Channel Partner Program Best Practices

A channel partner program is the formal arrangement between a vendor and the resellers, distributors and service partners that sell on its behalf. It sets out what partners get, what they are expected to do in return, and how both sides work together. Done properly it widens market reach, lowers cost of sale and improves the customer's experience of the product. Launched without the essentials in place, it does lasting damage to how resellers see the vendor, and that reputation is slow to repair.

That is why the channel partner program best practices below are worth settling before launch rather than after. Most of them cost nothing except the discipline of writing a decision down.

What a channel partner program has to contain

A stated purpose

What the channel is for, and what partners are being asked to do that the direct team cannot. Programs without a stated job acquire one by accident, usually whichever one is easiest to measure.

Entry requirements

Who qualifies, and what a partner must demonstrate to join. Vague requirements are discovered quickly and the program fills with partners who will never transact.

Tiers that change behaviour

Levels that give more in return for more commitment. Where the thresholds are unenforced, tiers stop influencing anything and become decoration.

Benefits a partner can actually use

Margin, leads, market development funds, technical support, training. Benefits that look generous but are hard to claim are worse than smaller benefits that are simple to access.

Clear obligations on both sides

What the partner commits to, and what the vendor commits to in return. A program that only lists partner obligations reads as one-sided and is treated accordingly.

Deal registration rules

How a partner protects an opportunity, how conflicts are resolved and how quickly. This is the single most common source of partner mistrust, and the rules matter less than their consistent application.

Enablement and certification

What training partners must complete, and what the vendor provides to make that possible. Enablement that stops after onboarding leaves partners selling last year's product.

Joint business planning

A plan per significant partner, with a review cadence, so expectations are agreed rather than assumed. The channel partner business plan template below is the starting point.

Measurement

What a successful partner looks like in numbers, twelve months out. Without this, investment decisions are guesses and underperforming partners are discovered late.

A review mechanism

A stated point at which the program itself is examined against where the channel is going, rather than only against last quarter's revenue.

Getting the practices into the program

Reading a list and running a program against it are different things, and the gap between them is where most programs end up. The Certificate in Channel Management covers each of the areas above across ten modules, online and self-paced, about 20 hours of study, ending in an exam with a 70% pass mark. 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.

Related reading on this site: successful channel partner programs sets out the ten factors that decide whether a program delivers, building a channel partner program covers the order the decisions need to be made in, and channel partner recruitment covers the part most often done on instinct.