TRANSFORMING THE MANUFACTURING PARTNER EXPERIENCEA guide for manufacturers that go to market through dealers, distributors and more

Let’s start with what we can all agree on: No man(ufacturer) is an island. As a manufacturer, you rely on dealers, distributors, and partners to attract, acquire, and serve your end customer. That means your success and revenue growth are very dependent on the success of your partner network.

With so much at stake, how can you ensure that your partners are successful? The good news: Partner performance is very much within your control. Improving how your partners interact with you is often the key to successfully, and profitably, growing your business. In this guide, Salesforce and 7Summits have teamed up to shed light on how manufacturers like you can unlock the value of your partnerships today.

Partner By Any Other Name For the purpose of this paper, we are using the term Partner to generically stand in for terms like:

• dealer• distributor• reseller• sales partner• service partner• consultancy• channel partner• franchise

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Historically, manufacturers have merely maintained partner relationships. Providing partner support meant manual processes and one-way pushes of information (translation: lots of email). More recently, manufacturers have started adopting digital portals — a more organized hub for information. While these portals are a step up from manual support, too many are still a one-way flow of communication designed to benefit the manufacturer, not the partner. As a result, many portals suffer from poor partner adoption. When partners bypass portals in favor of manual support, the portals never achieve the value they were meant to provide. And all too often, that poor experience trickles down to customers.

While some will always be slow to adopt, it’s time for the rest of us — the most innovative among us — to fast-forward. It’s time for you to enable your partners to build your business for you.

Today’s most successful manufacturers are not just maintaining partner relationships; they are delivering a partner-centered experience. The transformation of your partner experience takes three steps, all laid out in this guide:

Stand in Their Shoes to Build Empathy: First things first, understand what a great partner experience looks like — from a partner’s point of view.

Assess Your Current State to Identify Opportunities: Reflect on where you’re delivering on your partners’ expectations and where you’re falling short.

Map Out Key Elements to Take Action: Lay the groundwork to enhance your digital partner experience for the benefit of partners and customers alike.

The majority of organizations manage their indirect channel or partner activities with a mixture of outdated and homegrown applications (driven primarily by spreadsheets) and customized and inflexible legacy systems.”

- Gartner 2018

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STEP ONE: Stand in Their Shoes to Build EmpathySo, you’ve decided you want to graduate from merely maintaining partner relationships to delivering a partner-centered experience. Way to go! The first step is to recognize that your partners have needs and expectations that are likely not aligned with your processes.

Let’s walk through the manufacturing partner experience. We’ll identify what partners expect in each section. While reading, ask yourself: Is your company succeeding at putting the partner at the center of the experience?

Identifying, registering, onboarding, and educating partners The partner experience begins long before your partners start working on deals. Equally important is the way a manufacturer recruits new partners and brings them up to speed.

It’s not enough to provide a list of resources for partners to skill up on your company and products; partners want curated, personalized learning journeys that they can track their progress against. Manufacturers that do this well guide partners through onboarding by creating role-specific tasks and timelines for each partner program and level.

Finally, the best digital partner experiences embrace ongoing education. After all, manufacturers are constantly innovating and improving their products, and partners need to be enabled with the latest information. Built-in learning management systems (LMS) allow manufacturers to create, assign, and track learning activities so that partners stay current and have a clear path toward certification.

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Marketing to partners the resources, tools and programs to build awareness and drive demandPartners don’t want to reinvent the wheel as they generate awareness and demand for your offerings; they expect to plug into a robust, practiced system for amplifying your marketing message.

The most successful manufacturers proactively enable partners by extending pre-built, cross-channel marketing campaigns. Partners are then able to customize these journeys, enroll leads, and track results to easily build demand — all while staying true to the manufacturer’s brand, which is great news for you.

And when it comes to co-marketing, partners want real-time visibility into market development funds (MDF). Top manufacturers create seamless processes for requests, claims, and delivering funds, so partners spend less time tracking down status updates and more time driving business.

MARKETING & ENABLEMENT

ONBOARDING & EDUCATION

Supporting partners with self-service enablement and manual assistanceTo improve customer satisfaction and minimize revenue leakage, manufacturers want partners to provide the best customer service experience possible — through warranties, cases, field service management, and more. In the same way, partners want to be on the receiving end of a streamlined service experience.

Partners want their questions to be answered on-demand, through easy access to trending articles, relevant documentation, and FAQs. Unlimited access empowers partners to solve their own issues on their own schedules. Better yet, as partners become advocates working within the partner network, they want to share their wisdom or flag a concern with the broader partner ecosystem, benefiting all. If a partner is not able to find what they need, they expect the manufacturer to address their unanswered issues in an open forum or private case.

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Enabling partners to create and process profitable ordersManufacturers rely on partners to help them grow at scale. Partners in turn expect customer data at their fingertips and automated processes to help accelerate the sales cycle.

Above all, partners want unfettered access to the right leads. To prevent any channel conflict, top manufacturers use a seamless deal registration workflow to grant exclusivity to partner-sourced opportunities. They also manage lead distribution by intelligently routing leads to match partners’ expertise.

In order to close as many deals as possible, partners desire a 360-degree view of the prospect or customer — including account details, previous orders, service requests, and more. But it doesn’t stop there. Partners want to be intelligently guided through the best actions, with tedious tasks automated. They also want the power to configure products, generate co-branded proposals, and quote quickly and accurately, with discounts built in.

SERVICE & SUPPORT

SALES OPERATIONS

Building awareness of product and industry news, trends, and events to drive partner engagement and ideas for improvementIn more transactional manufacturer-partner relationships, manufacturers communicate news, product updates, and events. But in a transformed partner experience, partners have an important voice and are empowered to use it.

Top manufacturers see partners as a strategic asset, and turn to them for insights that drive innovation throughout the value chain. When partners give feedback, share ideas, and provide competitive and market input, everyone wins.

Successful manufacturers also enable team collaboration and access to subject matter experts as a part of the partner experience. Partners and employees benefit from working jointly on deals, co-creating marketing assets, tackling service escalations, and engaging in advocacy groups. A robust digital partner experience makes direct access to resources across the community scalable.

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Tracking and measuring partner performanceEven for manufacturers that have embraced transformation, managing, and measuring partner performance is perceived as one of the most challenging tasks. But, at its most fundamental, it’s about aligning on goals and empowering partners to measure their achievement of those goals. See, not that complicated!

Partners don’t want to wait for a quarterly business review to know where they stand. A truly partner-centered experience gives partners the right dashboards to understand their individual performance, as well as where they are in the context of the partner program (e.g. partner segments, tiers, categories).

As a best practice, top manufacturers enable partners to track partner activity, lead flow, conversion rates, and every part of the sales pipeline. They surface insights and suggested actions to help partners grow their business.

ENGAGEMENT & IMPROVEMENT

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

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Using a scale of 1 (lowest impact on partner performance) to 5 (highest impact on partner performance) rate each of the Functional and Technical Enablers.

Using a Red/Yellow/Green ranking, indicate how you believe a partner would rate your current ability to deliver each of the Functional and Technical Enablers.

Assess your gaps by analyzing your current readiness (Red/Yellow/Green) against the highest impact (4s and 5s). These should be your primary areas of focus as you design your new partnership experience. Hint: Quick wins would be Yellow 5s — tackle those early and launch them quickly!

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D I R E C T I O N S

Now that you've seen the level of experience you can create for your partners, it's time to reflect on where you're excelling and where you stand to improve. Use the tool on the next page to identify which enablers have the greatest impact on your own business's channel performance.

STEP TWO: Assess Your Current State to Identify Opportunities

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TECHNICAL ENABLERS

Collaboration

Mobility BrandingIdentity

ManagementMonitoring & Encryption

ApplicationSecurity

Workflow & Business Logic

Multi-Language Support

Multi-Currency SupportLive MessageData Quality

ManagementIntegration

Search

Activity Tracking

Approvals

Business Decision Engine (ML)

Community Analytics

Partner Communications

News / Events

Forums & Discussion Boards

Partner Ideation

Partner Incentives/ Loyalty Programs

Partner Performance Analysis

Partner Tiering / Scorecarding

Business Planning

Partner Compensation

Partner Forecast / Pipeline Analysis

Partner Satisfaction

Returns Management

Partner Support & Case Management

Dispute Management

Warranty Management

Knowledge Management

Self Service / Information Access

Product / Inventory Availability (ATP)

Lead Distribution

Deal Registration / Project Request

Configure / Price / Quote (CPQ)

Opportunity Mgt & Deal Collaboration

Joint Account Planning

Partner Locator / Solution Directory

Marketing Programs

Market Development Funds Management

Content Management

Marketing Event Mgt / Sponsorship

Joint Marketing / Planning

Gamification

Partner Registration/ Application

Partner Recruitment & Onboarding

Partner Training & Certification

Partner Contact Management

Agreement / Contract Management

MANUFACTURING PARTNER EXPERIENCE

Onboarding & Education

Marketing & Enablement

Sales Operations

Service & Support

Performance Management

Engagement & Improvement

FUNCTIONAL ENABLERS

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STEP THREE: Map Out Elements to Take ActionSo far, we have laid out partner expectations of manufacturers, and you took stock of how well you’re delivering on those expectations. Ready to close those gaps? As you design your digital partner experience, you’ll want to map out and understand:

WHO will be the key users of your partner experience

WHAT business processes and rules will be integrated into the partner experience

WHICH technology will be used to create the partner experience HOW information will be captured, organized, and structured

Business Process AnalysisConsider the business processes that fuel your company’s success, and ensure your partner program aligns with them. Engineering user flows for basic partner processes is important, but building those flows, data needs, and business rules into your partner experience is only the beginning. Think about how you will incent your partners to engage, and how you will guide them to the right content, the most relevant information, and the best insights to drive their overall performance. When built with business processes in mind, the partner experience becomes indispensable to their success and yours.

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Personal Analysis Each partner program has different internal and external stakeholders. Before all else, identify the unique needs and friction points of your key stakeholders. Only from there can you uncover the value drivers that your partner experience must address. Journey maps are an effective way of uncovering not only what stakeholders are doing, but also what they are thinking, feeling, and needing.

WHO

WHAT

Enabling Technologies Your partners expect a comprehensive digital experience, so the technology supporting that experience must be designed to deliver. Niche partner relationship management solutions are often inflexible, limited to desktops and laptops, and lack the integration and customization manufacturers need to transform the full partner experience. In contrast, a complete, end-to-end PRM platform gives manufacturers one single system of record and engagement that works on every device. In other words, you get complete visibility into partner activities and performance.

WHICH

Data Architecture Last but not least, there’s no shortage of data structures underpinning partner programs–customer classifications, partner segments, relationships between different partners, elements like territory assignments, authentication rights, permissions, and more. For that exact reason, delivering a thoughtful partner experience requires a well-defined approach to data management and architecture. Manufacturers need to clearly spell out data structures and hierarchies, centralize master data cleansing, and make sure the right models, processeses, and owners are established to manage and maintain the data over time.

HOW

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Don’t just maintain partner relationships. Deliver a partner-centered experience.Manufacturers today are reliant on partners to grow profitably. But as partners have higher expectations and more options than ever before, it is time for manufacturers to rise to the occasion. The digital partner experience you deliver will directly impact partner retention, loyalty and growth.

The partner experience is about driving partner performance and creating business value. The most successful manufacturers do this by:

Deeply understanding the partner experience from the viewpoint of the partner

Continually re-assessing the key enablers that directly impact partner performance

Delivering a digital partner experience that supports those key enablers as they evolve

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How will you know if you’re moving from maintaining partner relationships to delivering a partner-centered experience? When you are…

Serving partners relevant and impactful information

Enabling partners to more effectively sell, serve and grow their customers

Providing a unified way to engage with the manufacturer

Keeping partners informed about their leads, opportunities and their business

Driving productivity by eliminating waste and streamlining key business processes

Fostering long-term partner relationships based on mutual success

It’s time for the most innovative manufacturers to get the most out of their partner programs. Embracing a partner-centered experience will get you there.

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About 7Summits

Salesforce is the world’s #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Over 150,000 companies, both big and small, are growing their business with Salesforce’s cloud-based Customer Success Platform — including applications for marketing, sales, commerce, service, and more. With our Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution, you can optimize and personalize the entire partner experience, get visibility into your partners’ activities and performance, and set them up for success with the right content, tools, and data. Ready to connect to your customers and partners in a whole new way?

About SALESFORCE

7Summits is the leader in community-driven digital transformation solutions that enable partners, empower customers, and unleash employees. Our proven approach combines strategic consulting, user-centered experience design, and deep technical expertise to improve clients’ business processes through collaboration and automation.

Our Salesforce Lightning Accreditation recognizes our suite of solution accelerators, including Community Lightning Bolts and Lightning Components. These proprietary tools help clients implement high-quality solutions faster. 7Summits is a Salesforce Platinum-level Consulting Partner, a two-time recipient of Salesforce Venture funding, and is recognized by industry analysts and observers as a standout digital solutions provider.

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