It’s safe to say that the role of the partner account manager (PAM) is ever evolving. Today, the role involves being less operationally focused and more sales driven. So how can partner performance dashboards empower your account managers to become sales focused?
It’s a question that always generates a lot of debate, and it was no different during our recent webinar, “Partner Performance Dashboards for Tomorrow’s Channel Ecosystem”. During the webinar, Channel Mechanics’ VP of Sales John McArdle, was joined by Jeremy Butt, SVP, International & Strategic Alliances Partners at RingCentral, Balaji Subramanian, Global Channel Chief, SVP Channel Sales at IGEL and Channel Mechanics CEO, Kenneth Fox.
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The Evolving Role of the Partner Account Manager
Channel Mechanics’ CEO Kenneth Fox weighed in on how partner performance dashboards are driving a new type of account manager.
“What we see with vendors that have implemented a well-defined partner performance dashboard, is that it helps account managers keep their finger on the pulse of sales and on what a partner is doing”, he explained. In order to track performance metrics, it’s critical that PAMs have visually rich dashboards that are both external and internal facing.
This is important for an account manager as some might manage between 10 and 20 accounts. Then there may be five or 10 of those account managers reporting into a regional manager, who will oversee 50 or 100 accounts.
“Having that internal view, in our experience, has proven to be as successful as the partner facing view because it helps the account managers drill into any given account at any given time,” said Fox. This results in more productive meetings, enabling the PAMs to clearly outline to partners, ‘This is your target. This is what you have achieved since our last QBR. This is what we agreed on. Here’s where you are against that’.
The Impact of Partner Performance Dashboards
Alongside driving revenue, a partner performance dashboard is central for helping to ensure partner compliance. With a dashboard in place, the PAM can easily track a partner’s compliance and share that information to prevent any problems.
Another area that partner performance dashboards have proven successful is with incentivization or rebates. Incentives and rebates can be summarized into a single tile or picture on the partner performance dashboard. This allows the PAM to track what a partner has earned, and what they could potentially earn with just one click.
A partner performance dashboard also creates a consistent approach, so all account managers interact with partners in the same way.
“That’s quite powerful,” said Fox. “It doesn’t matter who’s doing it. It’s always done in a consistent way. And it is one of the great examples of how automation can really help deliver sales”.
To conclude, Jeremy Butt shared his view, stating that the days of partner managers being relationship managers are long gone, “They need to be business development managers. How they’re going to do it without data and dashboards? I’ve got no idea. But it will be with great difficulty”.
Looking to learn more on Partner Performance Dashboards? Contact our team today and implement your Dashboard tomorrow.
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