A structured and seamless partner onboarding program forms the backbone of strong relationships with your channel partners. After all, channel partnerships open avenues for market growth by providing access to new customers.

Smart, impactful onboarding is the key to building the partner relationships you desire and maximize partner performance. Poor onboarding of a new channel partner can seriously hamper partner productivity and engagement, increase ramp-up time, and leave end customers disappointed.

Before delving deeper, let’s first understand what partner onboarding is. Simply stated, partner onboarding is the act of providing your channel partners the training and education required to sell your product successfully. It’s the process of guiding your partners through their first few months with your business.

How does the onboarding process benefit the organization and its channel partners?

Smart onboarding enhances channel partner experience, maximizes partner performance, and positively impacts your business in the following manner – 

1. Enhances knowledge and skills

Onboarding training gives channel partners the education and skills required to sell the product well. This not only boosts partner productivity but also fuels the business’s revenue.

2. Saves costs in the long-run

Since channel partners are provided all the needed resources upfront, organizations save money in the long-run as they needn’t invest much time in solving product-related queries in the future. Moreover, it enables organizations to quickly roll-out product updates and helps ensure all partners take the necessary training to stay relevant and up-to-date. 

3. Builds brand image

Channel partners are on-field representatives of your brand and must be made aware of the brand’s vision and the values aligned with it. Such training fuels partner engagement, helps maintain the organization’s standards, and enhances brand image.

A few tips to ensure smart onboarding

Give a personal touch – Assign an internal company representative to every new partner, depending on their skills, knowledge, and area of expertise. Schedule one-on-one introductory calls and meetings that reiterate the value of the partnership and highlight the next steps in the process.

Incentivize the PAMs (Partner Account Managers) – To minimize RAMP times and expedite partner-produced revenue, organizations can provide incentives to the PAMs to speed up the partner onboarding process. This may involve rewarding PAMs for every significant onboarding activity they complete, such as 5-for-5 programs, or finishing off business plans within the initial two weeks.

Provide continuous support – Ensure internal reps are available at all times to support the channel partners. Provide partners access to all forms of communication, including details of a second or third line of contact, a specific email id, a dedicated telephone number, or even a direct extension. 

Leverage an automated partner relationship management platform – Organizations can leverage technology to streamline the partner onboarding process and ensure 24/7 access to all relevant resources on a unified platform. Include registration forms, training content, company news, product updates, and other essential resources on the forum. Monitor and measure key performance metrics using real-time dashboards and solicit feedback to improve the onboarding process continually.

How can Zaggle assist with smart channel partner onboarding?

Zaggle Propel, our enterprise rewards, incentives, and engagement solution for your channel partners, dealers, distributors, and freelancers, enables hassle-free onboarding on a branded website. 

Propel’s exciting onboarding features enable effective partner engagement and help maximize partner performance. Some of these include – 

1. Allows the creation of custom registration forms to capture relevant details of all the new partners.
2. Provides access to necessary information and resources, such as training material, surveys, polls, channel partner schemes, etc.
3. Helps define structured approval workflows, with a built-in notification system, for partner registration and smooth onboarding.
4. Delivers real-time reports and actionable insights on key partner metrics using various in-built dashboards, such as participation and adoption rates, time to the first sale, etc.
5. Empowers management to analyze, visualize, and measure results through quick stats, downloadable reports, and interactive dashboards.
6. Includes add-on features like web and mobile app, partner leaderboard, best practice library, gamification, third-party app integration, etc.

To know more about the other powerful capabilities of our software, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.