How Partner Scorecarding Can Build a More Efficient and Effective Channel

In today’s market and especially in the channel, there are so many different resources available.  How do you ensure that the resource (or partner) you are putting time and budget into is performing? You may have stars that are bringing in the majority of your revenue and you may have a number of partners who are not pulling their weight. How can you make sure that you are doing your best to be selecting and monitoring efficient and effective partners?

Partner scorecarding is a great way to get an accurate understanding of which partners are your leaders, which are your growth partners and which partners you wouldn’t be sorry to see leave your program.

So what is partner scorecarding and how is it done?

First, Let’s Take a Look at Some of the Things you Should Consider:

1. What goals are you or your company trying to drive? Do you want to increase services? Grow revenue? Expand into new markets?
2. What is your reputation in the channel? Occasional channel conflict? Channel centric? Etc.
3. Who are your consumers? Retail, enterprise, SMB, small business, etc.
4. What type of partners do you have? Referrals? Consultants? MSPs?

How Can you Customize the Scorecard for your Business? 

Here’s where we are going to look at partner performance; are they doing well? What is the potential for them to perform in the future?

Let’s Make a Plan:

1. Why? Performance or potential, what’s the goal? Trying to raise awareness of partners, trying to promote them, trying to see potential?
2. Who? Which partners? Top performers, gold, platinum,  gross partners, a particular region, who managed them through distribution? Etc.
3. When? Right after they’ve ramped, a year after engagement? After 2 years?
4. How/How often? Will you do this through a survey, a 3^rd party, account managers, distribution, at  a partner conference?

What Are the Top 10 Scorecarding Metrics?

Metrics depend on industry, partners, process and the why’s and what’s. This is a lot of information to break down, so we asked Chris Becwar, {Director of Marketing and Strategic Alliances} of CCI Global Channel Management, what his top scoring metrics are:

“This is a question we get asked a lot. There are a seemingly infinite number of ways to score partners. The optimal set is different for every supplier depending on what you’re trying to achieve with your channel, the type of products you’re selling, what resources/data/budget you have access to, what your partners need to be successful, and others. It can be difficult, time consuming and expensive to narrow all the data you might want. To help, we looked at the metrics channel leaders are finding the most useful these days and grouped them into the ‘Top 10 Scorecarding Themes.’”

Each of these themes has several specific metrics within it and are categorized into 4 quadrants based on how impactful they tend to be and whether the data tends to be easy to obtain versus harder to get.

What Do Scores Mean?

That is really up to you.  It depends what you are trying to achieve and what you value in your current partners.  Once you’ve scorecarded you’ll decide where you have gaps and how you can better nurture current partners or recruit new partners to fill those gaps; but that’s a whole other blog post!

So there you have it; Scorecarding is a great resource to make sure you are properly evaluating your partners to ensure an efficient and effective team. Just another tool in the toolbox!

What other metrics do you find valuable when evaluating partners?

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