Building a partner enablement strategy is essential for any company looking to expand their reach, drive sales, promote a unified brand vision, and strengthen their business relationships. Partner enablement helps you achieve this by equipping your partners with the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to succeed.
In this article, we explain what partner enablement is, reveal why it’s so crucial to the success of your business, and offer actionable insights to help you build a great partner enablement strategy.
What is partner enablement?
Partner enablement is the support that your business provides for your partners via training, education, tools, and resources. This support can include providing access to technical support and creating valuable and relevant content, such as sales scenarios and product overviews.
Most companies have some kind of channel partner program, be it a franchisee, a value-added reseller, a distributor, or an original equipment manufacturer (OEM). Partner training — also known as reseller enablement, channel partner enablement, and sales enablement channel management — ensures that your partnering businesses can successfully sell your products and services.
Although your business’s partners have a certain amount of autonomy, they still represent your brand. Beyond simply providing your partners with information about your products and services to increase revenue, a good partner enablement strategy aligns your partners with your business’s core values. This empowers your partners to represent your business in a way that stays true to your brand vision and overall strategy.
Why is partner enablement so important?
When implemented correctly, partner enablement allows you and your partners to build a relationship based on trust, transparency, and accountability. This makes partner program management easier while enhancing revenue growth and keeping your customers happy.
Here are just a few reasons why partner enablement is so crucial.
Increases product understanding
Effective partner enablement is essential for bringing your partners up to speed on product features, benefits, and use cases. With a deeper understanding of your products and services and a clear strategy to follow, partners can focus on executing the sales process from a position of certainty rather than one of ambiguity.
Improves product marketing
Partner training should include marketing materials such as web content, brochures, and case studies. This will help your partners spread the word about your products and services to their customer base.
Strengthens brand identity
Channel partner enablement ensures that you and your partners send customers a consistent message. This reinforces brand identity and helps your business develop a trustworthy reputation.
Drives sales
Partner enablement impacts sales performance indirectly by facilitating a strong brand identity, deeper product understanding, and improved product marketing.
That said, an effective partner enablement strategy should also directly address how to best sell your products. Partner enablement tools such as sales playbooks and account-specific support are essential for helping your partners identify prospects, create valuable leads, and secure more sales.
Expands market reach
Partner enablement facilitates market expansion by leveraging partners’ networks and expertise. By empowering partners with product knowledge and resources, your company can tap into new customer bases and niche markets that may be otherwise inaccessible due to geographical, cultural, or logistical constraints.
How to build a great partner enablement strategy
Successful business-partner relationships require partner training that equips each partner with the necessary knowledge and resources. While channel partner enablement can vary from company to company, these are some of the key steps that you’ll need to take to build a great partner enablement strategy:
Make a plan and identify goals
Before launching a partner enablement strategy, it’s crucial to lay out a clear plan of action that defines the goals you want to achieve together with your partners. In this plan, you should:
- Determine what you hope to accomplish through your partnerships with clearly defined objectives.
- Set measurable objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track partner progress.
- Include the characteristics of ideal future partners. A partner enablement strategy can attract prospective partners, making it a useful tool for connecting with businesses that align with your strategic goals.
- Outline the resources, tools, and support you will provide for your partners through the onboarding process to help them succeed.
Onboard partners
Effective onboarding is crucial for ensuring that your partners align with your brand. Making a good first impression during this phase sets the tone for a positive and productive relationship, so be sure to:
- Extend a warm welcome and introduce them to your brand’s values, mission, and culture.
- Share key details about your business, products, and services to give partners a comprehensive understanding of what they will be representing.
- Inform partners about available training programs to help them get up to speed quickly.
- Provide information on how to contact partner managers for ongoing support and guidance.
- Send links to the learning dashboard and make learning materials accessible to ensure partners have all the resources they need to succeed.
Create learning content
An in-depth learning experience is a key requirement in almost every partner enablement strategy. Most partner training programs emphasize product knowledge, customer support processes, and sales techniques. Key elements to include in your learning content are:
- A detailed company overview
- Ideal customer profiles and their main pain points
- Product demos
- Industry insights
- Current Google Tag Manager strategies and sales best practices
- Compliance training
- Exams to test product and sales knowledge
Start with a test case
If this is your first time creating a partner enablement strategy or you’ve made significant updates to your existing strategy, it’s always helpful to test it out with a trusted partner. To do this, you should:
- Create realistic scenarios to assess how well your enablement strategy prepares partners for actual challenges.
- Encourage detailed feedback on the onboarding experience, training materials, and support resources.
- Use the feedback to identify strengths and areas for improvement, making necessary adjustments to the strategy.
- Record insights and changes made during the test phase to inform future strategy iterations and onboarding processes.
Launch your partner enablement program
Once you and your trusted partner are happy with the finalized strategy, you can:
- Initiate the launch of your enablement program across your entire partner channel.
- Begin onboarding new partners as outlined in the finalized strategy.
- Encourage open communication to facilitate feedback.
- Request regular feedback from partners to gauge their continuing experiences and challenges.
- Use partner feedback to continuously refine and optimize the effectiveness of your strategy.
- Ensure that you review your partner enablement strategy regularly, both to meet the evolving needs of all your partners and to represent the changing requirements of the changing business landscape.
Make partner enablement easy with Moodle
Leveraging a well-trained partner network with the right enablement strategy makes achieving your business goals much easier. And with Moodle Workplace, it’s even easier.
Moodle Workplace is a customizable Learning Management System (LMS) that allows you to create engaging, on-brand training courses that provide your partners with everything they need to deliver top-class service to every customer. With key features like multi-tenant architecture, personalized learning paths, real-time progress tracking, and seamless integration, Moodle Workplace will streamline your channel partner enablement for optimal results.
