Are partners underperforming, or is it too hard to generate demand?
Before concluding that partners will not market, check whether your program has made marketing genuinely doable for them.
The short answer
- The usual diagnosis, that partners will not market, is often a friction problem in disguise.
- Most partners are technologists and salespeople running lean businesses, not marketers.
- Material that needs work before a customer can see it imposes a cost the partner will usually decline to pay.
- Check what a partner actually receives before concluding the partner is the problem.
When partner-generated demand is flat, the default explanation is that partners will not market. It is worth testing the alternative explanation first: that the program has made marketing harder than it needs to be.
Who partners actually are
Most partners are technologists and salespeople running lean businesses. Marketing is rarely a dedicated function, and where it exists it is usually one person supporting a portfolio of vendors.
The test
Take one asset a partner receives and count the steps between receiving it and a customer seeing it. Every step is a place the partner can stop, and for a vendor competing with a dozen others for the same attention, each step meaningfully lowers the odds anything ships.
Questions this raises.
- Why do partners not use vendor marketing material?
- Usually because the material is not customer-ready. If a partner has to rewrite the copy, adapt the design, or decide on an angle before a customer can see it, that is work, and for a partner carrying many vendors, it is work that loses to whatever is already urgent.
- How do you tell partner underperformance from program friction?
- Look at what the partner receives and count the steps between receiving it and a customer seeing it. If the count is more than one or two, the program is generating the friction, not the partner.