Key Strategies for Partner Onboarding

Onboarding needs to be a top priority in your channel development campaign because it's critical to your partners' success in selling your services. The adage "you get out what you put in" best describes why your onboarding approach must be thoroughly crafted before you even engage your partners. 

It's difficult, if not impossible, to set partners up for success without clear rules for collaboration and operational procedures. 

In this conversation with Kiflo, Juhi recommends focusing on the following pillars when it comes to onboarding:

The most important thing is to understand your target audience. Knowing your target audience will give you the information you need to find a solution to their problem. When you better understand their pain points and desires, you can really address them.

As Juhi says, you need to understand your IPP (Ideal Partner Profile). Not only that, but you also need to understand their industry and the audience they serve so you can figure out how your offering meets their needs.

“Who are our ICPs, in this case, partners and who do they serve? Because it's really important to understand their pain points and buyers. Once we have a really clear picture of their persona and their sales journey and their retention journey, I like to get into ‘where are we going to play?’”

If you see an opportunity in the ecosystem, what role do you think you should play? Are you going to have to play different roles? And then there are deeper questions you need to ask yourself such as: 

• Which ecosystems and marketplaces will you participate in? 

• Are you going to have a presence in your partners' ecosystems and markets?

• Who are the leaders in that particular market segment?

• Where, geographically, is the market? 

It's really important to be clear about how and where you're going to win. And honestly, there's often a green field out there that you don't see. So how do you figure out the unknown? A lot of these questions come up in conversations with customers.

According to Juhi, winning isn't based on pure luck. You win because you choose to focus on a specific goal and execute a strategy designed to achieve it. 

You also need to find a space within the ecosystem where you will play and thrive. But that's not all: you also need a compelling strategic value proposition. Your company's value proposition is probably the most important aspect of your entire campaign. A value proposition explains why potential partners should do business with you, not your competitors, and makes the benefits of your products or services clear from the start.

“Our strategy evolved quite significantly because of our partnerships motion, and that was a big surprise. We found a whole new space to play. Besides being a marketing platform, we found a whole new area to play, which ended up being a huge revenue driver. And that ties into, how are you going to win, what is going to be your value proposition, how do you clearly define that and what is your competitive advantage?”

Juhi means that your strategy determines your chances of success. To be successful, you must provide value to your partners that is superior and sustainable to that of your competitors. 

If you know where to position yourself within the ecosystem, you can maximize your chances of success. There is no one ideal tactic. That's why it's important to improve your company's ability to think strategically.

Juhi says that the key to a successful channel partnership is having a well-defined business strategy that helps you and your partner establish your goals and ensures that you win. This business strategy provides a roadmap to success and also helps with gaining the support of the rest of your organization and leadership team.

Just as important as setting goals is measuring them using KPIs. Not only can you use KPIs to track progress and show revenue to your executive suite, but you can also quantify the success of the partner program and make projections for the future. Of course, these KPIs will vary depending on your partner program.

As Juhi puts it:

“What are my short-term and long-term goals and KPIs? Because I am an engineer by training, I like to measure things. And data is always helpful in developing a course of action. What resources will I need? What's the investment? I like to build out a spreadsheet where I say, these are the resources I'm going to need over this period of time, and here's the ROI on that.”

There are numerous outstanding onboarding programs available, and Juhi recognizes Microsoft as a stellar model for a successful partner onboarding approach. One of the reasons her partner onboarding process achieves such success is that she has modeled it after Microsoft's partner program and partner incentives, incorporating the following characteristics inspired by the well-established practices of a Microsoft partnership:

Juhi explains:

“What I loved about Microsoft was they made onboarding super easy. They had a portal that you could log into, they had a checklist of things for partners to do, they had tools to teach them how to onboard.”

Each partner will be on their own path, arriving at different points in their journey at different times. Some will get in early and complete onboarding rather quickly. Others will join the festivities later.

All, however, will need support at the various stages of their journey. But, you should have deadlines and incentives to try to keep partners on track. Aim for a collaborative, automated approach for their convenience.

“Who's got the time anymore to get on the phone and get support on a call? I think it’s really important to let people do it on their own time and have a fantastic database of FAQs and resources that are technical as well as nontechnical so all the stakeholders can get their questions addressed at the moment they arise.”

Your partner platform should also provide your partners with easily available information and resources so they can learn about your business, services and offerings.

When your partners have access to more detailed information about your product, they can engage more effectively with customers and consequently sell more. This leads to higher product retention and loyalty among partners.

Transparency is critical during the partner onboarding process because it sets the stage for scaleable activities that will increase efficiency for years to come. To build healthy and effective relationships with your partners, maintain a high level of transparency throughout the onboarding process. Your partners must always know their next step so they can plan for it.

As you know, the onboarding process is the partner's first direct contact with your company. It can set the tone for the rest of the relationship. Even the performance of upcoming partnership opportunities can be affected by ineffective planning or implementation of partner onboarding. So, Juhi gives you some advice on how to maintain the success of your onboarding program.

Your partners want wins and they want them quickly.

That's because it usually takes time for partners to appreciate the value of your product. Give them an early win to build their confidence. This can be as simple as "leveling up" during the onboarding process or getting a badge for performing a certain action.

The quick-win strategy should be implemented while your partners are still onboarding. You don't want to wait until they get frustrated or regret their decision. Show your partners that you're the right partner to help them achieve their goals as quickly as possible.

To use Juhi’s own words:

“If your partners are all about co-marketing, it's really easy to have ready-made templates. I remember one of the companies I worked for had ready-made templates that said, ‘When you make an announcement of this category, use this template for a press release. Here's a quote and we'll amplify it.' That's how easily and quickly you can make gains in your relationship. You can do account mapping as part of the onboarding process and say, ‘If we have mutual clients, let's do a mutual case study, here's a template and you can create the content. We'll review it and then we'll release it.’ So these quick and easy wins are possible depending on what the partnership is trying to solve for.”

The idea of quick wins is a widely shared sentiment in partnerships because they are no longer optional, they’re an absolute necessity.

Set goals and expectations for your partner's onboarding process. Your partners should be clear by now about the specific benefits of working together. It's your responsibility to design channel processes and a document that states what you want partners to accomplish in the first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and beyond. 

While your partnership goals should be clearly defined, you need to be somewhat flexible in how you'll achieve them, because there may be setbacks to achieving your goal, and creating alternative plans in advance can help you deal with them.

“I think it's important to have goals that will not change over the long term, but the way you execute those goals should be flexible and need to be flexible, especially if you're a small partnerships team. So if your goal is to increase revenue by X percent over the next three years, you can do it in a bunch of ways. And it's important to figure out what's working and do it fast and maybe do it with multiple pathways simultaneously so you don't lose time. But I think the goal that you decide on should be fairly stable so your team is not running around changing course every week. And I think it's also important for the goal to ladder into the company's goals.”

The more you know about your program partners and participants, the better you can customize and personalize program aspects to them. Ultimately, the more time you have for partners, the more your revenue will increase.

As Juhi puts it:

“I think when you start, in the early stages, a lot of it is just a repetition of processes that you can follow. For example, this is how you create an account, follow these steps and if you have a technical problem you can’t resolve through FAQs, submit a support ticket. But I agree with you that the further up the value chain you go and the more mature your ecosystem becomes, the more human contact you need, no matter where you play. And that's what Microsoft has done incredibly well, and I think a lot of companies are emulating that: If you do more business with them, they provide you with more resources.”

In the realm of effective partner onboarding, the adage 'content is king' holds true, but its reign is meaningful only when the content is of high quality. Often, vendors inundate onboarding partners with extensive folders of content lacking a clear methodology, leaving templates and learning materials ambiguously named and not immediately applicable.

To address this, it's essential to innovate in the onboarding process. Building a multi-step training structure that progressively guides partners ensures clarity on the next steps to explore, fostering a sense of direction. As knowledge grows, consider limiting access strategically and automating the introduction of new topics, creating an environment where partners can explore and get started with relevant solutions. This approach not only supports partners in navigating the onboarding journey but also delivers a top-tier, engaging experience, ultimately increasing partner engagement.

“My highest priority would be to let me create content that trains sellers in a quick and easy way that's easily digestible on how to sell my product, when to bring me in, how to implement my solution, and how they retire their quota because they're going to care about that. If it's to get mind share, then yes, I would create fantastic white papers and content that would resonate with my partner's customers.”

“Figure out your strategy. Get really crisp on what you're solving for, who your downstream customers are, and how you're going to partner with the people you invest in.”

“Figure out your segmentation and your templates. A lot of this should be scalable and self-serve as much as possible.” 

“It is crucial to get stakeholders’ buy-in internally and externally so that they invest in your success and amplify your wins. And then get those early wins. Get those early wins, keep showing what's possible and that's just going to allow you to keep laddering up into more and more success.” 

“Time is your most important non-renewable resource, so that strategy piece is so important. Don't skip it. For example, if you decide to invest in a hyper-scaler, you need to know how much time that is going to take. It can be a black hole that will sink your partnerships if you don’t have the time, resources, and executive support for it. But if you do, it can take you to the moon.”

If you want to grow a partner program like Microsoft, it is essential that you have the proper tools to structure, automate, and scale your program.

A Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platform allows you to:

• Organize your program with tiers

• Coordinate training, onboarding, and certification processes

• Trace leads

• Build a knowledge base to provide instant answers

• Collaborate with partners on a shared pipeline

• Get full visibility over partner activity

• Measure partner performance

• Track commission and payouts