PRM Best Practice: Providing Service & Support

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll consider the best approaches for providing a service and support offering to your channel partners for which the investment required is proportionate to the return yet the quality of offering is consistently high regardless of partner status.

In an ideal world, partner service and support should be provided in the spirit of social welfare services – available to all, provided to a consistent standard and free at the point of use. In practice, things rarely work out this way. In previous whitepapers, we looked at partner selection and segmentation approaches leading to the development of accreditation hierarchies. These same hierarchies are commonly used to determine the nature and often the quality of service and support offered:

As we already discussed in previous posts, this approach simply exacerbates the pareto effect – 80% or more of a vendor’s business derived from 20% or less of the partner base. This makes perfect sense. Higher tiered partners get the best levels of service and support and the greatest investment. Lower tiered partners receive the poorest service and the least investment. One could argue that this is only fair. However the model makes a key and often flawed assumption; that partners generating low levels of sales today lack potential for growth. Making the same assumption about customers would be unthinkable!

However, nurturing lower tiered partners to encourage growth can be a difficult and time consuming task. It is for this reason that many vendors simply don’t bother to try. But in difficult business and economic climates such as those we currently face, failure to exploit all of the sales and marketing resources and opportunities available to you is quite simply inexcusable.

Next time we’ll take a look at the things you should be investing in.