Treating Partners As Leads: Beyond The Committed Stage

As partners commit to a supplier’s channel program, channel marketing must apply a partner engagement strategy to ensure participation. Failing to efficiently ramp up new partners can lead to missed revenue goals. Make sure new partners understand and use everything that is available to help them succeed – including training, sales tools, opportunities and incentives.

When creating a partner ecosystem, many B2B suppliers succeed in getting partners to sign up for their programs, but then take a passive approach, leaving it to partners to participate in training and demand programs and to seek out supplier support for sales opportunities. Instead, suppliers must develop and deploy programs to engage partners and help them become productive. In this report, we present best practices for implementing channel marketing programs that optimize partner engagement by treating newly signed partners as leads in the bottom half of the Forrester Channel Recruitment Waterfall.