Building Lasting Relationships: Key Ingredients to a Successful Partnership
More coffee and less online meetings! Whilst that may sound a bit flippant, the concept is important.
Our working lives and routes to market are becoming increasingly digital, so it is vital to remember that people buy from people. It’s the human connection, building trust and making time for one another that leads to strong and successful partnerships. Meeting in person is more important than ever, and taking time for that chat over coffee can help relationships grow in leaps and bounds.
Biggest Challenges in Establishing Relationships with Customers and Vendors
The main challenge is in building the right partnerships – and this applies to all relationships, whether with customers, resellers, or vendors. This means having relevant and valued conversations with people, setting clear expectations around how you will work together, and capturing as much feedback as possible. With open and honest discussions, both parties will be able to understand what each needs to gain full benefits from the arrangement.
If a partner isn’t growing, there’s either no opportunity, the relationship needs to be improved, or the products in the portfolio need to be reviewed. It is vital to remove any complex or unnecessary barriers and ensure that you are as easy as possible to do business and transact with and that the products in the portfolio are easy to sell.
As a vendor, we continually strive to streamline processes in order to consistently deliver in terms of technology, products, support, and customer service. As an example, Tollring provides a comprehensive onboarding process as the initial step in becoming a partner. We explain how their onboarding journey will be conducted and then ensure the whole experience is easy and open.
We believe it is critical for the right people to be engaged at the right time to ensure the onboarding journey is right from the outset. We advocate peer-to-peer relationships for successful strategic relations – this is not just salespeople and technology specialists, it includes finance, marketing, and the whole knowledge team. This is a broad audience who all need to be kept informed to drive success.
The more we empower our customers and partners with all necessary commercial and technical documentation, the more customers’ success accelerates, benefiting from the investment in time to ensure our partners become commercially successful.
Maximizing Value from Existing Partnerships
Our most successful partners are those that fully productize our solutions into their portfolio and bundle value-added solutions with their overall proposition. The ‘Go-to-Market’ strategy is clear and products are easy to deploy.
These strong partners are those who fully commit to the relationship and call upon us for our opinions and input on sales and technical issues. They are the ones who dedicate the resources, effort, and time from the outset. By immersing themselves in our business and technology, they can broaden their portfolios with new products and services, benefiting from one relationship with multiple products.
Technology to Enhance Communication and Relationships with Suppliers and Clients
Evolving and improving communication and customer service is critical for all businesses. The channel should adopt the technologies they recommend to customers wherever it makes sense to do so. For example, having an understanding of how your people communicate on the phone or on Microsoft Teams; this will reveal if calls are going unanswered, if customers are held in long queues, as well as identify the salespeople who excel or those who need extra training. When you take steps to make improvements in these areas, it signifies very clearly to suppliers and clients that you care about working with them.
Key Emerging Areas of Opportunity for Fostering New Relationships
Microsoft Teams has already helped to drive growth across the channel, and the market for calling on Teams is expected to grow significantly as businesses migrate from traditional telephony systems.
The next huge opportunity is to use analytics to extract insights from these Microsoft Teams deployments to enhance the quality of services and improve customer experience. With insights into usage patterns, collaboration trends, and performance metrics, channel providers can use the information to refine product strategies and uncover new revenue opportunities as well as help their enterprise customers to maximize productivity.
The key to enhancing Microsoft Teams Voice capabilities is to offer a seamless setup, rapid deployment, and an intuitive interface, enabling providers and their customers to enjoy a sophisticated, future-proof tool with minimal investment. But, as the ecosystem of third-party products around Teams grows – a product both of market demand and Microsoft’s commitment to their AppSource and Azure marketplaces for online selling – it is more important than ever that channel players seek partnerships that are accessible and willing to support them on that digital journey.