Welcome back to our partnerDRIVEN blog series.
We’ve been talking about the latest trends and best practices to boost partner loyalty and performance. So far we’ve covered three ways to increase partner engagement and the four biggest challenges for indirect sales channels. Up next: building a better partner scorecard.
If you’re like many manufacturers, you’re keeping partner Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in multiple spreadsheets, paper contracts and manila folders. It may be hard to get your staff or partners the information they need. And the data that is available is hard to interpret or understand, so partners often give up – and just wait until someone tells them what to do.
You may also be managing your partners based on the tribal knowledge of your marketing and sales teams. Between retirements, transitions and attrition among your staff, your organization runs the risk of not fully understanding how you are measuring and monitoring your partner network.
So What Does a Good Partner Scorecard Do?
A good scorecard gives you accurate information about each of your partners. It applies a consistent approach to how you measure and monitor results. It also offers real-time visibility into key metrics across your entire partner network, including:
- Current market share
- Contracts and quota details
- Available marketing funds to target new leads
- Leads by product or industry
- Current partner status and tier
3 Ways Your Partner Scorecard May Be Underperforming
Want to build a better partner scorecard? The first step is understanding what your current scorecard could be missing: automation, aggregation and accessibility.
1. It’s not automated.
Running your partner scorecards on spreadsheets, paper copies or tribal knowledge? You’re probably relying on your channel management team and partners to keep them up-to-date. If the process isn’t automated, your scorecards don’t give you the real-time data on partner sales performance you need or give your partners the direction they want.
2. It doesn’t aggregate the right data.
When your scorecards are missing important data, your partners don’t know where they stand against their quotas or what their status or tier is at any given time. You could also be missing:
- Up-to-date MDF information
- A summary view of marketing program performance
- Your investment in each marketing program
3. It’s not accessible.
Rather than easy-to-interpret charts and graphs, maybe you have cells on a spreadsheet or comments in a notebook. Maybe your partner scorecards don’t display well (or at all) on mobile devices, and they aren’t personalized and organized to your partners’ businesses.
You can compile a mountain of information, but if the way you share it isn’t clear and direct, it’s of little value to you and your partners.
Build It Better
How much easier would it be to run your business if you had real-time access to your partner information? partnerDRIVEN’s partner scorecard not only aggregates your data automatically, it offers consistent rules and metrics to manage your entire partner network. All of your performance data is in one spot, so everyone is looking at the same information.
partnerDRIVEN doesn’t just work for you. Your partners get a clean and simple view of what’s important to them. When they have questions, they can collaborate with key corporate stakeholders to get the answers they need. They can also share best practices and ideas with other partners in your partner ecosystem. And they can use partnerDRIVEN on any device.
In the end, clearer communication means your partners can sell more of your products. partnerDRIVEN puts everyone on the same page. So how could a better partner scorecard change your business? Connect with me on LinkedIn to talk about any challenges you have with aggregating and communicating your partner scorecard data.
Stay tuned for our next post about partner marketing and how to streamline and personalize marketing campaigns for your partners.
