It’s sort of a chicken and egg question: How do you service leads without partners, and how do you recruit and engage your partners without leads? The fact is you need to be doing both, but there’s probably more risk in starting with partner recruitment.
Understand how it looks from the partner’s point of view. Having leads and no partners is an easier problem to solve than having recruited partners but no leads. The CEO or your internal sales team can always sell the leads if no one else. But if you have partners and no leads, partners may not take a risk on you.
Lead distribution at the beginning of a partner relationship helps gain visibility to your program.
Leads demonstrate the value of your product. This goes back to your role as influencer. Getting partners to sell for you, you need to be able to bring something to the table. It’s not so different from dating—partners will begin by taking things cautiously. But by providing some leads, it will help your visibility with recruited partners, and it will give them opportunity to practice selling your solution. They’ll start seeing some success, and the faster they have success with your solution, the faster they’ll ramp up to becoming a better partner for you and one who will feel more comfortable inserting you into their existing accounts.
And the best place to manage that relationship for both you and your partner? A PRM solution like Channeltivity that helps both recruiting new partners and ensuring the process is tracked, from lead distribution through successful deal registration.
Read another blog post on how to find strong leads for your partners.