Your Guide to an Effective Partner Enablement Strategy

In business, as in life, things go better when you're prepared.

This is why sales teams rely on sales enablement to help them sell more — and sell better. Similarly, channel partners selling your products or services need to be set up for success. That's your job, and that's what partner enablement is all about. We'll walk through what partner enablement is, why it's important, and how to build your partner strategy.

What you'll learn:

• What is partner enablement, and why is it important?
• What are the benefits of partner enablement?
• Building a partner enablement strategy
• How to measure the impact of partner enablement
• Tips for maximizing partner enablement success
• The role of partner management software

Partner enablement is the process of equipping partners with the tools, resources, and training needed to sell and support a company's products or services. These partners include resellers, affiliates, vendors, and agents. They are your partner in selling and need the same support and resources that sellers on your internal team need and use. This includes knowledge about the product, its features and benefits, the problems it solves, and the pricing structure in place.

You want to ensure your partner knows what they're selling so they don't over-promise or undersell a product's capabilities. They also need to understand the ideal customer so they don't waste time targeting the wrong prospects.

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Strong partnerships can lead to expansion of your customer base and significant revenue gains. When you enable partners to do a great job, you'll see more than just increased sales. Here are just a few added benefits of good enablement:

• Channel partners can broaden your reach and introduce your products and services to new audiences and prospects quickly (and possibly through avenues previously unavailable to you).
• Channel partners create sales efficiency (often in a cost-effective way). That’s because they do the work you’d have to do in-house if you didn’t have partners.
• Effective enablement ensures your brand is represented accurately by the channel partner, especially when you're breaking into new markets and customers are experiencing your brand, product, or service for the first time.
• Great enablement also helps ensure customer satisfaction (customers get the product and service they expect).

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At a high level, you'll need to do the following to implement a strong partner enablement process:

• Assess current partner capabilities, fit and needs.
• Define the scope and objectives of the enablement strategy.
• Deploy resources, tools, and training materials.
• Engage partners through communication and support initiatives.
• Monitor performance and provide ongoing support.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy using key performance indicators (KPIs) and feedback.
• Continuously optimize the program based on insights and changing needs.

By focusing on these essential components, you can build a robust partner sales enablement strategy that empowers your partners to succeed (and also drive mutual growth).

Beyond these seven steps are two important components that must be addressed: setting objectives and partner onboarding. Let's dive a little deeper.

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You and your partner must be crystal clear on what you're trying to achieve together. This includes goals and specific metrics you'll use to determine success.

• Define goals: Establish clear, measurable objectives for the partner sales enablement program, such as increasing sales, expanding market reach, or improving partner satisfaction.
• KPIs: Set KPIs to track progress, such as sales growth, partner engagement rates, and deal close rates.

While you'll have overarching sales goals, it's important to plan to measure the success of the partnership and enablement efforts more specifically.

New partners need to be onboarded so that they become deeply familiar with your company, products or services, and any relevant policies or branding. As products, pricing, or policies change, you've also got to keep your partners up to speed. Factor in partner enablement as part of any major releases or launches, but also at a regular cadence.

Develop a structured onboarding process that includes an introduction to your company, products, market positioning and sales processes. Offer both initial and ongoing training programs on product knowledge, sales techniques and competitive differentiation.

Create take-home materials alongside the training. These may include detailed sales playbooks with step-by-step guidance on how to sell your products, including value propositions, objection handling, and best practices. Plan to develop and share comprehensive product guides that outline features, benefits, use cases, and technical specifications.

Provide a centralized repository of up-to-date online marketing and sales collateral, such as brochures, case studies, presentations, and whitepapers to help drive demand. Make it extra easy on partners by providing easy to access marketing materials, tools and templates that they can customize, co-brand, and make their own. The goal is to enable partners to hit the ground running with materials they can send to or leave behind with customers. Consider investing in a software solution that also enables partners to easily request marketing funds or request campaign approvals.

Ensure partners have access to a customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage leads, track opportunities, and monitor sales activities. Provide access to sales enablement tools, such as demo environments, proposal builders, and ROI calculators.

Design incentive programs that reward partners for achieving sales targets, closing deals, or participating in training. Recognize and reward top-performing partners through awards, certifications, and public acknowledgment.

Establish regular communication channels (such as newsletters, webinars, and partner meetings) to keep partners informed and engaged. Also provide dedicated support resources, including a partner manager and a helpdesk for technical and sales assistance. Partners should always know who they can reach out to when they have questions.

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A strong partner enablement process requires clear delineation between the roles and responsibilities of each party and good bilateral communication. This is essential — and not just when issues arise. Like any kind of partnership, it works best when both parties communicate often and are committed to working well together. Here are some of my top tips.

You want your partners to be busy selling your products and services. In my personal experience, however, partners are typically bombarded with product information from companies — sometimes daily. The last thing they need is more stuff to read. But how do you provide ongoing product and sales training, without overloading your partners? Yes, online video training is one way, but I've found that partners want their vendors to make them feel special, nurtured, and supported. So, create a budget for in-person get-togethers and workshops. Make them feel part of your corporate family, not some sort of remote appendage.

I've had great success inviting partners to a specific partner enablement event, like a two-day kickoff or launch. This allows you to engage with them and maybe spend one day focused on product training and the next on effcetive and actionable sales training. This is a more thoughtful approach than simply shooting resources and materials across for them to decipher on their own.

To set up a partner for success after an event, you have to do more than wish them luck and send them off with a pat on the shoulder. It's necessary to follow up with ongoing product and sales coaching to reinforce the new learnings and help individual reps feel comfortable with the new information.

You can also develop advanced training and certification programs to deepen partners' expertise and credibility, or implement sales simulations and role-playing exercises to enhance practical selling skills. A tip: AI can be your friend here.

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A partner portal is more than just a nice to have. It should be part of your partner enablement strategy. This may be as robust as a partner relationship management tool or something simpler like a website or knowledge base where partners can routinely access training and other resources.

A great partner portal should:

• Offer advanced analytics and reporting tools that provide insights into sales performance, customer behavior and market trends.
• Enable partners to generate custom reports to track their specific performance metrics.
• Serve as a one-stop shop for all resources, tools, and support, allowing partners to access information and training on demand.
• Include community features such as forums and discussion boards to facilitate peer-to-peer interaction and knowledge sharing.

Don't let your partners go at it alone. You can be partners in marketing as well as sales. Collaborate with partners on co-branded materials and marketing campaigns to generate leads and build brand awareness. You can also provide market development funds (MDF) for partners to use for executing their own marketing activities and demand generation efforts.

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Of course, the most basic metric is partner revenue, but there may be others based on your enablement efforts. Ideally, when a company provides partner enablement training, they have specific outcomes in mind.

You should set KPIs and metrics that measure the desired outcomes. For example, if your partner enablement training is about improving product knowledge, then the metric should focus on how well and easily the partner can represent the product to a customer. In short: Measure what you're trying to achieve.

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Communication is a two-way street, and partners will have feedback for you. It's important to validate and incorporate this feedback as you iterate your approach to working together. You should actively seek and regularly collect this feedback, and there are a couple easy ways to do this:

1. Surveys and polls: Use surveys and polls to understand partner needs and to improve the program.
2. Focus groups: Conduct focus groups with key partners to gather in-depth insights and foster collaboration.
3. Partner advisory board: This functions similarly to a corporate advisory board and works best when you're managing a partner ecosystem. Invite representatives from each partner to help better understand partner needs, wants, and desires and how you can help drive the partners' success.
4. Mystery shopper: Partners can also sell competing goods or services from another company, so you may want to research how the partner is treating your leads and ensure they are followed up on and channeled to your business. Use mystery shopping to test a partner's follow up by passing a dummy lead to a partner. Then, the mystery shopper will report back about speed and quality of service and, importantly, whether the partner tried to direct your lead to a competitor.
5. Voice of the Partner program: Just as is the case with your direct customers, your partners will not always be comfortable telling you what’s not going well in the relationship, but it’s important for you to keep track of your partners’ sentiments. This is where a voice of the partner (VoP) program can work wonders. You engage a neutral 3rd party to interview the partner on their partner experience with your business. It’s surprising how much more they will tell a complete stranger than a channel manager. This is simply because they want to get things off their chest, but don’t want to risk your relationship. For you, this information is super valuable to tweak and adjust your approach, and to put out fires before they occur.

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When you're working with multiple partners, it can be helpful to have a partner relationship management (PRM) system in place, integrated with your CRM. Solutions like this help personalize and automate activities — including communication, training, and sales and marketing campaigns — at scale. They can also use data and analytics to deliver personalized content and recommendations to partners based on their sales history, market focus, and performance. You can also use a PRM to implement automated marketing campaigns that partners can easily customize and deploy.

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Appointing partners is not a set-and-forget exercise. Your sales partnerships are only going to be as strong as your partner enablement strategy and its execution. Bringing on channel partners and resellers means committing to supporting the relationship over time and working to make it stronger and more effective as you go.