Partner Experience Starts with Internal User Experience

For some reason or another I've picked up a few new subscribers in the past week so I figured, what the hell, let's push some content!

Partner Experience starts and is built up from user experience for anyone working to support Partnerships in your organization. However difficult it is to support your partners via shitty internal tools and process is precisely how bad your Partner Experience will be for your partners.

Typically the entire burden of this experience falls on the Partner Account Manager.

They are the ones dealing with the poor tools, weak process, and lack of support and then facing the partners day in and day trying to convince them that the company really does care about them, their experience, and their success.

Increasingly, this burden is also falling to others.

• The product manager that's now a defacto PAM managing all the integrations partners because they aren't tied to a "commercial" program.
• The marketing manager that's trying to support co-branding and asset creation for "commercial" partners don't have enough attention from their actually assigned PAM because THAT person is too busy dealing with the "strategic" partners that drive most of the currently known revenue via spreadsheets and email threads.
• The SalesOps team member trying to support Partner Users in a system they didn't even know existed because somehow the support email got pasted into a new platform that's also not fully integrated into the core CRM.

Partners have no insight into your organization that you do not provide them. This means that their impressions, especially in early to mid-stage companies, is based entirely off their experience with your Product, People, and Processes. I wasn't trying for three "Ps" there.. it just happened.

• Product: The most obvious tie-in for SaaS companies, the product has to speak to the Partner's interests and live up to that expectation.
• Processes: How difficult is it for a Partner to get paid? How long does it take a deal reg to get reviewed? Who helps them learn the foundations? How fast was the response to their original email? How much time do they get from their account manager? How easy is it to understand current state of their Partnership? If everything has to go through the PAM, it's a sign there's a lack of investment in truly supporting scalable Partnerships within an ecosystem.
• People: At the core of all of this is the people that engage with partners. They have to cover for bad experience with good attitudes, rapid responses, and chasing down all the trails that are necessary for ensuring Partner success. They are the cornerstone of an excellent experience because they carry the relationships that build or demolish TRUST within your ecosystem. If their job is inherently difficult to do it's only a matter of time before they and your Partners look for new opportunities.

If your organization is determined to create a truly world class Partner Experience, the very first step is creating world class user experience for those that support your Partners.

Before you invest in Partner tech, a few questions to consider:

• How hard is it to identify your currently active Partner Programs/Incentives?
• How hard is it to identify the active partners within those programs?
• Can Partners be engaged in more than one program at a time, and how would you know?
• What about your pipeline for new Partners, can they easily request contact or express interest?
• Where do you manage contracts?
• How do Partners get support and what kind of support do they need?
• How do PAMs track performance or reporting for QBRs?
• Can your colleagues easily find and engage with active Partners?

New tech isn't going to magically solve all these problems and most can be handled within your CRM with a little bit of deliberate effort. Don't let 'attribution' be the first time you think about systematic needs for your Partner team and you'll be ahead of the game for creating a truly phenomenal Partner Experience.

Call to Action: Reach out if you need help evaluating your experience standards and figuring out the roadmap and requirements needed to get off-center and move forward toward a great Partner Experience.

aaron@partneropspartner.com