Partner engagement is how you know that your partners are invested in you and your products. If your partners are engaged with you and your content, it’s a sign that things are going well. If they’re not, then it’s time to talk to them and figure out what’s going on.
So how do you measure partner engagement? If you’re like most companies, you do it through the number of times they logged into your partner portal and the number of times they downloaded content. Those metrics are good. They show that your partner is at least logging in and looking at the content you give them, but they’re not the best to measure partner engagement.
For one thing, they don’t show you if your partners are using your content. Are they sending your lead magnets as campaigns? Is the downloaded content just sitting on their hard drive? Measuring the number of downloads and tracking the number of logins doesn’t tell you that.
How to actually measure partner engagement
There are 4 metrics that really give you an idea of how engaged your partners are. These metrics measure the actions your partner takes with the materials you give them and lets you know how frequently they take those actions. What each of these metrics measure will be unique to each company, but here are some broad examples.
- Marketing Activities
This metric measures how much partners marketing your partners do on your behalf. Do they send out an email campaign to their customers when you introduce a new product? Do they promote your joint event through social media, email, or both? Are they keeping in touch with their customers via a newsletter that includes your best practices? The more marketing activities your partners do, the more mindshare you have.
- Lead Generation
This metric measures how many leads your partners share with you. If your partner isn’t sharing a lot of leads with you, then it’s time to talk to them. It may be as simple as your criteria for a qualified lead not matching your partner’s criteria or as complicated as your partner feeling that you wouldn’t treat their customer well.
- Social Sales
This metric measures the types of sales and marketing activities your partners conduct and gives your partners an activity score. For example, you may measure the number of cold calls your partners do along with the number of marketing campaigns they send. The higher this measurement, the more engaged your partners are.
- Partner Meetings
This metric measures how often your partner does marketing and sales activities. It takes into account how frequently they have discovery calls, how often they send out campaigns, and how often they cold call prospects. It also measures how often they meet with you. This measurement shows you how communicative your partners are with you and with their prospects.
xAmplify vs PRMs
xAmplify is a PRM and Through Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) platform. Due to this, we measure engagement differently than most PRMs. Most PRMs store partner education material and sales and marketing content. As a result, engagement is typically measured through the number of times the partner logs into the PRM and by the number of downloads for each piece of content.
With the TCMA features of xAmplify, we measure how many of your campaigns your partner has redistributed. We’ve found campaign redistribution to be a reliable indicator of partner engagement because it shows what your partners are doing with the campaigns you give them. You know your partners are sending them out to their contacts and how often they’re doing it.
For more about campaign redistribution and the platform, schedule a demo.
Conclusion
To truly measure partner engagement, you need to track 4 metrics: marketing activities, lead generation, social sales, and partner meetings. Tracking marketing activities shows you how much your partners are marketing on your behalf. If they’re launching event campaigns to promote every single one of your events, sending their customers an update every time you have a product release, and constantly promoting your new products then they’re as excited as you are about you.
Tracking lead generation lets you know how successful partners are at generating leads and sharing them with you. If they’re generating and sharing a lot of leads with you, they’re a highly engaged partner with a lot of confidence in how you’ll treat their customers. Tracking social sales shows you how willing your partners are to market and sell your products.
Finally, tracking partner meetings gives you an idea of how your relationship with your partner currently is. If they’re always receptive to meeting you and proactively asking you for meetings, then you’ve got a great relationship. If they keep brushing you off and never want to meet with you, then you have a problem.
These 4 metrics will give you a great overview of how engaged your partners are with you and how great your relationship with them is. If you want to learn more about these metrics and how xAmplify can help you measure them, schedule a demo.