Partner maturity models: How does your program stack up?
Because you’re on the Knack blog, you likely already know that partner programs cultivate strategic alliances between businesses with related interests. In the business-to-business (B2B) software world, partner programs help vendors extend their market reach while diversifying and increasing revenue opportunities. The more mature a vendor’s program becomes, the more efficient and effective a vendor can be in working alongside partners to identify, engage, and convert leads.
Digging in further, the most competitive programs make it easy and profitable for partners to establish relationships. They leverage a system centered on mutual benefits: each side enables the other to access new audiences and drive more revenue than they otherwise might.
For the sake of today’s post, we’ll refer to platform providers as vendors and companies that build upon their platforms as partners. Partners, whose solutions rely upon vendor technologies, look to vendors for marketing help, including financial support, audience intelligence, industry research, and best practices that will help win more business. Vendors are excited to support partners who put their ideas and co-marketing assets to work.
A thriving partner program is vitally important for B2B tech businesses to expand their market reach, generate new revenue streams, and achieve sustainable growth. However, for vendors, simply having a partner program isn't enough. They need a clear strategy and a way to measure their program's effectiveness.
But how?
Enter partner maturity models
A partner maturity model maps a vendor’s progression through multiple stages of growth and sophistication. Each stage represents an increased level of collaboration and mutual success on the path to higher-impact results—read: more money.
Benefits of partner maturity models:
Besides the obvious answer of helping vendors evaluate their partner program, partner maturity models provide a variety of other benefits including:
Benchmarking and prioritization: If you’re a vendor, compare your program against industry standards to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in both the short and long term.
Targeted investments: Allocate resources strategically by focusing on partner training, tools, and support that best address your current needs.
Goal alignment: Ensure everyone internally is working toward shared objectives with partners for a more unified approach to reaching and converting target personas.
Improved partner experience: A well-defined maturity model translates to a more structured and predictable journey for partners, leading to higher satisfaction and retention.
Key components of a partner maturity model:
As a vendor, you’ll want to evaluate your program on:
Partner onboarding: How effectively do you attract top-tier partners and onboard them seamlessly?
Partner enablement: Do you provide the training, resources, and tools partners need to succeed?
Marketing and sales collaboration: How well do your teams collaborate with partners to create materials and campaigns or generate leads and close deals?
Performance and profitability: Track metrics like partner-generated revenue, win rates, and overall profitability to compare results with benchmarks.
Governance and communication: Evaluate the clarity of program rules, communication frequency, support needs, and the availability of tools like partner portals.
The partner program maturity model (Knack’s version)
We know that developing a successful partner program takes time and effort. Effective programs evolve through distinct phases, each with unique expectations.
Our go-to model consists of three phases. As vendors progress through each phase, priorities shift from establishing program infrastructure to maximizing partner value and driving mutual success. That said, the following components are common across phases:
Goals: Each phase has distinct goals
Primary focus: Where to prioritize
Incentives: Why partners would want to be a part of your program
Assets: The key items that will ensure success in this phase and beyond
Support: How well the program does is reliant on how well the program is internally and externally supported
Key performance indicators (KPIs): How the program’s success will/should be measured
Phase 1: Building a framework for success
If you’re a vendor, this phase is all about establishing the infrastructure that allows partners to connect with you, stay updated on market trends, and access resources for customer engagement. To achieve these objectives, it's crucial to invest in a user-friendly portal, provide ongoing market intelligence, and offer marketing support materials. The core investments in this phase not only need to be created at the onset but also managed and maintained over time.
It's important to note that if Phase 1 isn’t executed well or to partner program benchmarks, then it’s difficult to make the most of the next phases of the model.
Phase 2: Scaling your program for growth
Once the foundation is set, focus should turn to improving partner program efficiency, repeatability, and scalability. When placing ourselves in the position of a top B2B software vendor, this involves equipping partners with tools that accelerate their sales cycles and incentivizing investment in your program as well as adding new partners to the mix. Additionally, fostering connections between partners and facilitating customer interaction through marketplaces can further accelerate growth through discoverability and potential co-sell opportunities.
In this phase, connections are seamless and increasingly strategic. Assets are easier to customize to be partner specific with fewer rounds of revisions. Events your company participates in have partners in mind as co-sponsors to help land value stories.
Ultimately, your partner go-to-market (GTM) motion should begin to feel second nature for your sellers and marketers (and your partners too), which means that with the right processes and tools in place combined with the ability to scale, ambitious market share goals start looking like more of a reality.
Phase 3: Harnessing the power of your ecosystem
In Phase 1, the focus is primarily on building a program at its foundation while in phase 2 it’s about building on that foundation and driving demand in a scalable way. Phase 3 takes that foundation and scale and propels it into higher gear.
As a vendor, you’ll reach a stage where your partner ecosystem will drive momentum on its own. Marketplaces will become a key source, if not the preferred source, for customer acquisition and transactions. You’ll also be providing your partners with the tools needed (with minimal lift) to continue improving their GTM motions. Marketing assets will be readily available for partners to leverage at scale with minimal editing needed, enabling them to augment joint messaging through marketing campaigns, sales efforts, at events, and more.
This is where AI-powered, full-funnel marketing strategies can be particularly effective because the relationship will be mature enough to support rapid production at scale.
When Phase 3 is achieved for an organization globally, a vendor has a market-leading program that’s driving predictable revenue and increasing market share and the partners within that program are happy, feel supported, and are also achieving their success goals.
The graphic below showcases how we at Knack think about partner maturity as described in this blog.
Is it time to assess your partner program’s maturity?
Use our model, or any model, to assess where you currently are. Here are a few questions to consider:
How well does your current program align with the characteristics of each phase?
What areas do you excel in?
What areas present opportunities for improvement?
By reflecting on these questions, you can gain valuable insights and develop an action plan to optimize your partner program and achieve greater success.
Need help or don’t know where to start? Knack can help. Contact us here to work with our team directly on putting this model to work at your organization.