Channel Partner Recruitment

Recruiting suitable channel partners is a cornerstone of the channel manager's job, and it is the part most often done on instinct. The methodologies exist, but they are rarely taught, so vendors tend to recruit the partners who are easiest to reach rather than the partners most likely to sell. A channel partner recruitment strategy is simply the decision to do it the other way round, written down before the outreach starts.

This page sets out the strategy, the process and a checklist you can work against. The full treatment is Module 3 of the Certificate in Channel Management, which covers recruitment, ideal partner profiles and the assessment of new partner candidates.

How long channel partner recruitment actually takes

A successful partner recruitment activity in a new market takes roughly nine to twelve months, including the market assessment carried out before anyone is contacted. That figure surprises people who have budgeted for a quarter, and it is the single most common reason recruitment programmes are judged to have failed when in fact they were stopped halfway.

The scope also matters. What follows concerns recruiting independent channel partners, companies that operate in their own name and at their own risk and cost. Recruiting an agent, a referral partner or a wholly owned subsidiary is a different exercise with different economics, and applying this process to them will produce odd results.

The channel partner recruitment process

1. Assess the market before contacting anyone

Establish how the product is bought in this territory, who already sells adjacent products to the same buyers, and what margin structure partners expect. This is the bootstrapping phase, and skipping it is what produces a pipeline of partners who were available rather than suitable.

2. Write the ideal partner profile

Describe the partner most likely to succeed: size, existing vendor relationships, technical capability, customer base, and the gap in their portfolio that your product fills. Without this, every candidate looks plausible and the decision defaults to whoever responds first.

3. Build the value proposition for the partner

Partners are being asked to invest their own money and people. The pitch has to answer what they earn, what it costs them to get there, and why your product rather than the competitor already in their portfolio. Vendors consistently underestimate how much this step decides the outcome.

4. Identify the right people, not just the right companies

Knowing the type of partner to approach is half of it. The other half is reaching the person responsible for partnerships and alliances, who is rarely the person answering the general enquiry address.

5. Qualify against the profile, not against enthusiasm

Assess each candidate against the written profile. A partner who is keen but wrong costs more than no partner at all, because onboarding capacity and partner manager attention are both finite.

6. Agree expectations in writing before signing

What each side will invest, what the partner is expected to achieve and by when, and what happens if that does not occur. Joint business planning starts here rather than at the first quarterly review.

7. Hand over to onboarding deliberately

Recruitment ends when the partner is productive, not when the contract is signed. The gap between those two points is where most recruitment investment is lost.

A recruitment checklist

Before outreach begins, you should be able to answer all of the following. If any answer is missing, the recruitment effort is likely to produce partners you will later have to manage out.

Market

Do we know how this product is bought here, and who currently sells to those buyers?

Profile

Is the ideal partner profile written down, and has everyone involved agreed to it?

Proposition

Can we state what the partner earns, what it costs them, and why us rather than the vendor already in their portfolio?

Capacity

Can we onboard and enable the number of partners we intend to sign, at the pace we intend to sign them?

Expectations

Do we know what we will ask each partner to commit to, and what we commit to in return?

Measurement

Have we decided what a successfully recruited partner looks like, twelve months out, in numbers?

Where recruitment sits in the wider program

Recruitment is the second of ten areas that decide whether a partner program works. Signing the right partners matters less than it appears if onboarding, incentives and positioning have not been thought through, because those are what turn a signed partner into a selling one. See the best channel partner programs for the full set, building a channel partner program for the order the decisions need to be made in, and channel management best practices for how recruitment fits alongside the rest.

The Certificate in Channel Management covers all ten across ten modules, online and self-paced, about 20 hours of study, ending in an exam with a 70% pass mark. Its 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. Graduates rate the Institute 4.9 out of 5 across 36 Google reviews.