Channel Partner Enablement

Successful channel partner enablement comes down to a combination of practices and tools, applied in the right order. This page covers the plan itself, and the enablement template used in the Certificate in Channel Management is free to download below.

Enablement is not the first step in launching a partner. You recruit first, which means having an ideal partner profile and knowing how to recruit channel partners against it. Then you onboard, which is a distinct stage that has to be finished before enablement starts. A partner still working out who to ask for a quote is not ready to be taught how to position the product.

Building the enablement plan

Start from what the partner sells

Enablement is about understanding the partner's business and how your product fits into what they already offer. A plan written without that is a product training schedule, which is a different and much less useful thing.

Give them the documentation and a person

Program documentation answers the predictable questions. A named representative answers the rest, and the existence of that person is usually what determines whether a partner persists through the first difficult deal.

Sequence it

Commercial mechanics before positioning, positioning before campaign material. Partners given everything at once retain the part they needed first and lose the rest.

Match depth to partner type

A reseller, a managed service provider and a referral partner need different things, and increasingly a program has all three. A single enablement path built for resellers will not serve the others.

Set a measure

What an enabled partner can do, stated as something observable, with a date. Without it, enablement is declared complete when the content has been delivered rather than when the partner is capable.

Plan the refresh

Products change and partner staff turn over. Enablement delivered once decays, and the decay is invisible until a partner stops transacting.

The Partner Enablement Manager

These activities are usually owned by a Partner Enablement Manager, a role that sits between the channel team and whoever produces the content. The job is less about delivering training than about knowing which partners need what, and in what order, which is why it depends on partner data being collected deliberately rather than assembled when someone asks.

In smaller programs the role is carried by the channel manager alongside everything else, which is workable as long as the enablement plan exists in writing. Where it does not, enablement becomes whatever the partner asks for, and the partners who ask for least get least.

Related

Channel enablement covers what the discipline includes and where it sits in the partner lifecycle. Channel sales enablement covers the sales-specific part, including what AI has changed. Successful channel partner programs sets out the ten factors that decide whether a program delivers, and channel partner program template covers the other documents a program needs.

The discipline is taught in the Certificate in Channel Management: ten modules, online and self-paced, about 20 hours of study, ending in an exam with a 70% pass mark, with a syllabus reviewed and approved by a vendor-independent Industry Advisory Council of 27 senior channel leaders at companies including Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and SAP.

Enablement now extends to circular business. See what vendors now pay partners for circular IT, and how to help partners answer EcoVadis requests from their own customers.