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How to Leverage the Partner’s Journey for Successful Partner Recruitment and Development

Many IT suppliers focus almost exclusively on the partner-supplier relationship and don’t make a serious effort to reach out to solution providers until (and unless) they become a member of their partner program. While it is extremely important to support and enable your partner program members, it’s also important—believe it or not—to support and enable prospective partners. Why? Because if you are not participating in the Partner’s Journey leading up to a technology or partnering decision, you are missing out on valuable opportunities to capture partner mindshare, win new partnerships and motivate existing partners to sell more.  

Introducing the Partner’s Journey: A fresh approach to channel partner recruitment

If you work in marketing, you’ve probably heard of the Buyer’s Journey. It’s the concept that any product purchase is a process, not simply an act, which can be likened to a physical journey. The process consists of multiple phases, beginning with research and ending with a decision to buy. Conventional wisdom dictates that a consumer has completed 70 percent of this journey before even speaking to a salesperson. The message of this narrative is that, contrary to what retailers once thought, there is more than one opportunity to influence a buyer’s decision and resulting purchase—there are multiple opportunities that arise well before the consumer enters a store.