Apr 8, 2024
PartnerScore CEO David Ward attended the Channel Meet Up event in San Jose California last week and had the opportunity to meet up with channel professionals from a number of different industries.
As one of the sponsors David took part in the opening presentations and hosted two round table events. The topic that David was discussing with round table attendees was, “Tracking partner experience to partner success and performance”, a subject very close to home for the PartnerScore platform.
Amongst the questions being raised by David were:
What does the partner experience mean to channel partners?
What processes are used currently to measure the partner engagement?
How do you measure the partner experience in your channel?
Here are the key points that David took away.
What does the partner experience mean to channel partners?
Answers varied amongst the participants, some relating it very closely to revenues and spend (a lagging metric) but almost all agreed that partnerships were becoming increasingly complex and hard to measure.
One of the key objectives for the panel was building trust with their partners but there was an acceptance that currently, benefits were generally measured at an organisational level and little activity was devoted to building trust at an individual level.
What processes are used currently to measure the partner engagement?
Most of the participants talked about using customer satisfaction surveys and Net Promotor Score feedback mechanisms, others referred to commercial data and frequency of log ins to partner portals.
A common issue discussed what that there was sometimes too much data to analyse and channel managers were not always sure which data to rely on. All agreed that it was difficult the measure the partner experience.
How do you measure the partner experience in your channel?
When asked how partner experience was measured in the various organisations taking part in the discussions, most talked about advisory boards but admitted these were typically for their larger customers, were often infrequent and generally only involved senior management.
There was a general consensus that two-way communication was essential and with more than just the top teams, if they were to gain real insight into the health of their partnerships.
Conclusions
David’s take aways from the discussions and keynote presentations were that whilst partnerships are becoming increasing essential for many organisations, they are often complex and difficult to measure and manage.
There is a genuine need for real time partner experience monitoring and at more than just at a senior management level. The output from the monitoring needed to be real time, easy to understand and enable channel leaders to respond quickly to issues at any level, before they impact revenues.
How the PartnerScore platform can help?
PartnerScore is a unique, proactive partner experience monitoring platform that helps channel partners achieve success in their partner ecosystems. Our real-time insights drive effective action and decision making to ensure the best possible partner experience.
