I'm Your Partner, Not Just Your Reseller

I think we all realize that to be successful you must maintain a balanced relationship with your partners. It seems that, today, all too often, manufacturers look at their channels as necessary evils, and they treat them as such.

I'd like to ask a few questions of manufacturers. How do you compensate your regional account executives to build successful long-term relationships with your regional partners? How do you measure the satisfaction of your complete partner base? How do you ensure corporate knowledge of where accounts came from is maintained as you experience turnover within your ranks? Who is your customer? Is it the end user or the integrator, or both?

I often find myself wondering why selling $2 million of one of our vendor partner's products gains less notice than when a single end user buys a quarter of a million dollars. I find myself wondering why our vendor partners are more than happy to extend a few extra percentage points of discount to a D&D end-user customer, but not to D&D. I find myself curious why a vendor partner is offering free classroom training seats to an individual customer as opposed to my consulting practice. I would like to know why it's not important to our vendor partner what integrator our customer buys from, but it's supposed to be important to us that our customer buys only from a specific manufacturer vendor "partner."

I don't ask for much from our vendor partners. At least I don't think I do. I ask that while we educate ourselves about their products, they educate themselves about our solutions. I ask that when we bring them into opportunities they fully support us, as we do when they bring us into opportunities. I ask that they share the pain of lowered profit margins when we're trying to win a deal as opposed to us having to feel all of the pain. I ask that they appreciate my account executives when they sell a quarter-million-dollar deal as much as they appreciate the end user. A simple "thank you" will do. I ask that our partner's C-level and V-level people introduce themselves to our C-level people and V-level people, as they do to our end users.

Manufacturers have partner programs. They list a series of steps a "partner" needs to take in order to be authorized to sell their products. This may include training, the procurement of lab or demonstration gear and a dollar volume commitment.

I submit that this is not a partnership, it's an agreement for resale. A partnership goes much farther. It includes an agreement by both parties to market each other's solutions. It includes a way for both organizations to increase profitability and to be financially motivated to work together. It includes an interest by both the account executives and by the management of both parties to be successful and accountable.

So I would like to pose a challenge to manufacturers' CEOs and people responsible for the channel. Instead of just talking to your highest volume integrators, who probably have a great relationship with everyone at your organization, talk to your lower producers and find out why they aren't doing more. They can tell you what's not working. If you are truly committed to a successful channel program, provide financial incentives to your regional account executives (not just your channel teams) to build lasting strategic relationships with regional integrators. And lastly, treat your integrators as customers. They really are.