Channel Partner Recruitment Case Study

A software vendor rebuilding its partner programme has to decide who it wants recruited and who it no longer does. This case study looks at a vendor that changed both its recruitment criteria and its promotion criteria so that the partners it added matched where the business was going rather than where it had been. The example used is VMware, and the material comes from the partner recruitment module of the Certificate in Channel Management.

Recruiting into a territory with nothing in it

The hardest version of partner recruitment is the bootstrapping phase, when a vendor has no customers and no partners in a territory. There is no reference account to point at, no local success story and no peer pressure working in your favour. Everything has to be argued from the proposition itself.

That means doing the preparation before the first conversation. Decide which type of partner actually fits what you sell, work out who inside that company makes the decision, and get data good enough to tell the two apart. Recruitment at this stage is a nurture exercise rather than a sales one, and the relationship usually has to be built over months before anything is signed.

What a partner is weighing up

A partner joining a programme is deciding where to spend capacity it could spend on a vendor it already knows. The proposition has to answer that. Enablement tools, case studies they can use, a credible account of earnings potential, testimonials from partners like them, sales and marketing support, price protection, warranty terms, market development funds, and room to customise the offer for their own market all do work here. Few vendors win on one of them alone.

Knowing whether it worked

Signatures are not the measure. Engagement is: whether partners join joint marketing, whether they register deals, and whether sales follow. A partner who signed and then went quiet has cost you more than one who never signed.

Expect the lag. A new partner commonly needs six to twelve months of concentrated effort before it can represent a vendor properly, and recruitment plans built on a shorter horizon tend to be abandoned just as they start to work. Meeting people face to face still shortens that stretch more reliably than anything else.

Where this fits

There is a fuller treatment of the subject on the page covering recruitment strategy, process and checklists. The video above is one part of the partner recruitment module in the Certificate in Channel Management, which also covers onboarding, enablement, partner business planning and channel conflict.