We conducted design research with 15 of our clients’ commercial partners across the world covering large, medium and small partner businesses. We also attended a few sales meetings that our client convened with their partners. In addition, we spoke to the regional leaders responsible for sales and partner management across the world.

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The global playing field is very complex. On one side, there are these markets where customers demand the partners to demonstrate a technology-led capability and sustainability at every step of the process. In other markets, price is the main factor that drives sales leading to commoditization and a superior technology-led capability is neither appreciated nor demanded. In those economies, there is no incentive for these partners to take additional efforts to deliver a superior sales proposition driven by advanced technology.  In addition, almost all channel partners cited big challenges from the likes of Amazon and other local online players who offer big discounts, a better online customer experience and more choice.

We designed a solution that harnessed the existing best practices from different regions. Instead of pushing one solution to be adopted by the rest of the world, we decided to design a portfolio of solutions from which the channel partners could themselves choose. We designed an online platform that will enable the collection of these practices. A community manager curated the content and gave visibility for the partners in terms of video, blogs and social media marketing support. These are areas where partners have been historically weak and have been struggling to compete with the online players. This incentive nudged them to participate more.

 

With a series of training sessions, webinars, capability building activities and a global assessment, we created a partner community program with three levels. The program has been launched in 12 countries and will be scaled to 60 countries in less than a year.

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