Segment Your PRM Partners

Posted on October 19th, 2009 Adam Honig Comments 0

Using partners to help you sell? Don't let them leave you high and dry. Photograph by Darwin Bell.

Marketing departments segment their customers all of the time, based on numerous factors: high propensity to buy, low propensity to buy, infrequent customer, repeat customer, key opinion leader. So when it comes to partner relationship management (PRM), why don’t more companies apply the same advanced segmentation techniques to slice and dice their partners?

In fact, when it comes to building a successful PRM program, the marketing department needs to get more involved on two fronts: applying its segmentation smarts to know which partners perform best, as well as designing a system that holds partners accountable for their results.

Segment Partners

With PRM, the rationale for segmenting partners is simple:

• Rate partners based on their actual performance (success) and capabilities
• Feed more high-quality leads to your best partners, to help make your best-performing partners even better
• Better match leads with partners—based on customers’ needs, deal size, partner experience, organization size, and certifications
• Avoid wasting time and resources on underperformers
• Save money and close more deals

Don’t Just Cede Your Leads

Above all, segmentation helps your company, and especially the marketing department, control the flow of leads to partners. Because if you let partners call the shots, the results might not be optimal for your company.

For example, the channel partners of one of our high-technology OEM clients had explicitly requested all leads, good or bad. So the company shared them. But as a result, the OEM wasn’t receiving any feedback on lead quality, which it needs to keep refining its lead-generation techniques, to ensure that it’s passing as many high-quality leads to its partners as possible.

So the OEM began investigating exactly how all of the leads it shared were being developed. And it discovered that partners most often just discarded poor quality leads. In fact, partners’ rationale for requesting all leads (irrespective of quality) appeared to be defensive. Partners didn’t want any leads to get put into a shark tank (aka nurturing pool)—a repository for non-prequalified leads that a company makes available to any partner on a first come, first serve basis—because partners didn’t want other partners (i.e. the competition) to have any of the leads.

Of course, this didn’t help the OEM at all. Rather, it needs to turn as many leads as possible into sales, and requires feedback from partners on lead quality, to help it refine overall lead quality. So the main lesson the OEM learned was, don’t blindly follow what partners request. Rather, keep them on a tight leash, and require feedback on lead quality.

But at the same time, a general rule of PRM is that you can’t expect too much feedback from partners. While many companies treat partners as part of their extended sales team, in reality partners are more akin to customers [link to PRM sales blog]. You have to sell them on using your leads, instead of your competitor’s.

Measure Partners’ Karma

But you must also hold partners accountable for developing any leads you share, or else provide feedback about poor lead quality. If partners choose to not participate in that strategy, then share fewer high-quality leads with them.

Ideally, such accountability isn’t a one-way street or tough love strategy, but rather a highly transparent and even interactive process. For example, another one of our high-technology clients is experimenting with an internal charge system. Partners receive credits based on their customer qualification efforts, and then “buy” new leads—cost is based on lead quality—using those credits. Think of it as a virtual stock exchange for leads.

Achieve the PRM Payoff

To reiterate, when it comes to creating a successful PRM program, make sure your marketing department is heavily involved on at least two fronts: segmenting partners to know which ones perform best, and creating a system that holds partners accountable.

Master those two factors, and you’ll go a long way toward ensuring that success breeds success. And isn’t that the goal of partner relationship management?

Learn More

For more details about how to segment partners as part of a PRM program, read our white paper on the pursuit of partner relationship management.

Of course, any PRM program is only as good as its foundation. In other words, don’t forget to master the basics of precision marketing, which (as the white paper details) includes tracking and measuring campaign effectiveness, including associated sales leads and follow-up endeavors. Such efforts go a long way toward dealing with the down economy, as well as ensuring that your marketing program is not just building the brand, but generating a demonstrable increase in sales.