Using a network of partners can help you create meaningful growth for your company at minimal cost. But to make a partner program work for you, you need an effective partner enablement plan. One that ensures your partners can best represent your company and are providing a consistent message that shares your brand’s voice.
Here’s what you need to know about the modern partner enablement plan.
Partner enablement provides additional resources to ensure that your partners have everything they need to amplify your message and accelerate growth. Enablement includes both technological needs as well as any skills or training that might be necessary.
Partner enablement is important because it offers your partners an increased chance to perform better and increase your overall revenue. The more depth your enablement program has, the less need for oversight.
An enablement plan creates a framework for how you are going to share the necessary tools, training, and information. Your plan goes beyond what you share and focuses instead on how it’s shared.
Your channel partner enablement kit is more than a simple training session. It includes how you will hold sessions, how long they will be, the resources you will cover in each module, break out sessions, gamification, and both formative and summative assessments to ensure your partners are learning and retaining information.
What does sales enablement include? Look closely at the needs of your partners, the structure of your program, and what works best for your organization. To give you a starting point, here are some of the most important things you need to include in an enablement plan.
Imagine you are looking to buy a new car and you asked the salesman to tell you about it. How would you react if they started with, “Well . . . it looks blue”? Chances are you’d walk off the car lot or ask to speak to someone who could actually answer your questions. To sell a product, your partners have to have deep knowledge of it.
A primary aspect of partner enablement is ensuring each partner has the knowledge they need to answer questions about your product in detail. This goes beyond simple surface-level specifications. Your goal is to make your partners experts on all levels.
Also known as a sales playbook, this is a guide that shares the best practices of sales with your partners. It covers a variety of situations and problems a partner might experience and then shows the best solution.
A solution playbook takes the success of the best and distills their experience and knowledge in a single location to help others follow in their footsteps. It makes sales scalable, consistent, and repeatable.
It’s essential to have a playbook to standardize how your brand is being represented, from both a quality and brand equity perspective. Without a single source of truth, your partners will default to their own interpretation of your offering (which isn’t always a good thing). Your playbook levels the playing field by giving each partner clear guidelines about how they can and should represent you.
Coaching helps partners become comfortable implementing best practices. It’s during coaching that you can catch problems before they happen and ensure that every partner is equipped with the skills they need to succeed.
For best results, coaching should be spread out in multiple segments in your enablement plan. It can be a great way to take a break and do something different between sessions and gauge how much partners have learned from previous modules. With multiple coaching sessions, it’s also possible to track growth and improvement over time.
Use cases answer the question you’ve been asking ever since letters got introduced into math: “When am I ever going to use this?” They provide information about how a product or service is used in real life.
Use cases show value: why the product is worth having and how the customer can use it. When a potential customer sees evidence of how someone like them benefitted from your product or service, it provides them with direct value, which is essential for conversions and sales.
Customer or user onboarding introduces a new customer to your company’s product or service. The goal of customer onboarding is to make their experience as smooth as possible.
Your partners will have a wide series of tools dedicated to customer onboarding. They need to understand how to use each of them, as well as when they should be used. Customer onboarding isn’t one-size-fits-all, so it’s important for your partners to understand the different needs of your customers and how to assist each one in their customer journey.
A pitch deck is a pre-made sales presentation your partners can use to supplement their sales. It provides information that can help engage the customer through storytelling, media, graphics, and interactive content.
For your pitch deck to be used correctly, your partners need to be trained in how to use your pitch deck. Your enablement plan should give them time to learn not only what’s in the pitch deck but also how to use it.
The Tiled platform is a perfect fit to use as your partner enablement platform. Here are some of the features that make Tiled ideal:
Find out more about how Tiled makes the ideal partner for your enablement platform.
