Driving partner-led customer success initiatives

According to Canalys, there are around 28 distinctive moments during a customer buying journey. Each of these moments can be influenced by as many as 7 partners that act as trusted advisors to decision makers within an organization. Taking this into consideration, many partner programs today have started to reward their channel above and beyond just the point of sale and the transaction. 

Historically, sales margins have been the sole mechanism of choice to incentivize partner ecosystems to lean in and support co-sell efforts. This incentive structure evolved from decades, and perhaps centuries of retail transactions, and they were naturally adopted. The main benefit of it is its simplicity, a totally predictable sales margin for the vendor, and the fact that there is only need to incur in such expenses when there is an actual sales transaction.  However, relying solely on this this type of incentive has, among others, two main problems:

1. Forcibly, to get rewarded, partners must enter into a reselling relationship with the vendor, taking title of the goods, and passing them on to the end customer. This leaves out the possibility for other types of partners to contribute to the value chain in a non-transactional form. Partners that have significant skills and influence in pre-sales, delivery, and post-sale activities sometimes are not interested in becoming a reseller.

2. By rewarding only the point of sale, there is very little influence from the vendor on the behavior of the partner outside of the specific actions that take place to close a sale, and you may lack a "carrot" to influence important moments during the customer lifecycle journey. Examples include: evangelizing and creating awareness around your solutions, identifying/sourcing new opportunities, accelerating the sales cycle, driving product usage/adoption, and  improving customer satisfaction.

One solution to address these challenges, is to create incentives that energize the partner ecosystem during those other points of value beyond the transaction. For demand generation, many technology  vendors make Marketing Development Funds available or implement deal registration rebates; in an effort to generate qualified partner sales pipeline and gain visibility into it at an early stage. Once a sales opportunity has been identified pre-sales and post-sale efforts can be supported via services funds for the delivery of discovery workshops, technical proof of concepts, or scope-of-work based solution migration/deployment projects. These types of incentives are well known to the industry and different vendors leverage them in different ways and with different results.

One area that traditionally has lacked a robust and widely accepted support by channel incentives is customer success.

One area that traditionally has lacked a robust and widely accepted support by channel incentives is customer success. It is important now to open a parenthesis and clarify that customer success does not refer to pure tech-support and break-fix activities, but any of those (which include the former) that will help the customer truly succeed in extracting value from the solution. So, how do we get our partner ecosystem to drive engagement beyond the delivery of a fixed scope of work? How can we influence a specific set of activities, that by experience we know will ensure customer satisfaction, but that are hard to tie to a time bound project?

Partner incentives for the totality of the customer journey become ever more critical as we transition most of our businesses to pay-as-you-go and as-a-service models that require impeccable adoption.

Managed Service Providers, or SaaS-driven partners have skin in the game; they either depend on a license or consumption margin to drive revenue, or have "hands on keyboard", managing infrastructure or handling support tickets on their customers behalf. But, what about the rest of the ecosystem that one way or another is engaging with your customer? How can they be energized? What are the challenges of creating incentives that support this important part of the customer journey? These questions become ever more critical as we surely transition most of our businesses to pay-as-you-go and as-a-service models that require impeccable adoption, and sometimes even additional expansions to achieve the expected return on investment on top of the customer acquisition cost.

We see some tech companies offering their partner ecosystem growth rebates or cash incentives around product adoption or for driving a higher NPS rating. One of the biggest challenges to effectively leverage the skills, the presence, and the close relationship that partners have with their customers; is the lack of a shared telemetry to provide, both the vendor and its partner ecosystem, a shared view on what is happening under the hood, for a specific customer.

This shared visibility is what would allow both vendor and channel to:

• Understand objectively how the solution/platform/product is behaving with a specific customer
• Have a common understanding on how customers are using a specific solution or platform and which features are they using
• Have a pulse on how specific partner activities (from solution implementation to change management) are evolving , and how they influence key indicators
• Have a clear understanding of the roles and involvement of the partner and vendor, avoiding overlap, omissions, communication delays, and finger pointing.

This shared visibility is a prerequisite to put in-place meaningful incentives mapped to actionable activities, effectively driving the right behavior with our partner ecosystem. We offer below some ideas on how companies can start creating and tracking valuable incentives with joined visibility around customer success:

A) Technology providers sharing with their partners specific customer’s KPIs via a customized dashboard. This sounds like a logical approach, yet we see concerns around scalability. If each vendor/SaaS company continues sharing their own data, in their own format, on their own separate means, this will create more work for partners, who typically support multiple vendors. Partners will eventually find themselves managing multiple “dashboards” and needing to stitch together relevant data points on a cross-section to get a holistic view on the overall customer experience.

B) Leveraging a specialized customer success management tool and providing an individual at each partner with access to view data related to their specific customers.  Leveraging a platform like Gainsight, Totango, or Qualtrics is also a reasonable option, but in this case there will be considerable burden on the technology vendor to control who gets access to which projects with which partners. This could create a complex web of access management to your ongoing customer projects.

C) The creation of a true partnership oriented customer success management platform. We believe the market is ripe for a solution that is not only capable of gathering insights from valuable customer data points but can also create shared visibility and workstreams to engage with a partner ecosystem present at the account. Some early entrants in this space like Morada Systems have shown some interest and leadership. We are excited to see where they evolve!