The Finest Quality Partners: Deploying the Partner Scorecard

Often the hardest part of finessing a partner program can be somewhat elusive. It may be honing your partner enablement strategy or focusing on your partner marketing development, but more often than not systemic problems are usually down to partner quality.

So just how do we assess partner quality? What can we do to only have the best quality partners? And what is the Gorilla Partner Scorecard? Read on.

What do we mean by partner quality?

A couple of things before we take a deeper look at how to rate your partners. Firstly, partner quality is not an all-encompassing thing for most programs. You should not think of partner quality as an ideal to be constantly chased and focused on, the simple fact is almost anyone can be a quality partner given the right resources and time. The general wisdom is that as long as you have a solid foundation of 20% quality partners in your program, you’re on the right track. 

Second, quality in terms of your partners is not universal, the quality of partners in a program is largely a function of how well they push the program towards its goals. In most cases those goals are to create pipeline or revenue for both partners and vendor, however other, more holistic program goals can exist, partners here should be measured in a useful rather than ubiquitous manner.

In general however, partner quality is a function of how well each partner is driving your businesses and your goals forward and can be assessed on multiple criteria including:

• Financial results
• Customer satisfaction
• Marketplace performance
• Sales Readiness
• Customer Relationships
• Growth 
• Marketing ability
• Continuous improvement
• Progress towards long-term strategic goals

The list can include anything that in essence means the partner is a more valuable asset to the overall success of the program, and as such can be exhaustive. With all that information how can you hope to correctly assess, pursue, and help enable the right partners?

The Power of Partner Scorecarding 

You want to know which partners you should be investing in, which are generating sales and leads regularly, and which opportunities are being missed.  This is something that, as a channel marketing agency, vendors approach us often to help with, so we developed our Partner Scorecard.

To begin our experienced partner assessment team works with you to create a list of characteristics depending on your objectives for scorecarding. We take your preferences and partner ideals and apply them to your channel in our proprietary platform. The final outcome is a ranked list of partners with scoring based on your goals. It allows you to clearly see every partners’ value, any weaknesses, and lucrative possibilities arising, so you know where to put investment and resources.

When you employ Gorilla partner marketing or sales services, we help you create a real-time dashboard of the growth opportunities in your network. 

By adding in sales and marketing data from your CRM, the scorecard can become a dynamic timeline revealing the progress of the partners endeavours and their growth in your program. The analytics tools will help you better understand which partners are giving you real quality and providing sustained value, and which need attention.

Learn more about our partner scorecard or our other partner enablement services here.