Key Considerations for a Successful Channel/Partner Strategy - Part 1 of 3

Strengthening Competitive Position for Success

During this pandemic, a top priority for sales leadership is to strengthen your organization’s competitive position. The primary consideration is to invest in customer relationships and channel partnerships so sales leaders can increase and reward loyalty from key stakeholders. In addition, they must find ways to help equip critical customers, channel partners, and suppliers to succeed during and immediately after the crisis.   

As companies targeting industrial clients consider a channel/partner go-to-market strategy or program, these organizations must be aware of the top five reasons channel/partner strategies and programs fail:

1. Lack of focus, resources, and commitment 
2. Lack of channel/partner strategy and plan 
3. Incomplete channel ROI assessment 
4. Partners are not prioritized according to fit with channel/partner strategy 
5. No test market of strategy and plan 

Consider the following questions to avoid these points of failure:

• Are you operating your channel/partner program by committee? 
• Are your key stakeholders (C-Suite, GM, sales, marketing, and engineering executives) working with partners without company and executive alignment? 
• Are you fully committed and staffed for channel GTM execution? 
• Do you have a strategy that has executive commitment? 
• Has the strategy been communicated and rolled out to your organization? 
• Are you using a focused approach to recruit partners or spray and pray? 
• Do you even have a channel/partner play? 
• Have you collected the data and done the analysis to support a channel/partner GTM program? 
• Are you recruiting partners primarily based on the biggest/best brand? 
• Have you developed a comprehensive partner taxonomy to support your strategy?
• Before you devote too much time and resources, have you tested your plan with prospective partners?
• Are you taking your program to market prematurely? 

Addressing these questions will help you avoid disappointing channel performance, loss of incremental revenue, and wasted time. In today’s business climate, when building a channel/partner strategy and program, failure is not an option.

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Building Channel/Partner Programs That Work

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