest in a PX platform.

  1. Create a single source of truth to reduce confusion

How do you currently assess the effectiveness of your partnership initiatives? You might take a look at the duration of your relationships, for instance, or the number of partners that you have.

But with such limited metrics, it’s often hard to get the full picture. While you might have long relationships, for instance, you can’t really tell if your partners are truly satisfied and whether or not your relationships are driving symbiotic value.

A feature-rich PX platform can empower you to unlock new insights and get a full view of how your business is performing. The most powerful PX platforms provide you with a direct link to your partners and offer a suite of supplementary metrics to drive insight.

  1. Reduce the cost of answering repeat questions

Statistics from Salesforce show that 67% of customers say their standard for good experiences is higher than they’ve ever been. If you’re going to impress and retain your most loyal customers, it’s essential that you make their success your business.

This can be taxing, though. You’ll need a team of customer support and customer success agents who communicate with your customers as and when necessary. This can quickly drive up your costs and even cause confusion with mixed messaging.

High-quality PX platforms make it simple for you to build and scale your channel partner programs. You can leverage this communication channel to reduce the cost of answering repeat questions and ensure that your message is always heard loud and clear.

  1. Create a stronger internal culture

The world’s most partnership-oriented businesses work incredibly hard to cultivate a strong internal culture that values great relationships. Rather than just listing that as a corporate value, those businesses walk the talk and provide their teams with the tools and processes to make relationships great.

If you invest in a high-quality PX platform, you’ll really demonstrate your strong commitment to partnership excellence. Not only will it provide your team with the groundwork for relationship building success, but that tool will also underscore your corporate value and secure buy-in from your team members.

  1. Amplify your brand

If your partners are going to identify with your business, it’s critical that you create and champion a strong brand identity. That identify will make your business relatable and recognisable, thereby helping your partners to build an authentic connection.

Creating and championing a powerful brand is no easy task, though. You’ll need to engage your marketing department and make sure that your customer-facing teams understand how to bring your brand to life.

As well as a strong strategy and sense of motivation, you’ll also need the appropriate tools to succeed. A great PX platform can help you to share the right messages at the right time. This can amplify your brand and your messaging to forge stronger links between you and your partners.

  1. Achieve faster and more effective communication

In today’s fast-moving business environment, information is everything. It’s absolutely critical that you provide your partners with timely and relevant updates that they can use to move their business forwards.

If you have an important product update, for instance, you’ll need to share it so that your partners can leverage it to their own ends. This can help you to upsell new products and enhance overall customer satisfaction.

Sharing that information isn’t easy, though. Your customers might have conflicting preferences in terms of communication channels, for instance, and you can’t be sure that your announcements will be seen.

The best PX platforms make it simple for you to share posts in a timeline format with your partners. You can use the PX platform to share posts in a variety of formats like announcements, articles, surveys and more. This functionality means that you can make yourself heard and provide your partners with the information they need.

Create Your PX Platform Today

Are you ready to invest in a leading PX platform to unlock all of the benefits above? Learn more about Follco today and how our PX platform can help you to deliver exceptional brand, partner and reseller experiences.

/0 Comments/by

How to Define the Success of Your Partner Experience Programme

Your partners and resellers are critical to the health of your business. It’s essential that you offer the best Partner Experience programme possible to create lasting relationships and unlock a host of exciting benefits.

But how exactly can you gauge the impact of your Partner Experience initiatives? In this post, we’re going to take a look at the KPIs that you can use to define the success of your Partner Experience programme.

What Is Partner Experience (PX)?

In today’s interconnected business environment, productive and profitable business relationships are more important than ever before. Forge strong links with your partners and resellers to keep the flow of communication open, and you’ll be sure to reap the rewards.

That’s essentially Partner Experience – all the processes and details that come together to make your partners and resellers as satisfied and productive as possible.

Here are just some of the factors that affect your partner experience.

  • Personable relationships
  • Fast response times
  • Loyalty rewards
  • Timely updates
  • Exclusive offers and discounts

By focusing on those areas and offering great Partner Experience programme, businesses can boost partner satisfaction, forge closer links and ultimately enjoy higher revenues

Looking for a closer look at the benefits of a strong PX? Read our piece to learn more about how partner experience can benefit your business.

The Main Partner and Reseller Program KPIs 

As we’ve established, Partner Experience is critical to your business. That’s why you’ve got to collect data and monitor the right KPIs. To give you a helping hand, let’s take a look at the actual KPIs that you can use to measure the state of your PX.

Number of partners

Many businesses will decide to track the overall number of partners that they have over a given period of time. This is a straightforward metric that you can use to gauge the efficacy of your relationship-building efforts.

You can use this historical data to assess the positive and negative impacts of your partnership-building activities and forecast future performance.

Revenue per partner

Once you’ve forged a strong partnership, you’ll need to make sure that it’s as valuable as possible for your business. This is why it’s vital that you track the revenues per partnership.

Accurate and diligent data analysis of revenue per partner will make it easier for you to assess which partners are most valuable and how your efforts have grown over time.

Partnership lifetime value

Partnerships evolve and change over time, according to a wide range of factors. You should monitor the ebb and flow of your partnerships by monitoring the partnership lifetime value of your partners.

Using this information, you’ll be able to monitor how your relationship has expanded or contracted over time and identify the relevant factors. If you assess the lifetime value of partnerships alongside one another, you’ll be able to uncover trends and patterns.

Partnership length

It goes without saying that you’ll want your partnerships to last for as long as possible. The longer the relationship, the more profitable it will be. Longer relationships are also a good indication that you’re using the right techniques and strategies.

You should measure the length of your partnerships and find averages to understand where you need to apply attention and improve your offering.

Partner satisfaction score

It goes without saying that you want your partners to be as satisfied as possible. Higher satisfaction scores are indicative of a healthy and profitable relationship that benefits both of your businesses.

You should use a blend of surveys sentiment analysis to calculate your partner satisfaction scores and monitor how they evolve over time in light of the changes that you make.

Year-over-year partnership revenue growth

Are your partnerships working for you and pushing your revenues higher? You’ll naturally want to upsell certain products/services and extract the maximum value possible from your business relationships.

You should carefully track the year-on-year revenue growth of your partnerships and use that information to shape your strategies and techniques.

Average partner response time

If you’re going to delight your partners and provide them with a great experience, you’ve got to offer them a swift response and resolution times. You should monitor the average partner response time to assess how you perform and which changes you need to make.

Boost Your PX Today with Follco

As we’ve covered, it’s crucial that you monitor the appropriate KPIs and use that information to shape your partner and reseller relationship strategies.

Do you need to forge closer links with your partners and keep your lines of communication open at all times? A Partner Experience platform is what you need.

Here at Follco, we offer businesses the ability to create feature-rich communication platforms that keep your partnerships operating at peak capacity. Ready to boost your critical PX metrics? Visit our website to learn more and get started with Follco today.

/by

Partner Experience (PX): What Is It and How Can It Benefit Your Business?

A new partnership can transform a business for the better and propel it forward. Those productive partnerships can bring fresh opportunities, higher revenues and new expertise.

Unfortunately, 70% of business partnerships fail. The failure of a partnership can be a disaster – not only will you lose out on the various potential benefits, but you might lose significant amounts of time, money and effort.

If you want to protect your partnerships, you’ve got to focus on mastering Partner Experience (PX). In this post, we’ll offer up a clear definition of PX and dive deeper into exactly how it can benefit your business.

What Is Partner Experience (PX)?

Partner Experience (PX) is a measure that businesses can use to gauge the health and profitability of their various partner/reseller relationships.

In today’s complex business environment, strong local and inter-organisational relationships can open up new opportunities and boost revenues. This is why it’s so essential that businesses have a methodology to assess the quality of their partnerships.

The most productive and profitable relationships will lead to a high PX score, while a low PX score suggests that the partnership can be improved. Businesses can use this useful metric to guide their actions, assess their impact and bring about the most fruitful relationships possible.

How to Measure Partner Experience

There are a number of metrics and factors that you can measure to assess the effectiveness of your PX initiatives.

Here’s a brief look at some of those key metrics:

Number of partners

A good way to assess the impact of your PX initiative is to track the number of partners that you have over a given time period. This is a great metric to get an overview.

Revenue per partner

You can assess the impact of your PX initiatives by tracking the revenue generated per partner over a period of time. You could plot PX initiatives against revenue growth to uncover trends.

Partnership length

Long partnerships are often the most profitable ones. You should regularly track the length of your partnerships to gauge how satisfied your partners really are.

Partner satisfaction score

The best way to understand the satisfaction of your partner is to ask them with regular questionnaires and surveys.

How Can Partner Experience Benefit Your Business?

If you focus on nurturing a strong PX, your business will reap the rewards. Here’s a closer look at the benefits that you can unlock with PX:

Drive sales

Stronger relations with your partners will ultimately result in more sales and higher revenues. Whether you’re nourishing relationships with resellers 

Boost satisfaction

If you focus on keeping your partners happy, you’ll be sure to elevate their satisfaction. This higher level of satisfaction gives you the ability to retain your 

Develop closer ties with your partners

If your business focuses on elevating PX, you’ll naturally forge closer and more productive links with your partners. Those closer relationships can result in new opportunities for your business and additional support.

Enhance your reputation

Modern business is a team sport. Those businesses that learn to cooperate and forge symbiotic relationships with other businesses are the ones that will prosper.

If you nourish and maintain productive partnerships with other businesses, you’ll find it easier to build on those experiences. You’ll quickly build a reputation as a trustworthy and productive partner which will open up new doors for your business.

Offer more effective and efficient support

In today’s interconnected business environment, it’s critical that businesses are able to offer timely and always-on partner support. If businesses focus on PX, they’ll naturally make the right decisions when it comes to support and reap the benefits.

Offer excellent support and you’ll see partner retention and satisfaction rocket.

Boost Your PX Today with Follco

Here at Follco, we empower businesses to create industry-leading secure private communication portals that boost engagement and communication. You can quickly get started with our platform to spin up a personalised and feature-rich portal.

Our platform empowers you to create a personalised platform that champions your culture and brand while offering a one-stop-shop for communication with your partners.

Ready to improve your partner experience today? Visit our website to learn more and get started with Follco today.

/1 Comment/by