A good partner relationship means that your partners are engaged, growing their revenue and yours. But sometimes, partner engagement can be difficult. If partners aren’t engaged, your channel is less effective. So how do you engage your partners and why aren’t they as engaged as you’d like them to be?
Why are Your Partners Less Engaged?
Partners have many reasons for not being as engaged with you as you would like. Here are 3 common reasons why your partners are less engaged.
1. Not enough support
Partners are often small businesses and have less resources. They may not have much knowledge about the industry and rely on a few large contracts to get by. These partners will need more support than other partners, but engaging them is a good way to grow your channel.
2. They struggle to bring in revenue
Typically, partners are great at sales, but less so at marketing. They have difficulty keeping up with new marketing technology and trends. They struggle to reach potential customers. Partners are willing to learn how to market themselves. They just don’t know how.
Also consider your sales process. If your sales process is too complicated or takes too long, your partners will lose their prospects. This decreases the likelihood of your partner selling your products in the future.
3. The tools you gave them are complicated
Have you noticed your partners logging into your PRM less? Do you have multiple tools, each with their own login? Your partners struggle to understand how to use the tools you give them. They find them time-consuming and costly to use. They don’t see how the tools can support them and their business.
If any of these reasons sound familiar, take a look at your partner’s feedback. The feedback from your partner is the best way to find out what their problems are and what they want.
How to Engage Your Partners?
Your partners want to be partners. Providing them the support, tools and incentives they want, will help you maintain a good relationship.
- Provide Support
Many partners are small business owners with less resources. Providing industry knowledge such as whitepapers and other material tailored to your partners’ interests will help show your partners that you’re invested in them as much as they are invested in you. This also helps your partners market themselves, allowing them to reach more potential customers.
2. Provide tools that connect to other tools
Partners use multiple channels because that’s what their potential customers do. Providing tools that connect these channels together enables your partners to coordinate their efforts across channels and expand their reach. Enabling access to all of your tools from your partner portal makes it easier for your partner to use the tools they need, freeing them up for more important tasks.
3. Change your incentives
Find out what your partners would like as an incentive. Some of your partners may want incentives that allow them to focus more on customer experience while others may want a reward for finding new markets. Reward your partners for what they want to be doing.
Conclusion
Partner engagement is essential for a good relationship. Ensuring that your partner program supports your partners and offers the incentives they want will go a long way in increasing your partner engagement. Providing your partners with easy-to-use tools will free up your partners and allow them to reach out to more prospects.
About Us
At xAmplify, we’ve kept partners top of mind. With our decades of experience, we’ve helped companies engage their partners by giving them a marketing automation platform designed for partners and by partners. Our platform solves the challenges that partners face and automates much of the work they have to do.
Want to learn more? Schedule a Demo