As more and more businesses rely on channel partners as a significant revenue source, attracting and retaining the right partners becomes a foremost priority.

Finding the right partners and providing them with adequate training, resources, and feedback are some of the challenges organizations face. Moreover, to ensure channel partners are productive and profitable and to keep the best talent, designing effective partner incentive programs is crucial.

So, below we present a few tips to attract and retain the right channel partners.

Tips to attract and retain the right channel partners

1. Defining the “ideal” partner

Who is an ideal channel partner? The answer lies in evaluating a few value propositions before signing up a partner, which include – 

• Assessing the skills, qualifications, and experience, including the technical acumen, industry expertise, and selling capacity
• Evaluating if the partner is well-positioned within the right geography and has the required customer base in relation to all the other products he/she sells

2. Leverage valuable data insights

For companies with an existing channel partner program, identifying the already successful areas through key performance indicators, such as product performance, customer satisfaction, channel revenue, etc., is essential to measure what common qualities your successful partners have and then look for channel partners with similar attributes.

Once a partner persona is created – that represents the goals and expected behavior – the next step is to acquire leads through social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, direct mail, trade shows, etc.

3. Develop an effective channel partner pitch

Emphasizing your market position and authority with a clear business strategy that explains your company’s USP and how your offering is different and superior from the competitors is the key to engage and recruit the right channel partners.

4. Ensure smart onboarding programs are in place

Effective onboarding not only arms your channel partners with the skills and education required to sell your product or service but also enhances partner engagement and company image and helps acquire/retain channel partners. 

5. Implement a well-defined and profitable incentive program

Unless incentive programs are well-articulated and profitable and meet each partner’s specific objectives and business needs, they will not live up to their expectations, making it challenging to retain the partners.

How can Zaggle help?

Zaggle Propel, our digital rewards, incentives, and engagement platform for channel partners, helps with seamless onboarding, developing KPI-driven metric-based reward programs, analyzing reports and business metrics to assess performance, and designing gamification elements like polls and surveys to drive engagement.

Our software boasts of advanced capabilities, including – 

• Creation of custom forms and multi-tiered approval workflows for smooth registration of new partners
• Automation of the claims submission and approval process, enhancing partner experience in the process
• Metric Based Configurator, with a provision to define multiple KPIs, attributes, weightage, and qualification criteria for incentive programs
• Individual partner dashboards, automated badges and community dashboards for outstanding performance, and dynamic leaderboards with demographic filters to display specific achievements
• In-built gamification to create tiered reward and umbrella recognition programs

To know more about the other exciting features of Propel, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.