How Do You Enable Partners?

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

How Do You Enable Partners?

RingCentral VP of Channel, Zane Long, did an interview with Channel Vision. He states, "Partners need the right sales support and enablement in order to be successful. It isn't enough to have just an amazing product or the richest commissions, because if partners are not fully enabled to really market it, they will not position your product first. The cloud communications marketplace is crowded and the demand for these competing solutions is evident (as noted in my earlier predictions). Vendors need to "think partner enablement first," making it easy to transact to keep their partners transacting and gaining market share for their solutions."

How do you enable Partners? A bunch of ways.

Clear messaging with a positioning statement. Who benefits from your service, why and how. Who being the exact target.

Take friction out of the process whenever and wherever possible. It is crazy to me that in 2017 more providers aren't using e-signature and transitioning paperwork to online forms.

Sales tools like case studies, deployment manuals, tech specs and more.

User training to make adoption easier and deeper.

When Zane says, "It isn't enough to have just an amazing product or the richest commissions, because if partners are not fully enabled to really market it, they will not position your product first." What amazing product? There isn't a clear winner in UCaaS at any level. While Broadsoft has the majority share, it is divided up among 400+ providers. So what amazing product?

The richest commissions change weekly. Providers are willing to pay almost anything to put any revenue they can get on the books - good, bad, under water or even horrible fit. And this leads to a host of problems on the deployment side, on the customer satisfaction side and later on the commission side (when the provider realizes it is under-water and wants to change compensation or when customer quits early and provider nets the commission out.) I wish I was making this stuff up, but it happens every week at most organizations.

And then we wonder why the UCaaS space that was supposed to be so hot is not.

8x8's numbers were kind of surprising because while numbers went up they posted a loss.

  • Service revenue from mid-market and enterprise customers grew 36% year-over-year and represents 55% of the Company's total service revenue.
  • New monthly recurring revenue (MRR) sold to mid-market and enterprise customers and by channel sales teams accounted for 60% of total new MRR booked in the quarter.
  • Average monthly service revenue (ARPU) per business customer grew to $414, compared with $369 in the same year ago period;

This goes to show you that just one huge deal can change everything (if it doesn't sink the company in the process of deployment!): "New enterprise Master Service Agreement signed with a Fortune 50 health care corporation to provide services to up to 10,000 users in 450 medical offices. [AND] New enterprise agreement signed with a national retail chain for over 10,000 seats across 3500 locations."



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