These blogs will provide you with insights and opinions about partner relationship management from a strategic and a best practice perspective. We will also discuss RelayWare’s technologies and software and how they can be applied to help customers with common partner management challenges
Communication Objectives
Whilst you can communicate with your channel partners too infrequently, the opposite is certainly also the case. As with all forms of communication, if you have nothing worthwhile to say, don’t say anything. Partner communications must have a purpose each and every time. They must inform, educate or form a proposition of some sort. You must stop and think:
- Why are we communicating?
- What are we trying to achieve:
- Quantitatively?
- Qualitatively?
Selection and Segmentation of Receivers
Your message must be relevant and interesting to your receiver. Therefore prior to creating the message, it is essential to determine who your audience will be and consider adapting your communication according to your audience:
- Restrict your audience to only those receivers for whom the specific message is relevant
- Adapt the medium of the message so that it is relevant
- Adapt the syntax and / or the semantics of the message so that it is relevant
- Adapt the timing of the message so that it is relevant
- Adapt the call to action of the message so that it is relevant
This step can often be difficult for vendors who lack sufficient personal profile data on the individuals in their channel. It is common to hear of vendors sending partner communications to the partner principle or to the sales@ or info@ email address. All of which are of negligible value and send out a poor impression of your level of partner intimacy. Quite simply, if you do not have a detailed, up to date partner database with multiple contacts in all disciplines for each of your partners, your communication strategy will at best deliver sub-optimal results.
Next week we will look at communication mediums.
