Building a Channel Partner Program

Building a channel partner program is mostly a sequence problem. The decisions depend on each other, and taken out of order they produce a program that recruits partners it cannot onboard, or pays incentives for behaviour it did not want. The fundamentals of channel management are what put them in the right order, which is why a channel partner training program is usually the cheapest way to avoid an expensive rebuild two years later.

The Certificate in Channel Management covers that sequence across ten modules: terminology, partner recruitment, onboarding and enablement, joint business planning, incentives, partner positioning, partner marketing, opportunity management, channel data and channel relationships. The syllabus is reviewed and approved by a vendor-independent Industry Advisory Council of 27 senior channel leaders at companies including Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and SAP, so what is taught is directed by the employers who hire channel managers rather than written in-house.

The order the decisions need to be made in

Start with who the program is for. An ideal partner profile written before recruitment begins is what stops a program filling up with partners who will never transact, and it is the single cheapest document in the whole exercise. Channel partner recruitment then becomes a matter of assessing candidates against that profile rather than against how keen they sound.

Onboarding comes next, because the gap between signing a partner and that partner selling anything is where most programs quietly lose their return. Only once partners are productive do incentives earn their keep, and only once positioning has been addressed do co-marketing campaigns stop being the vendor's campaign with a partner logo attached. A channel partner marketing plan template is the usual starting point there, and the discipline itself is covered by the Institute's partner marketing training.

Underneath all of it sits channel data. A program that cannot say which partners are growing, which are declining and which have never transacted cannot allocate anything sensibly, and every decision above becomes a guess. See successful channel partner programs for the ten factors set out in full.

Where partner programs are heading

A program designed around resellers alone is now designing for a shrinking share of the route to market. Partner types have multiplied, hyperscaler marketplaces have become a route in their own right, services partners and influencers earn money without ever reselling a licence, and partner economics have shifted accordingly. A program built on the assumption that a partner buys and resells will fit fewer and fewer of the partners it is trying to attract.

That is what the Certificate in Channel Partner Ecosystems covers. It is the Institute's advanced certificate, designed as the next step after one or more of the core certificates, and it deals with new partner types, new routes to market, new partner economics and the arrival of AI on both sides of the sale. Every claim in it is dated and graded, so you can tell what has already happened from what is only forecast. For anyone building a partner program now rather than maintaining one built five years ago, it is the part that decides whether the program is still fit for purpose in three years.

Taken together: the Certificate in Channel Management for how to run a channel day to day, and the Certificate in Channel Partner Ecosystems for how the thing you are running is changing.