Partner Success and Customer Sucess

dperenchio

For those working in a SaaS company that leverages system integrators:

I am super interested in chatting with you about how you engage your SI partners. When you pull new SI into your ecosystem, how do you scale them up and provide ongoing training to them? When they get stuck with a customer requirement, how do they engage your organization? Do you have some sort of a Partner Success Team that supports all of these concerns or some other sort of specialized team?

My organization sells very complex solutions with steep learning curves. I would love an opportunity to talk to a few folks that have experience around this topic. Our partner success is a key to our customer success and I would love to explore how to tie these together better.

Appreciate it!

richardconvery

Hey @dperenchio,

I worked closely with partners across EMEA during my time with a BI company a few years back. My approach with the partners is to include them where ever possible when it comes to training your own team - treat them just like you would one of your own consultants. The partners appreciate seeing things 'warts and all' and can help you in the process of fixing those items too.

I would recommend approaching partners like a top tier account. Have a Partner Success Manager, and an Partner Account Executive too.

Happy to have a call and chat if you'd like!

Richard

Jordan Silverman

@dperenchio at my previous company I was the VP of CS and partners were one of our top lead sources.

What we did was:

1) Sales would manage the partner at the start

2) After the partner referred 3 closed won deals they were eligible to level up to the next partner tier

• For the first 3 all we asked was an email intro, our sales team handled the rest
• This meant higher rev share for the partners so most partners wanted to get to the next tier

3) For deals 4 and 5 the sales team would co-sell with the partner

• Calls and demos all done together hand in hand
• At this point most partners decided to continue solely in a referral relationship and let our sales team handle the heavy lifting

4) Once the partner referred 5 closed won deals they were then introduced to the CS team

• We had about a dozen of these partners

5) Our enterprise CSMs managed these partner relationships as part of their portfolio

• This meant QBRs, revenue goals, etc.

For our 5 to 7 largest partners we had shared Slack channels. This way they could reach out to their CSM as needed with support as backup. For other partners they ran through support and support would escalate as needed.

Happy to hop on a call or Zoom to dive more in depth into this if helpful!

BenB

We use cloud distributors to help sell our platform (which is also pretty technical and involved).

We have dedicated reps that manage a group of distributors. Their responsibility is to train the sales team, keep everyone updated on new features, company announcements, pricing and new messaging. They're also responsible for helping drive new ways to engage to their customers (webinars, events etc...) plus play main POC for anything that falls through the cracks.

For all things support/onboarding etc... we have a separate colleague from the support staff that serves as one primary contact for all training and improvement.

Anytime their customers are stuck there is a clear path to escalate to our team directly. In most cases we simply find the solution and send it back to the distributor to communicate -but we'll also let them setup joint calls to get us all involved at the same time.