You probably already have Partner Account Managers running your various partner accounts, but do you have a dedicated Partner Experience Manager in action too?
With an ever-larger proportion of your end customers coming to you through your partner programs and channel resellers, we believe that SaaS companies need to start valuing the partner experience as much as they value the customer experience. After all, your partner program is one of your biggest revenue-generating assets, and looking after your partners properly equates to looking after your customers properly, (you can find more about strategic roles on our blog post, Get your ecosystem up and running by defining your company’s strategic partnership jobs ).
Partner Experience Manager vs. Partner Account Manager
While your Partner Experience Manager and Partner Account Managers will certainly work closely together and overlap on some tasks and responsibilities, the two roles are quite different. Let’s clarify:
Partner Account Manager: This person should take care of an existing partner account, specifically working to help expand the account’s revenue.
Partner Experience Manager: After discussing the scope of this role in a forum with several Partner Account Managers, we came to the conclusion that a Partner Experience Manager should:
· work closely with the internal team to solve partners’ issues through the use of a range of tools and resources,
· collect feedback from partners,
· manage ticket flow, and
· drive the partner onboarding process.
Partner Experience Managers can help resellers with high-level strategies.
When Databox and PartnerStack set out to discover what resellers and partners value most from their Partner Relationship Managers, the top answer was help and guidance with their high-level strategy. Whether this guidance is focused on hitting specific growth targets or takes the form of more general business coaching, partners really appreciate the feedback and advice an experienced Partner Experience Manager can offer. Because the Partner Experience Manager’s job involves working with the internal team to raise and tackle issues and challenges faced by resellers, they’re particularly well placed to offer insightful and workable advice.
Other aspects that partners and resellers cited as highly valuable are getting their questions answered quickly (so as not to hold up potential deals or sales), honesty and transparency regarding goals and resources on both sides, and getting the partnership up and running in record time.
The best Partner Experience Managers take your partner program to the next level by building a thriving, interconnected ecosystem.
An interesting bit of feedback resellers gave in the survey was that one of the best things about joining a great partner program was gaining access to the wider community of resellers and partners within the ecosystem. For this reason, encouraging mutually beneficial connections within the ecosystem and fostering partner-to-partner networking and support should be a key aspect of any good Partner Experience Manager’s role.
Give your resellers and partners a new revenue channel with a commerce-enabled services marketplace.
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