What are Partner Programs?

Partner Programs encompass a range of strategic initiatives that companies embark on that are built upon one basic premise. Build partnerships with a typically large group of companies that can drive the growth of their business by helping them acquire new customers, and frequently, by also offering their new and existing customers related services such as implementation, systems integration and other auxiliary services.

Partner programs are not new. Companies have had them for decades. In this article we’ll focus on partner programs that serve as sales channels and additionally offer the company’s existing customers some additional services, be it implementation or other auxiliary services. Such partner programs that are focused on customer acquisition essentially involve the following,

• Recruiting partners into the program
• Training and certifying them on the company’s products and services
• Offering sales enablement and marketing assets so that partners can sell effectively
• Paying commissions on sales brought in by the partners
• Offering other incentives to high-performing partners such as joint marketing campaigns and Market Development Funds (MDFs)

Sounds pretty straightforward – recruit and enable partners to sell your product and incentivize them to do so. Partner channel sales can often account for a significant portion of a company’s sales.

The Advent of SaaS

Over the last couple of decades or more, digital transformation has led to a rise of SaaS (Software as a Service) products. Long gone are the days of buying a piece of software on CDs or other media and installing it on your personal computer. The ability to access and use software using just a browser and an internet connection has opened up opportunities for SaaS products to integrate with other SaaS products and services within an ecosystem.

Consider, for instance, a cloud-based CRM tool such as HubSpot or Salesforce. These tools integrate with several other applications such as an email provider, social media channels, productivity tools such as Slack, analytics tools and much more. Such integrations are designed to augment the CRM software with capabilities that can truly unleash its power.

This has created ecosystems of products and services that are complex and fast changing and often require expertise at the user’s fingertips to be able to make the most effective use of them, or even more elementary, simply keep up with changing landscape and capabilities.

What do Partners offer?

 The most common types of services that partners offer are implementation of SaaS products, system integration and consultation. Typically these services are offered to the clients that they bring in through their sales channels. In certain cases, if a customer or prospect is working with the SaaS company’s sales team, the account executive may funnel any requirements for additional services they may have, on an ad-hoc basis, to a select group of partners based on the partners’ expertise, performance and the relationship with the account executive. In essence, the partners’ services are largely offered at the time of sale or soon after, during onboarding.

Partners also often possess expertise in the ecosystem of products and services that work together. For example, partners of CRM companies offer related services such as email marketing. Partners of Ad networks such as Facebook and Google offer marketing strategy, creative development and CRM among other things. Partners of Web hosting companies offer web design, app development and SEO services. It is easy to see how connected these ecosystem products and services are.

Such services generally fall outside the scope of the partner program and are seldom offered proactively to customers through the partner program itself. Instead, partners generally cross-sell such services to the clients they are already engaged with. Partner programs do offer their customers some visibility into and access to the partners’ overall capabilities beyond their own product. The most common, and pretty much only, manifestation of this is an online directory of partners that customers can tap into and reach out to whichever partners that appear qualified to address their needs. A directory typically includes filters for the partners’ locations, certifications, service offerings, the tier of their partnership with the SaaS company along with reviews and ratings from past work they’ve done with other customers.

Customer Success with a SaaS product

Products are only as effective at driving the desired and intended outcomes as the effectiveness and correctness of its usage by a customer. Google Analytics would be useless if conversions on a website are not tracked correctly and/or the site traffic is not UTM-tagged correctly or tagged at all. A Sales Automation tool will not be able to deliver results if it does not integrate with the user’s sales processes such as accurately defining and automating updates to a prospect’s ownership, lifecycle stage or lead status. Business Intelligence tools are, as popularly described, “garbage in, garbage out”. Without the right KPIs to monitor and access to the data to do so, no fancy dashboard can enable data-driven decision making.

Incorrect or incomplete implementation and operationalization of a product is a major risk to customer success with the product and can drive churn and lower growth at renewals. Customer success teams are specifically charged with the responsibility to ensure that their product is getting used most effectively and increase customer retention rates. While they do play a critical and indispensable role, customer success teams are often limited by bandwidth and a lack of complete understanding of every customer’s unique use case and business context to be able to impact product success beyond driving usage of product features and advising on best practices.

Moreover, most SaaS companies have mastered or aspire towards a fast-paced acquisition model that relies on inbound demand generation for the product coupled with self-serve sign-ups, upgrades and renewals. While such a model can drive much-desired, exponential growth in customer acquisition, it completely eliminates the involvement of a partner directly or an account executive that can loop in a partner to ensure optimal implementation of the product and it’s integration with the customer’s overall tech stack and business processes.

Tying it all together

Partners can play a much bigger and impactful role across the customer lifecycle. Enabling customers to seamlessly engage with the right partners at the right time can ensure significantly better product implementation, operationalization and impact on business outcomes. Interactions that presumably happen through partner directories can be formalized and made a part of the overall partner ecosystem. This can not only create an additional avenue for incentivizing partners, but also provide complete visibility to the SaaS vendor into partner-customer interactions that span beyond customer acquisition.

PartnerConnect.io – Marketplaces as a Service

We, at PartnerConnect.io, believe that customers should have seamless access to the right expertise they need at the right time. We enable this by offering fully customizable Marketplaces as a Service. With PartnerConnect.io, SaaS companies can deploy and operationalize fully-customized marketplaces within a week, and bring together their partners and customers on a single platform where they can engage seamlessly throughout the customer lifecycle. Our proprietary Partner Match Score enables customers to choose the perfect partner for their needs and manage the entire engagement right within the marketplace with collaboration features such as instant messaging and file sharing. SaaS vendors on the other hand can maintain complete control over the interactions using our Marketplace Command Center that lets them, among other things, route customer projects to all or a select group of partners and feature high performing partners.

Get in touch

Would you like to explore further? Do you see your partner program playing an integral role in customer success and retention? How do you currently manage Partner-Customer interactions? Schedule a meeting to learn more about PartnerConnect.io solutions and unleash your partner network.