Boosting engagement, effectiveness, and efficiency — three common benchmarks enablement teams are expected to achieve — can be challenging enough at your own organisation. Attempting to drive them across your channel, however, unlocks a whole new degree of difficulty.
Yet, when done right, channel selling can ignite immense potential. It’s a conundrum — channel partners are uniquely positioned to drive impact but enabling them to do so can feel next to impossible.
Working with external partners amplifies the usual obstacles to enablement success, making it more difficult to achieve the high engagement and the effective, efficient execution that makes consistent revenue generation possible.
But that’s the key word: Possible. Powering channel partners might feel complicated, but with the right enablement strategy, it needn’t be. Read on to discover how to establish a strong foundation of channel partner enablement, maximise the output potential of your partner teams, and minimise the pain of doing so.
Strategically Integrate Partners Into Highspot
As you begin building a channel partner enablement strategy, the first step is simple: Loop your partners into Highspot. When every rep — internal or external — operates from the same source of truth, you’re less likely to encounter common issues like out-of-date messaging or irrelevant content reaching your buyers.
Bringing your partners into Highspot keeps them up-to-date on the latest-and-greatest content and messaging, not only easing the pain of version control but also ensuring partners have easy access to the assets they need to succeed. But your partners don’t necessarily need access to everything in your Highspot instance.
To ensure your partners have exactly what they need, curate tailored partner access tiers that only surface essential content and guidance. By configuring Spots and strategically Spot Sharing, you give partners quick, self-serve access to everything they need, meaning they won’t be stuck wading through internal-only assets in the moments that matter.
But well-defined access tiers do more than just limit the time partners spend searching for content: They also protect your privacy and make certain that your internal documents and data remain just that.
Highspot has been really flexible and great in enabling us to classify certain information that is either restricted just to us as Siemens internal employees or is restricted to an internal audience inclusive of Siemens partners.
Keeping your partners informed and in the loop — all without stretching your compliance guidelines — is as simple as defining and automating custom partner Group settings. Once you’ve grouped your partners, you can then take bulk actions to set and adjust their permissions at scale, verifying that your partners have access to all the content they need — and nothing they shouldn’t.
Define the Talk Track So Your Partners Don’t Have To
Just like your internal reps, your partners are slammed for time. Because they’re balancing the demands of both their organisation and yours, they’re probably even more so, meaning you need to make selling your products and services as easy as possible.
When partners don’t have the time to brush up on your content and messaging, it’s up to you to bring all that context together. Create partner-specific Plays that explicitly define what partners should know, say, show, and do when representing your organisation and selling your products and services. Then, socialise those assets in high-visibility locations within partners’ workflows, such as in the Featured Content sections on their homepage or in their partner Spots.
Using Highspot to house and promote all of the content and enablement has allowed us to increase the adoption rate of this program and allowed the message to disseminate quicker.
It’s a win-win for both you and your partners, not only limiting the time they need to spend studying up on your product and how to take it to market but also ensuring that when they do take it to market, they do so in alignment with your internal teams.
Plus, with partners utilising your Plays and implementing your know, say, show, do strategy, you gain even more data about what works — and what doesn’t — in the field, allowing you to iterate quickly and adjust as needed.
Wherever and however your reps operate, enablement is the key to improving engagement, effectiveness, and efficiency across every lever of your go-to-market motion, from internal reps to external partners.
While it may feel unfamiliar to enable non-traditional teams, their needs are much the same as your own. It’s up to you to equip them in a way that sets them — and you — up for success.
For more actionable tips and tricks on how to harness Highspot to standardise partner performance and optimise the output potential of your channel, download the e-book, “Polishing a Lacklustre Channel Partner Strategy”.
