Getting your partnering effort to scale

I met recently with a prospect from a very large and prestigious partnering company. They have just under 15,000 registered partners in the US alone. The core group represents around 6,000 partners. Of course they have deployed just about every system you might think of to help manage this colossal effort in partnering, many of them expensive custom facilities created specifically for them.

From our discussion, I believe that AccountMaven.com offers them advantages that they are not currently realizing with their existing efforts.  Specifically the ability for partners to work with other partners within the channel. Also the ability to tap into partner networks from other companies to help them with their recruitment efforts. Finally in adding to the methods of communication they use to communicate with their partners particularly as joint solutions with their strategic alliance partners.

However, what stuck me most of all from our conversation was the obvious scale of this partnering effort as opposed to probably 90% of all companies out there. If you have 15,000 partners with a core active group of 6,000 to activate you can pretty much not worry about the problems of scaling to critical mass. You have mass all of your own and your partners supposedly will adopt and participate in your partnering efforts and facilities assuming they are worthwhile. For most small to medium sized companies its a very different scenario. Why would one of those same 15,000 partners using this companies facilities come along to those of a relatively diminutive organization and give them the same level of ‘mindshare’? The reality is that they would not, and this speaks to the consistent problem that is evident in the partnering market.

Spending money on developing, deploying and maintaining partnering facilities that nobody uses or even logs into is plainly a wasted investment. It’s hard to understand how companies justify continuing to go down this route in the face of this experience. A different approach is warranted and for the the small to medium sized company, that approach can only be as part of an integrated, multi-dimensional community that has existing scale to tap into.

The net benefits to each and every member of the sales community that participates in that community is greatly enhanced with the addition of both new companies and new individual members. These are the so called ‘networking effects’ which have shown themselves so effective in creating the leaders of the Internet.

Why is blogging easy and partnering hard?

The world is changing fast. It was not long ago that the only people who got published were journalists and authors. Publishing a book meant significant investment (and risk) on the part of somebody, either the publisher or the author. Now anyone can get published by setting up a blog with free blogging software like WordPress, and they can generate significant traffic and success.

When I created this blog, it took me about 15 minutes to set it up and write the first post. I chose the features I wanted from a set of applets, uploaded a custom image and invited the first people to read it. Total investment = zero. Return on investment as yet unknown.

We wonder why it is that running a channel sales program is therefore so prohibitively expensive. You need dedicated channel sales people on salary and customized software from a leading CRM tool. You might have one or more private portals created from scratch by a web designer, and the expense of maintaining and promoting these sites. The worse news yet, is that research shows that these significant investments in partnering, activation and recruitment yield typical results that are very mediocre. I have yet to meet a channel sales leader who is satisifed with the performance of their channel partners.

We think that social networking has the best chance to activate channel partners for these reasons:

• business is about relationships, social networking is about connecting people
• communication is improved
• a unified community is dynamic and interesting

Finally, we think that setting up your channel sales ecosystem with Web 2.0 tools should be no more difficult than setting up a blog. You should be able to do it in 15 minutes, and it should be free until it can demonstrate to you that its improving your bottom line.

This is our vision for AccountMaven – Push-Button Partnering.