Unlocking the Recipe for Thriving Partnerships in the Channel Industry

Six Essential Ingredients for Vendor Success

To find the right partners, channel companies need to be clear on what they want from an ideal relationship. The most successful partnerships are those where both parties bring an equal commitment to the relationship, have a shared understanding of their strategy and goals, and what they need to achieve in order to realise value.

Speaking from a vendor’s perspective, we believe six key ingredients to success are:

1. Products and services that compliment your portfolio and deliver real value to your business and your customers.
2. A clear vision of what success looks like for both parties.
3. Match tech needs with your company data and security policies. Using the example of the delivery of cloud services, considering where the data resides and how the solution is deployed (private/shared instance).
4. Knowing how your brand strategy can fit into the overall proposition; can it be white-labelled or co-branded, can APIs be leveraged to bring provisioning and onward billing into your own ecosystem.
5. Consider productisation and how commercials fit into your product mix, to differentiate and demonstrate value.
6. Good communication and peer-to-peer relationships to continue alignment in strategies as the relationship evolves.

Many of our most successful partners have integrated our call analytics and call recording services within their own product portfolios, bundling the product to guarantee attachment and recurring revenues.

We believe the larger the addressable market (partner type through to end user verticals), the harder it is to take a one-size-fits-all approach to partner programmes. Our products – call and collaboration analytics, recording and toll fraud prevention – have a very large addressable market (from vendors, Tier 1 carriers, distributors to resellers) and each has varying needs and varying routes to market, ultimately servicing a vast array of end user vertical markets.

We have created a tiered partner programme that includes a broad range of processes and benefits. By working closely with key partners, we agree the approach that will align most with their own go-to-market strategy, picking and choosing the elements that deliver maximum impact on revenues.

Strategic Considerations for Seamless Collaboration

The key is to foster collaboration across all levels within both organisations.  This involves genuine peer-to-peer engagement and dedicated account management teams that will help generate the joint identification of new product opportunities as well as combine strategies to ensure customer retention.

The benefits of strong collaborative partnerships are vast.  By having a common goal, your success will become your partner’s success.

Partnerships with good support programmes should make it easy for you to increase ARPU, widen your addressable market, and differentiate your services.

Identifying Ideal Partners in the Channel

Firstly, the partner’s offering must compliment and add value to your own and reviewing their profile of customers helps build an understanding of their strengths. Once engaged, good communication and an interest in strategic alignment will be good initial indicators of the type of partner that they are.

A focus on customer experience is critical, in terms of their approach to partnerships, opportunities for API integration, personalisation of services and engagement, through to end user experience, training and support. Training programmes should cover train the trainer programmes, demonstration tutorials as well as chargeable end-user training. Seeking partners with extensive sales and marketing resources that you can draw upon make it much quicker and easier to productise and take the new proposition to market. A proven 24/7 helpdesk will also ensure you can offer full-service assistance to your customers. This may include an online helpdesk support plus helpdesk-to-helpdesk support.

Tollring’s solutions are sold by partners in 21 countries, ranging from resellers to Tier 1 carriers. We have developed a tiered partner programme to meet the needs of all our partners to support them in their growth strategies. Our strong relationships, flexibility and investment in our partners’ growth underpins our programmes in order to deliver great APRU, significant value and ongoing recurring revenue for everyone involved.