The discipline that embodies the principles and tactics of managing channel partners is called partner relationship management (PRM) or channel relationship management.

At the foundation of channel management, you’ll find partners. Partners fuel channel marketing, sales, and service efforts–their success is directly correlated to the overall channel’s success. While finding ways to manage them efficiently can be challenging, it’s a crucial component that can enable your organization to recruit and retain more partners, as well as, increase revenue at a much lower cost of sales and services than a direct sales and service model.

The Partner Journey

The word journey means it has a roadmap–with a beginning and an end. Regarding partner relationship management, the roadmap is about attaining higher sales velocity and better customer satisfaction at a lower cost of sales and services. The beginning of this journey starts with partner recruitment and it ends with a high-performing channel.

The truth is it never ends, because the channel is a living and breathing entity. It’s always changing. So, yes you start with a roadmap and you execute, but there are constant changes, detours, and optimization that you have to do with the new focus.

A successful and growing organization is always introducing new products, acquiring new partners, realigning their groups and incentives, etc., to achieve a higher level of performance. So, while you don’t want to make changes every ninety days, you certainly don’t want to stick with a stale channel program year after year either.

That’s why the notion of a partner journey revolves around a framework, but it’s highly dynamic–not like a Disney roller coaster ride, but more like a seasoned traveler that ventures through dozens of countries with a pre-determined budget to attain certain specific goals. In this case, those goals are to make more revenue at a lower cost with a higher customer satisfaction rate and very few business risks or (legal) exposures.

With this said, few things are constant. For a channel-focused organization, partners are always going to be a critical component of any business strategy, whether it’s a vendor just starting or an organization that has been established for years. After all, the productivity of the partners determines the success of the channel. This is where a well-tuned partner relationship management (PRM) software or system can truly help an organization realize its channel strategy and business goals.

With this in mind, let’s go through an overall partner journey with a vendor organization–starting with partner recruitment, training, enablement, sales, and ongoing relationship management.

Partner Recruitment

This is the first step in a partner journey–joining a vendor organization or partner recruitment. You can’t expect to scale without adding new channel partners to your organization. There must be an ongoing and proactive effort to build relationships with potential channel partner organizations that can sell and support a vendor’s solution. This includes both outreach and onboarding processes. A well-designed partner relationship management (PRM) platform should allow you to do this well.

Rather than targeting any available partner, outreach efforts should be built around a strategy–one that seeks out channel partners who are likely to perform. But recruiting is only half the battle. Once you’ve signed on the dotted line it’s time to give them all the resources and knowledge they need to begin actively selling as soon as possible.

Partner Training

The goal here is to ensure partners’ functional teams are properly trained on how to market, sell, deploy, and support a specific solution. This means more than just a two-day conference in a hotel.

To properly give new partners the tools they need to sell you need to take a more holistic and ongoing approach. By that, we mean offering online courses, including webinars, courses, tracks,