A partner performance dashboard (PPD) is a powerful tool that provides a real-time, comprehensive view of your partner ecosystem’s performance. It consolidates critical data and metrics related to your partners’ activities, such as sales, marketing, and customer service, into a single interface.
By offering actionable insights and highlighting KPIs, PPDs empower businesses to make informed decisions and streamline their partner operations effectively. Through improved visibility, PPDs help you identify areas for improvement, optimize resource allocation, enhance collaboration with partners, and ultimately drive operational efficiency. This data-driven approach enables you to achieve better business outcomes, including increased revenue, cost savings, and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Channel Mechanics recently hosted a webinar titled “The Power of Partner Performance Dashboards”. The webinar featured a panel of senior channel executives including Laura McGregor Falko, Head of Worldwide Partner Programs at Broadcom, Brian Kroneman, Sr. Director of Worldwide Channel Programs and Strategy at SentinelOne, and, Kenneth Fox, CEO at Channel Mechanics. This is the last in a series of three blogs exploring topics covered during the webinar.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how Partner Performance Dashboards generate business outcomes in three key ways:
1. Firstly, enabling channel and partner account managers with a sales-oriented approach
2. Secondly, improving business planning for more effective partner management
3. Finally, winning partner mindshare
How Partner Performance Dashboards Generate Business Outcomes
Enabling Account Managers to Adopt a Sales-Oriented Approach
One of the key advantages of PPDs is their ability to transform channel and partner account managers into sales-focused professionals. For example, visibility on registered deals through a deal-registration dashboard means the account manager is able to easily see what opportunities the partner has in the pipeline. Thereby better equipping them to seek the right support to accelerate and close those opportunities. In addition, PPDs ensure everyone is on the same page. By providing visually rich and easily accessible dashboards, account managers are empowered with real-time insights, this encourages:
- Data-Driven Conversations: Account managers can engage in informed conversations with their partners, offering valuable insights and recommendations based on actual performance data.
- Efficiency and Accuracy: PPDs save account managers valuable time by providing accurate and up-to-date information. Thereby eliminating the need for manual data collection and analysis.
- Consistency and Adaptability: Partners often find it frustrating when vendors undergo frequent organizational changes, particularly when it impacts who is managing their account. PPDs ensure a consistent approach across account managers, regardless of their portfolio size or any changes in account assignments. This consistency leads to smoother transitions and much greater adaptability.
- Personalized Engagement: Armed with comprehensive partner data, account managers can offer personalized advice, making conversations more meaningful and impactful.
“It creates a personal touch. It becomes a much more meaningful and personalized conversation in terms of here’s where you are in terms of your compliance. Do you know you’re going to lose this cert, which means you drop down a tier? Or if you do this extra deal you qualify for a spiff or incentive, etc., etc.” Kenneth Fox, CEO, Channel Mechanics
Improved Business Planning for Effective Partner QBRs
Without a PPD, generating relevant KPIs and effectively tracking them for quarterly business reviews and planning meetings is a tough task. Account managers typically have to collect data from multiple sources. This is not only inefficient and time-consuming but also prone to errors. This often leads to disagreements where the partner’s data on their performance doesn’t match the vendor’s version. By acting as a single source of truth (SSOT), PPDs play a crucial role in streamlining business planning and enhancing the effectiveness of partner meetings and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) by:
- Consistent, Measurable KPIs: PPDs enable you to establish and track measurable, defined KPIs, enabling data-driven business planning.
- Common Framework: PPDs provide a common framework and language for business planning, fostering alignment and consensus on goals and objectives.
- Efficiency and Accuracy: By eliminating manual data manipulation and reporting tasks, PPDs reduce errors and ensure that everyone is working with the same reliable data.
- Effective QBRs: With PPDs, QBRs become more productive and forward-looking. Teams can focus on current business realities and future opportunities rather than getting bogged down in data-related minutiae.
- Program Governance and Compliance: PPDs help organizations maintain internal compliance and meet audit requirements by consistently measuring partner performance and communicating results transparently.
“One of the reasons we actually put the partner performance dashboard in place was to satisfy an internal compliance and audit requirement that we were not only putting the business plans in place, setting the KPIs, but measuring them consistently, frequently and communicating that back to partners.” Laura McGregor Falko, Head of Worldwide Partner Programs, Broadcom
Winning Partner Mindshare
Most partners work with multiple vendors, each with their own partner programs, and own processes. This can be overwhelming. Partners need to not only grasp the intricate details of these programs but also need to understand each vendor’s products. For this reason, many partners are looking to rationalize the number of vendors they work with.
Winning partner mindshare is a top priority for vendors, and it hinges on two critical factors: ease of doing business and profitability. The priority of which varies by role. Partner sales and technical teams prioritize ease of doing business whereas the executive leadership prioritizes profitability.
“Having a PPD that is role-specific for your partners which serves up the relevant information that they need, in real-time to do their job for the things that matter most to them is really how you gain that mindshare.” Laura McGregor Falko, Head of Worldwide Partner Programs, Broadcom
Partner Performance Dashboards (PPDs) play a key role in helping you win partner mindshare through:
- Streamlining Partner Engagement: PPDs provide partner sales and technical teams with easy access to critical information related to products, enablement, performance, and/or incentives.
- Transparency and Visibility: PPDs offer insights into the metrics that drive profitability. They track progress toward sales targets and rebate program accelerators. While simultaneously providing proactive alerts on what is needed to advance to higher tiers in order to unlock additional benefits. This enables partners’ leadership to easily gauge their performance and make data-informed decisions about which vendors are beneficial for business.
To Conclude
Partner Performance Dashboards are more than just a tool. They are a strategic asset that empowers you to manage your partner ecosystem with confidence, efficiency, and success by simplifying the inherent complexity of partner management.
“Everyone can make it complicated, not everyone can make it simple,” Brian Kroneman, Sr. Director Worldwide Channel Programs & Strategy, SentinelOne
Ultimately, Partner Performance Dashboards deliver business outcomes that can help you build stronger relationships, more effective business planning, and provide a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace.