3 SUPPORT & RECOGNITION

Support and recognize your partners by bringing internal resources together in one place—the partner engagement hub. These support functions help build channel partner relationships between different roles. These resources include, but aren’t limited to, field team access and support role access.

Field Team Access

Incorporate field teams in the hub to connect them with partners. Doing so helps both partners and reps. It puts the field team contact information in plain sight of partners who need it and it gives field teams increased visibility into the performance and adoption of channel incentives (e.g., marketing campaigns, goals, etc.)

A secondary benefit of field team access (and a fantastic channel partner relationshipbuilding tool) is the ability to offer peer-to-peer recognition and ad hoc awards in the hub. Because partners and reps are in the same platform, they can connect in new ways like writing recognitions for jobs well done or milestones met (with or without a monetary award attached).

Consider giving field teams a slush fund of points to reward for on-site trainings, call-a-thon contests and other elements they might use while visiting partners. Clearly tracking everything in the partner engagement hub (versus a separate giveaway that pulls their attention in multiple directions) helps reinforce the value of your portal and technology investment.

Support Roles

Similar to field teams, the hub can connect support roles like sales engineers, customer service reps and technician resources to partners. The connection provides additional tracking of requests and promotes your commitment to providing partners with the resources they need to do their jobs.

Motivate Channel Partners With a Partner Engagement Hub

There’s a better way to use portals to enable partners. If you focus on a portal that’s more of an engagement hub—one that puts the partner’s needs first while improving motivation, adoption and reporting—the portal can be very effective at fostering relationships between partners and reps, and putting what they need front and center. Ultimately, even if transitioning to a partner engagement hub is only a future goal, work toward making partner portals as relevant and easy to use as possible so partners can get the most of the portals’ benefits, without the drawbacks.