As a vendor you should be interested in the benefits that a partner performance dashboard can deliver to your business. However, you may have some questions about how it would work within your organization. The good news is that those questions are easily answered. Here are the top three questions vendors ask when considering a partner performance dashboard.
Three Popular Questions when Considering a Partner Performance Dashboard
1. How Do I Define My KPIs?
It’s okay not to know where to start in terms of the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to set for partners. However, revenue and program compliance are the easy ones for most vendors. Often, the number of registered opportunities is next. After that it depends on your business. In general, vendors usually have between six and nine KPIs, based on their partner ecosystem and the business outcome they’re trying to achieve.
This makes the program owner or channel manager think about their strategy and its alignment with their business. It can actually be a very good exercise, as you really need to think hard about what KPIs are important to your channel program, and if they align with your company’s business strategy.
2. How Do We Integrate All Our Partner Data?
Once you have determined which KPIs to display, the next question is how and from where do you source all the partner data. Which systems store your revenue, your deal registrations, where’s your compliance data? There could be a number of different systems or applications that store that required data. And the more KPIs you wish to display, the more data you may need to source.
However, creating a performance dashboard, via a platform such as Channel Mechanics, simplifies the process and pulls all that data from disparate systems – collates it and presents it in one place so you have a single, personalized view of any partner’s business, at the click of a button. Not only does this ensure ease of doing business for partners, but it empowers account managers to become sales focused rather than spending a significant chunk of their time hunting through many different systems for the necessary data.
3. How Will We Get People Using It?
And finally, another common question I hear when vendors are considering a partner performance dashboard, is an operational one. How will we get people using the dashboard internally? Because it’s a little bit of a culture shift – partner account managers are often very focused on running the numbers in Salesforce. They adopt a more internal looking approach than external, and certainly aren’t looking through the lens of the partner.
But with a partner performance dashboard and the great set of data points it provides, account managers can steer partners in the direction in which you want them to go. You can spot instantly if they are in danger of non-compliance, for example. Or if they’re not going to reach their incentives thresholds. As an account manager, the dashboard enables you to see all of that information and approach your job in a much more efficient way – including being less operationally-focused and more sale-driven. Creating a win-win for both the vendor, and the partner.
If you are interested in learning more about Partner Performance Dashboards, check out my recent webinar with Jeremy Butt, SVP, International & Strategic Alliances Partners at RingCentral and Balaji Subramanian, Global Channel Chief, SVP Channel Sales at IGEL as we discuss Partner Performance Dashboards for Tomorrow’s Channel Ecosystem:
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