Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 034 - Partner Onboarding: The Path to Revenue - Part 2/5

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034 - Partner Onboarding: The Path to Revenue - Part 2/5 · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:16
  My name is Rick van den Bosch, and I'm the CEO and founder at Channext.
• 0:19
  And I'm here together with Alex Withford, VP partners at Channext.
• 0:22
  Alex, how are you doing today?
• 0:22
  Yeah, good.
• 0:25
  Yeah.
• 0:25
  Today we're tackling the second part of our five part series around onboarding and I'm excited to get into it.
• 0:31
  Likewise, I think indeed for the listeners, we are doing a five part series on bridging the partner recruit to revenue gap.
• 0:40
  Or in other words, how do you get a net new partner as quick as possible to first revenue.
• 0:46
  And therefore indeed we are touching upon several topics and today we are touching upon onboarding and maybe Alex to take it away.
• 0:55
  Why is onboarding so important in the partner journey?
• 1:00
  Yeah, sure.
• 1:00
  So onboarding is the sort of mechanism that you're going to get sort of partner terms signed, maybe their distribution agreements set up the actual mechanics for the ability to market and sell your product.
• 1:12
  And I'll be honest, most people do it horrendously because they delegate some of the responsibilities down to the partner, some of the responsibilities maybe to a distributor.
• 1:21
  And because there's not really a plan set out for the onboarding journey.
• 1:25
  This is where a lot of partners get confused and stall in progress, which ultimately worsens the relationship between the partner and the vendor stagnates sale and creates churn.
• 1:36
  And for me it's critical and we covered it a lot.
• 1:39
  Last point.
• 1:39
  But for any of the listeners who didn't go and listen to the podcast, go and listen to it.
• 1:45
  But just a very quick synopsis, what we see in the channel is the recruit to revenue gap.
• 1:50
  The longer that takes and the more complex that is maximises churn and ruins scaling and for me is the number one problem that we see in channel recruitment.
• 1:59
  Onboarding is a key mechanism because within the onboarding plan you're going to set out a partner success plan which includes delegation of responsibilities, time frames and an explanation of the entire journey as well as the legal infrastructure, the sort of finance infrastructure of making everything work.
• 2:16
  Getting that done very seamlessly is critical to success.
• 2:20
  Yeah, I think in previous podcasts we touched upon that a lot, right.
• 2:24
  That for partners it's very important to know where the finish line is, but also that they have the feeling that they are getting closer and closer.
• 2:31
  And I think that if you look at an onboarding, if you set out a plan you want to see, okay, how do we get you to first revenue?
• 2:37
  And as such, what steps are we going to take?
• 2:39
  And also what are the roles and responsibilities and make sure that you keep each other accountable, that you're actually making those steps there as well.
• 2:46
  Yeah, and for any sort of CROs out there who go, oh, well, how relevant or how important is this?
• 2:52
  Think about it from an enterprise sales perspective.
• 2:55
  Imagine you only reported on revenue.
• 2:58
  Well, you might only close three deals a year so that means there's nothing to report on until the revenue lands.
• 3:03
  Well no you don't.
• 3:04
  You track all of the lead measures that go up to that process so you can track progress effectively and catch any stagnations and any problems.
• 3:13
  Partners think the exact same thing, they go brilliant, I've just signed a contract with X large brand.
• 3:19
  Oh, I haven't seen any revenue.
• 3:21
  Well yeah, if you don't set out all the lead measures in the onboarding process, in the partner success plan that partners will feel we are not making any progress.
• 3:31
  While people are complaining about the work that they have to do that ultimately isn't generating any revenue.
• 3:36
  They've got to co-market, they've got to co sell, they've got to do trainings, they've got to do all of those pieces and if the leaders within the partners can't understand how far they are through the process, that will only cause concern by the fact that revenue hasn't landed yet.
• 3:50
  And I think why that partner success plan is so important to have a very clear view together of where are we going?
• 3:57
  And I think therefore indeed, if you can take a partner on that journey and also make sure they keep excited like when they are going there.
• 4:05
  Because I think that's indeed you touched upon it just now.
• 4:07
  What we went in quite deeply in the last podcast episode is the best way to keep the attention of your partners is giving them that feeling that they can generate a lot of revenue with you and that's the traction you want to create in your onboarding.
• 4:20
  So how are we going to get you there as soon as possible and create a partner success plan around that?
• 4:26
  For that specific partner?
• 4:27
  How do we make sure that you become successful in a short period amount of time?
• 4:33
  Or in other words, how do we get the time to value for that partner as quick as possible or as short as possible?
• 4:40
  Yeah, exactly.
• 4:41
  And some of that onboarding process, especially some of the bit really early on is actually can be quite complicated, right?
• 4:46
  Signing headed terms or having legal discussions.
• 4:50
  One, that's a very expensive thing to do for some companies, and two, it takes quite a long time.
• 4:56
  And so you want to be very, very clear on the time to value for the partner how much value they're expected within three months, within six months, within nine months, within twelve months.
• 5:05
  Because that will be the carrot to get them through the stick.
• 5:08
  Right.
• 5:09
  Some of that mechanism that they have to do early on, that's very painful.
• 5:13
  Now, we're obviously through this podcast going to discuss some of the things you could do to simplify the end to end process.
• 5:18
  But especially for complex sales cycles and complex partner cycles.
• 5:22
  Some of that can be really, really hard.
• 5:24
  You've got to have some very big carrots and a very clear explanation for how we're going to get there to sort of drive the impetus from the partners to get through those problems.
• 5:31
  Maybe we can start with that one where we really dive into what does a good partner success plan or partner onboarding plan, whatever you want to call it, entails for you?
• 5:41
  Yeah.
• 5:42
  So for me we've discussed a lot and I do a lot of training internally.
• 5:46
  What makes up a plan?
• 5:47
  Three key things.
• 5:48
  Where are we going, how are we going to get there and when do we need to get there by?
• 5:52
  Right.
• 5:52
  That's what your partner success plan has to outline it's what are the different streams of things that we have to do?
• 5:58
  So I'll break those down into the four key pillars, which is sales, marketing, technical and operations.
• 6:03
  What are the four pillars?
• 6:04
  Who has responsibility within each one of those pillars?
• 6:07
  What are the deadlines?
• 6:08
  And who within the vendor, who within the distributor and who within the partner has to take accountability for the success of each one of those components.
• 6:16
  So if we take operations, that's going to be legal, finance.
• 6:19
  If we take sales, that's going to be onboarding training, co-selling, sales days, whatever the things are, marketing, asset creation, asset syndication, marketing, plan creation, all of those pillars have to be knitted together into a jointly signed off plan.
• 6:35
  Not just a plan sent by the vendor, but a plan agreed by the partners.
• 6:40
  Because once you've got that senior level agreement within the partner, that senior person then can cascade the responsibilities down to each one of those four pillars and ensure progress and accountability.
• 6:51
  Meaning that the partner is clear on where are we going and how are we going to get there.
• 6:57
  And then the last bit that you need within the plan is when are we going to get there by?
• 7:00
  And what you want to do to that when are we going to get there by is tie a big carrot, that's your time to value.
• 7:05
  Those are your deals, those are the revenue opportunities.
• 7:08
  You want a very, very clear outline.
• 7:11
  We in our customer success plans internally use a Gantt chart to really take everyone through that.
• 7:16
  But for me that's the mechanism of what breaks down a really strong partner success plan.
• 7:21
  What I like there is when do you get there piece as well.
• 7:25
  Because I think there it's very important as a vendor to have a very clear understanding of, for example, what your sales cycle looks like, but also of how long it usually takes for a partner to get to the first deal registration or the first lead you're going to work on together.
• 7:39
  Because that's indeed, when you talk about expectations, if you already know that it's always a twelve month deal cycle, then it's very important within that partner to communicate that very clearly in the beginning, but also show them what the impact can be because usually the longer sales cycles have much more revenue or impact.
• 7:57
  Of course there but also look a lot like what kind of other carrots can we create within that partner success plan so we can get the short term success and the short term celebrations as well.
• 8:07
  And that's crucial.
• 8:07
  And based on how long is our sales cycle?
• 8:11
  When it's an SMB sales cycle that's very quickly, then you just have a go.
• 8:14
  Okay, we're going to get you that first deal in as soon as possible and this is how we're going to get there.
• 8:18
  Well, if it may be a big enterprise deal, you say it will take probably twelve months until the first revenue, but these are all the steps we're going to take to get there.
• 8:26
  This is what we want to have by end of month two, by end of month three, maybe we want to have our first opportunity together and things like that and really celebrate that within the plan with the partners as well.
• 8:37
  Yeah, we've often discussed it in partner recruitment.
• 8:40
  There's three things that you need to give to the partner.
• 8:43
  You need to explain who the end user is that you're going to be selling to, how difficult the sales process is and how much money are the partners going to make.
• 8:51
  Now what's important about point 2 how difficult it is to sell, that also includes the onboarding.
• 8:58
  Right?
• 8:58
  Because it's no good having a really easy product to sell, loads of opportunities out there.
• 9:02
  But there's a 14 month onboarding plan.
• 9:05
  Well, that's really important to set the expectations.
• 9:07
  You then reset those expectations in the onboarding plan, which is a sales cycle is X, but the onboarding cycle is Y.
• 9:14
  The time to value is X plus Y.
• 9:16
  We're going to accelerate you through that process.
• 9:18
  Here's what we expect in terms of opportunity creation.
• 9:20
  Within month three sales cycle is seven months.
• 9:23
  We would expect it's going to be ten months in.
• 9:27
  We should be able to start seeing revenue and we're going to accelerate that through that process.
• 9:32
  The other important point within that partner success plan is what to do when it goes wrong.
• 9:37
  So you'll often see this, oh, contract was meant to take two weeks, contract took six weeks.
• 9:42
  Well guess what?
• 9:43
  The whole plan is now four weeks out of Kilter.
• 9:45
  And so what should be happening is an immediate flag into the relevant people within the partner, the distributor and the vendor, depending on what pillar it is.
• 9:53
  Anytime we're starting to stray too closely to not hitting a deadline.
• 9:58
  And then it's pretty simple operational design, right?
• 10:01
  If all the deadlines match, then the plan is achieved in time.
• 10:04
  If one of the deadlines slips, the whole plan falls out of kilter.
• 10:07
  So what you want to be doing is stagnating everything together so that you can effectively handle all of those mini objectives that teslate into the much bigger one.
• 10:16
  Yeah, I think that one is really crucial because indeed creating the plan is a of course, but really getting it to the success in the word of the partners success plan, that's a whole different thing.
• 10:27
  And I think therefore, indeed, if you have a small set of partners, you can maybe still do it yourself but really do it very specifically and be on top of it.
• 10:35
  Like it really requires killer project management from the vendor side as well.
• 10:39
  But if you start doing that at scale, then you really need to look at software as well where you can look in it like, what are the steps we're making?
• 10:45
  We have a success plan and as soon as we are missing deadlines, then indeed the right communication is going to the right stakeholders.
• 10:52
  Yeah, 100%.
• 10:53
  And I think what we need to be delivering and creating a really good plan is hard work then managing that plan to be successful continuously at scale, that's really hard work and you want to be investing in the right tooling and automation to simplify some of those mini steps to make everything easier.
• 11:13
  The one that we always talk about is, well, do we really need to redline every agreement or do we just really need to redline agreements for very specific partners?
• 11:22
  And we can just get someone to tick terms and conditions approved.
• 11:26
  Right?
• 11:26
  That's a really simple operational improvement or technical improvement that we can make to the onboarding process.
• 11:32
  That means that suddenly, oh, we can actually get headed terms signed very, very quickly at a wide scale and you want to be analysing each one of those steps of your process and your programme going, how do we shorten this?
• 11:45
  How do we make it 10% better?
• 11:47
  Improve it slightly or 200%, redesign it.
• 11:50
  And that's what you want to be analysing around all those mini steps because 1% improvements to each one of those steps equals a radical improvement to the whole process.
• 11:59
  Again, minimising churn.
• 12:01
  The longer and more complex this becomes, the more failure you're going to see at scale.
• 12:07
  I'm just thinking indeed, like, it needs to be flagged but I'm also very curious and you have a lot more experience in this than me.
• 12:14
  What if a partner just doesn't do the actions that you agreed upon?
• 12:19
  What is the best approach there?
• 12:20
  How do you communicate, et cetera, to make sure that you get it in motion again?
• 12:25
  Yeah, so the most common reason I see that sort of partner stagnation, we didn't get in at a more senior enough level.
• 12:31
  Right.
• 12:31
  So what will happen is we spoke to sales director who saw an opportunity, or potentially they heard about a deal that they can get cut in on.
• 12:38
  And then they were like, yeah, we really excited to sign.
• 12:42
  The whole process started going.
• 12:43
  And then it gets stopped at legal, or it gets stopped at finance, or it gets stopped at senior management.
• 12:47
  And then when it comes down to it, the senior leaders within the partner are not bought into the strategy.
• 12:53
  And then when someone digs their heels in and isn't willing to do their bit, you can't create top down pressure within the partner.
• 13:00
  Top down pressure is required because no partner, we're all busy, right, and we all have lots of things to do.
• 13:07
  Someone goes on holiday, it's not handed over properly, and suddenly the legal agreement isn't being signed, or suddenly the technical onboarding isn't happening, or suddenly the marketing team decide they have other priorities.
• 13:18
  Unless you can create top down pressure within the partner and realign priorities to what your priorities are, you are going to struggle.
• 13:27
  So you've got to get in at the top, sell the value of what you're trying to deliver and then leverage senior management as an escalation where appropriate.
• 13:36
  Don't burn bridges unnecessarily where appropriate.
• 13:39
  You can then drive senior management to speak to marketing if that's the blocker to remove the broker and continue to drive progress forward.
• 13:46
  I think that's a very interesting one, because indeed, if you look at that, that's required, right?
• 13:50
  Sometimes when you have to like in partnering, you are working together with so many different departments in another company, you really need that top down.
• 13:59
  But I'm I'm very curious how top does it need to be?
• 14:02
  Like, what is the minimum required?
• 14:04
  Of course, ideally, I can imagine it's with the CEO or the director or whatever, but what would you say is the minimum required seniority level to have that right top down pressure?
• 14:14
  Yeah.
• 14:14
  You shortcuted my sort of short answer.
• 14:16
  Which is the most senior stakeholder you can get a hold of, right?
• 14:19
  If you can speak to the CEO, speak to the CEO.
• 14:21
  But what's really important in a bigger company, right, that's obviously in a bigger partner, that's going to be a challenge, but you want to be speaking to the person who has the ability to control the full sales cycle or the full partner cycle.
• 14:34
  So in our deals, that might be an EMEA marketing director or an EMEA channel leader.
• 14:39
  Now, they're not responsible for legal, but they have a huge amount of influence into that department.
• 14:44
  That's the same thing you want to be doing.
• 14:46
  You want to be speaking to the most senior stakeholder and then when you're speaking to that stakeholder, challenge them.
• 14:52
  It's worth it, right, to really say, look, here are the stakeholders that we're going to need.
• 14:56
  Here's the workflows that are required.
• 14:58
  Do we need to have a joint meeting with legal so that they understand what we are trying to deliver?
• 15:03
  I can't tell you how many mega deals I've seen slow down and miss quarter, miss a deadline because legal weren't looped in early enough.
• 15:12
  They didn't understand the value of the opportunity that was ahead of them.
• 15:15
  And so the deal just died.
• 15:17
  Or the deal was delayed.
• 15:18
  The same is true of partner onboarding.
• 15:20
  So walk your champion, your stakeholder through all of the requirements and set up joint meetings to create pressure.
• 15:28
  And if they don't feel confident that they can drive the situation forward, you're not speaking to a senior enough stakeholder.
• 15:35
  Get the senior stakeholder bought in, sell the value, sell the plan and then go again.
• 15:39
  I think what I'm just thinking about, indeed, is how important is it to also ask the questions that we sometimes shy away a little bit about?
• 15:47
  We've spoken a lot about that in sales as well.
• 15:49
  It's so crucial to ask those questions, of course, when you are in a partner position and legal, et cetera, it's not the thing you want to talk about the most, because it's not the most exciting part of your new partnership.
• 16:00
  But ask for it indeed.
• 16:01
  Do they need to be involved?
• 16:02
  Does finance need to be involved?
• 16:04
  You better just know it.
• 16:05
  And maybe, indeed, the process becomes more complex, but you are in the driver's seat.
• 16:11
  Then, instead of making sure there's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of things going on, but then eventually it stalls down later on because you indeed haven't looped in the right stakeholders early enough.
• 16:21
  Yeah.
• 16:21
  My number one channel sales tip, and the thing that differentiates good salespeople from average salespeople good to great salespeople ask for the no and they ask for the no all the time.
• 16:34
  Why wouldn't this deal go ahead?
• 16:36
  What would be the challenges that would prevent this deal from going?
• 16:39
  Why, as a partner, would you choose another vendor?
• 16:42
  They look for all the dirty little secrets, look for all the skeletons.
• 16:45
  Why?
• 16:45
  Then they could solve them, right?
• 16:47
  They can solve them proactively, they can fix issues.
• 16:51
  Bad salespeople go, oh, they're interested.
• 16:53
  Brilliant.
• 16:54
  Well, I won't ask any questions because that might change their mind.
• 16:57
  It's a weak position to be in.
• 16:58
  You want to get into a position of strength that's finding reasons the deal won't go ahead and solve them.
• 17:03
  The best salespeople in the world do that all the time.
• 17:06
  And we, as channel people, we as partner people, have to do it more.
• 17:09
  Yeah, I'm fully on board there.
• 17:11
  I think when we talk about that partner success plan, there's, of course, within many vendors, different type of partner programmes.
• 17:18
  A lot of vendors we know, they have a resale programme, they have a referral programme, they have a tech partner programme.
• 17:23
  How important is it there?
• 17:24
  Like, can you have a one size fits all in terms of onboarding, or does it need to be tailor made?
• 17:30
  So, ideally tailor made, right.
• 17:32
  It depends on the maturity of the channel.
• 17:34
  If you've just started your partner programme yeah, you're going to build a one size fits all solution first, but then as quickly as possible, you then want to cut down and specify, and there's a million different segmentations.
• 17:46
  Right.
• 17:46
  Language size type of partnership, referral versus resell, tech versus ISV, telco versus VAR.
• 17:53
  You want to get as specific as you can.
• 17:55
  Why guarantee success?
• 17:57
  You want to build a programme that is going to put your partners in the best position to have success and the best way to monitor that.
• 18:05
  Track conversion, track time to value, keep conversion as high as possible, keep time to value as short as possible.
• 18:11
  Do those things consistently over time, you're going to build an award winning partner programme.
• 18:15
  I fully agree that the more tailor made, the better.
• 18:17
  But of course, we are also talking to a lot of SaaS companies, et cetera, still building it.
• 18:21
  I think the most crucial differentiator is really in the partner programme.
• 18:25
  In terms of partner type, where you indeed have, whether it's resell or referral, that's already wildly different.
• 18:31
  What such a partners needs to be able to do so a referral partner only has to bring in a certain new lead and then your direct sales team just takes over to close the full deal.
• 18:41
  They need to learn and they need a very different type of legal structure, et cetera, than someone who's really going to buy your product and sell your product and maybe create their own services completely around it and things like that.
• 18:53
  So I think that's indeed an important one to think about.
• 18:56
  Yeah.
• 18:56
  And the thing I would challenge people on, and I get into lots of debates with channel leaders around the world, around this one, is specificity of programme drives, success within that programme.
• 19:08
  So don't go wide, go deep, right?
• 19:11
  Don't build an ISV partnership and a tech partnership and a telco partnership and a resale programme and a referral programme when none of them are yet successful.
• 19:20
  Go and build one, be successful with it and then cannibalise what you've learned from that and build another one.
• 19:26
  Right.
• 19:27
  So a really classic example would be like, oh, well, we can build a referral programme because it's fairly simple to get off the ground.
• 19:33
  Right.
• 19:34
  You're still controlling as a vendor most of the sales cycle.
• 19:36
  Good.
• 19:36
  That's a really good start.
• 19:38
  Well, when you get one resale deal, don't think right.
• 19:41
  Well, now we have to pivot.
• 19:42
  Ask yourself, is the best use of resource redesigning an entire partner programme or is it finding more referral partners and scaling that way?
• 19:51
  And what you'll very often find is you're better going deep than wide early, and then over time, add strands and then you can start to go wider.
• 20:00
  But don't sacrifice depth to get breadth.
• 20:03
  That is not a value in your early stage cycle.
• 20:07
  It makes me think immediately of when you look at that as well.
• 20:11
  Indeed, when you make one programme very successful, let's take the resell programme and you have a vast majority of resellers who are very excited about you, who are very much willing to put you in front of their end user, et cetera, then your other type of programmes can become successful much easier.
• 20:27
  Because, let's say you go to your resellers and say what other ISVs?
• 20:31
  Are you positioning all the time together with me or are you creating a package around that?
• 20:36
  And that could be your ultimate kickstart of your ISV or your tech partner programme where you can actually know that you start immediately with the right type of ISVs because they are actually utilised a lot already by your resellers.
• 20:48
  And you also can ask your resellers a lot of questions like how you're working with them and what's important for them and what kind of value proposition do you have?
• 20:56
  So a lot becomes a lot easier in terms of making the programme around those type of partners.
• 21:01
  Yeah, of course and to me you want to build the best reputation, get the most value, that's depth always no one cares about mile wide inch deep, they care about a mile deep inch wide.
• 21:12
  That's what you're after and then, like you say, the extrapolation to get wider and wider from there is really simple.
• 21:18
  The other thing I would always say, and I've seen it happen, a partner will go, no, we only do resell, don't do referral, and then a resale programme gets built and I've seen deals where we go, no, well, we only do referral.
• 21:31
  So if you want to be involved with us, you have to go referral and that resale partner goes, okay, fine, right, it's how hard did you really push back?
• 21:38
  How hard did you challenge or is now tens of people doing hundreds of hours of work because the salesperson didn't really push back as hard as needed also, how valuable was that deal that we're really talking about?
• 21:51
  Is it worth all that time now?
• 21:53
  If you're suddenly talking about lots of deals, lots of value, good.
• 21:57
  Then you've got a business case to really go all in and really build a deep programme.
• 22:02
  But don't build a pad programme, because we've talked about this hundreds of times.
• 22:05
  Deal goes wrong, deal doesn't happen.
• 22:09
  Partners gets a bad feeling, partner talks to another partner, suddenly you've got a crap reputation in the channel.
• 22:14
  Oh, their resale program's rubbish.
• 22:14
  Don't do it.
• 22:16
  Then once you've got a really good resale programme, people don't believe you.
• 22:19
  Suddenly you're fighting up against it.
• 22:21
  So instead focused on really focusing on one, then we can start to broaden and really that metric and that high standard that you set in the one partner programme will then carry over to your other programmes and you can start to do more and more segmentation.
• 22:36
  Yeah, what I like about this is where you see it going then indeed is if you build one programme, then you can optimise and increase the conversions in every stage of your onboarding so much quicker because then indeed you look at, okay, we've been talking about it before, partner velocity, how quickly do they go through it?
• 22:55
  But also that time to value.
• 22:56
  And there indeed, if you do that within that programme, you get a lot of learnings that you can later on implement in your other programmes as well, or if you don't have other programmes when you start building them.
• 23:06
  And I think that's indeed a crucial one to think about.
• 23:09
  Yeah, sure.
• 23:09
  Let's take a really easy example, right?
• 23:12
  Let's say you've got ten referral partners, you're learning, you've got ten data points effectively, and then someone goes, oh, we need to build a resale channel.
• 23:19
  And you go, okay, fine, well, that's okay.
• 23:23
  But imagine if you instead of that, you then focused on going, well, let's just grow from ten referral partners to 100 referral partners.
• 23:29
  Now, you've got ten X the information, ten X the data points, to then convert some of that across to your new partner programme.
• 23:36
  Well, guess what?
• 23:37
  All the co marketing material is exactly the same, right?
• 23:40
  Marketing for resell or marketing for a referral.
• 23:42
  It's the same process.
• 23:44
  Well, I'd much rather easily scale to 100 referral partners, collate all of that information, build amazing channel marketing, and then be able to just flick cookie cutter that across to my new resale programme.
• 23:58
  Suddenly, all these resellers going, bloody hell, their marketing is really, really strong.
• 24:01
  Actually, I'm finding it really easy to get into opportunities with the quality of their marketing that's going to generate success at scale.
• 24:09
  And so you really want to think in that optimum, long term approach, don't think, oh, there's a deal here, we have to go after it.
• 24:16
  No, build programmes that are going to make you successful in five years time.
• 24:20
  Yeah.
• 24:20
  When I think about, for example, that tailormate and per programme, I think maybe for our listeners who are a bit further down the line, let's say you have three programmes, a reseller, referral and an ISV, they really look at that partner, take your ideal partner profile with it again, like, who is that partner?
• 24:38
  What role are they playing in our full customer sales journey?
• 24:42
  Are they just bringing in the lead?
• 24:44
  Are they doing the full cycle?
• 24:45
  Are they a tech partner?
• 24:47
  Because then it will really determine as well how your partner success plan gets drafted.
• 24:52
  Because with a tech partner, you need a lot more help from the product side, from the partner that you're going to work, because you need to integrate completely.
• 24:59
  You need marketing with a joint value proposition within the referral partner, you need to make sure that you get the right sales and the marketing people, so you boost that within a resale, you need to enable them with the full cycle.
• 25:11
  So really look at that.
• 25:12
  If you start building your onboarding, so to say, per programme, what is the role of that partner in our specific customer journey there?
• 25:21
  And then you can really make it tailor made specifically for them.
• 25:24
  I think that's the step where I would start in terms of.
• 25:27
  The type of partner for sure a.
• 25:29
  Plan like we've said 100 times, where are we going?
• 25:31
  How are we going to get there?
• 25:31
  Well, where are we going?
• 25:34
  For a tech ISV versus a resale partner versus a referral, partners are three wildly different places.
• 25:40
  So work the plan back from that design.
• 25:42
  As long as you do that and you're really thoughtful around how do we make this as easy as possible from the partner to drive up conversion and shorten time to value?
• 25:52
  You are going to have a partner success plan which makes the partners successful.
• 25:56
  Their success is your success.
• 25:59
  I love it.
• 25:59
  Maybe.
• 26:00
  Final question.
• 26:00
  You said make it as easy as possible.
• 26:03
  Do you have a specific tip for listeners?
• 26:05
  Like what is something in that onboarding where you need to focus on or it can be multiple things but to make it as easy as possible.
• 26:12
  Good because I think that's very clear.
• 26:14
  That's crucial, right?
• 26:15
  In the onboarding.
• 26:15
  Yeah.
• 26:16
  Automation.
• 26:16
  Automation.
• 26:17
  Automation.
• 26:17
  As simple as possible.
• 26:19
  I feel like I'm the world's laziest salesperson, world's laziest operational person.
• 26:24
  I look at a process and think what steps are actually valuable, what do we really need to do?
• 26:29
  And automate all of the in between bits.
• 26:29
  Right.
• 26:32
  So as a vendor, if a partner has to do three sales trainings we'll get the first one done.
• 26:39
  The second that's done, automatically send out the second one.
• 26:41
  Automatically send out the third one.
• 26:43
  preschedule everything.
• 26:44
  Invest in the tooling that's going to do sequences to get people through that gantt chart across sales, marketing and technical and ops as fast as possible.
• 26:53
  And the more streamlined you make it, the better.
• 26:57
  Just think about removing every single step that isn't valid.
• 27:00
  The more you shorten it down, people will be amazed at how much that improves conversion.
• 27:07
  Yeah, I like that.
• 27:08
  I think indeed when I think about it as well, like make sure that the sign up is easy, that the partner gets approved quickly.
• 27:14
  Don't wait too long with such things.
• 27:16
  Like I've seen examples where partners have been pending for 30 days then they're already like when they just signed up, at that moment they are the hottest partner, so to say.
• 27:25
  Or they are really looking forward to work with you.
• 27:28
  But then also once they are get the first approval make sure that it's very easy to sign the contracts.
• 27:34
  Make sure you work with something like DocuSign, like just everything.
• 27:38
  How easier you can make it, the better it is.
• 27:41
  Let's even just take that approval one.
• 27:41
  Right.
• 27:43
  Because what should be happening is you build an ideal partner profile.
• 27:47
  You then have a list of partners that you're going to proactively go after.
• 27:51
  You track that by domain and then it's automatically approved.
• 27:54
  That's what you want to be thinking about?
• 27:54
  Yes.
• 27:57
  There's always going to be, oh, we signed up through the website.
• 28:00
  Okay, well then you need a different strand for how you deal with that, but the more you can focus on automating every step.
• 28:07
  So go, applied, approved, done.
• 28:07
  Excellent.
• 28:09
  Right, then we're onto the next thing.
• 28:11
  We're onto the next thing that's going to drive consistent cadence.
• 28:14
  Yeah, fully, fully on board there, I think.
• 28:16
  Indeed, if you have that step, then immediately they are into your programme in the first approval and then they sign the legal, they are in the second step and then they have multiple steps to fully on board it.
• 28:26
  And I think there's a lot of wins there.
• 28:28
  But I also really liked your point around the automation of all the other steps and the reminders, like, you just need to think about it almost like the project manager or the onboarding manager that does all that for you.
• 28:39
  For you, your partners and your distributor.
• 28:41
  Yes.
• 28:41
  Digital Partner success is what we're evangelising at the moment.
• 28:44
  Right.
• 28:45
  And the great thing is people will say no, but for our top 20% of partners that deliver all the revenue, we don't want Digital Partner success.
• 28:53
  You do.
• 28:53
  Because then it allows the one to one resource to focus on face to face meetings.
• 28:58
  Everything else is still handled digitally.
• 29:01
  That's why it's such a good investment.
• 29:03
  And then, therefore, indeed, then the partner people can actually focus on the relationships and closing the deals with the partners.
• 29:08
  And that's a crucial one.
• 29:10
  Relationships and revenue, the only thing cams should really be focusing on.
• 29:13
  Love it.
• 29:13
  Thank you, Alex, for all your tips today around onboarding.
• 29:16
  I enjoyed this conversation as well.
• 29:18
  I hope for our listeners you enjoyed the conversation too.
• 29:21
  And we'll see you next week.
• 29:21
  Bye.