Dealing with passwords

It seems that a very common problem with partner resources online, is the whole issue with passwords. This may sound like a small thing, but when you are trying you best to get your partners ‘mindshare’ putting a password between you and then can be the straw that breaks the camels back.

Lately I have spoken with several vendors that are making use of not just one password for their partners, but multiple. By this I mean; partner goes to site and logs in, then tries to access some resource and is asked to log in again with a different password. To make matters much worse, passwords are issued to the partner. They are not able to define and manage them as they see fit.

If your partner facility sounds like this, then it should not be a surprise to you when you monitor the traffic you have on that facility and find that it does not get used at all. This is a wasted investment on your part, in resources, time to develop and effort in keeping that facility updated. The biggest cost to your organization is the opportunity cost of not activating those partners effectively.

The other area of debate is just how much of your partner site really needs to be behind a password. Not all information needs to be protected and therefore could be put on the main site without the need for a password. Unfortunately if you take this approach it tends to split the partner portal into two, with some information this side and some the other side of the password. If you think your password protected facility does not get used enough, try removing half the value and putting that on your public site. This will surely kill what traffic you had to the rest of the facility. So what is the solution?

My recommendations for password protecting your site are as follows:

1) You need to password protect your data. These problems do not obviate the need for security so don’t attempt to break the site in two to solve the issue.

2) Allow your partners to create and manage their own passwords. Just like when you use Gmail, or Facebook, you create your own account and its yours to manage as you see fit. A partner portal should be no different (and AccountMaven works this way)

3) Don’t put silly restrictions on passwords to make them more secure. If your partner likes to always use the word ‘partner’ as his password – don’t make him insert special characters, numbers and upper and lower case. This will just annoy him and make him forget the custom password you made him choose. This is not a bank account so security does not have to be that tight.

4) Finally, and the most important point. Once your partner logs in and you have validated his credentials, don’t expect him to log in again with a different password. If you are deploying additional resources from outside vendors you really need to integrate their security into your primary facility. If they can’t achieve this I would tell them its a deal breaker. Don’t waste your investment on something that will not get used.

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 sales people don’t like portals

Whenever I talk with a prospect, I ask them about their efforts at activating and connecting with channel partners. One of the questions I always ask, is if they have deployed a portal for their partners to access, and if so what the results were.

One thing that always astounds me is when I ask about the participation rate on that portal. IE: How many partners log-in, how often, and what do they look at. The most common answer to these questions is that they don’t have that information to hand. The sad reality is that these statistics are typically so low as to be too embarrassing to even talk about, particularly after the time and money that has been invested in this facility by the marketing department.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against partner portals. They are potentially an incredibly useful resource for communicating in an organized manner with your partners. They automate many of the routine tasks that you might have to do over and over of you did not have one. Like giving out pricing or product information. Assuming partners used them, the marketing department would relieve large burdens from the channel management folks by keeping good, current, well organized information in the partner portal. So why then is it that sales people (partners) simply don’t log in to these portals?

Here are a few reasons:

1. Sales people are busy and they are focused on sales. They don’t have time (inclination) to go searching around someone else’s portal for information that they would just as soon have emailed to them.
2. They already have multiple other systems to use, Outlook, CRM, Linkedin, Hoovers and others.
3. You are likely not their only partner. In some cases you may be one of several hundred or more.
4. Your portal is password protected. Sure you have them the password, but they lost it or never received it in the first place.
5. When they log into your portal, all they find is information about your company. (one dimensional). This is boring to a sales executive.
6. They have no way of interacting with others once in the portal. In most cases it’s simply a way to retrieve documents and information.

I think the most telling answer to the question of why sales people don’t use portals comes from asking yourself this simple question. How many portals have you felt inclined to log into lately?

There is your answer…

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