If you’re looking to accelerate your recruiting and partner on-boarding processes, you can learn a lot from Lauren Robinette, Channel Rockstar and a business development professional in high tech. Charged with quickly building a global enterprise partner channel from scratch for Samsung, she signed up 250 global partners in only 6 months.
The Shift from Sales Fulfillment to Sales Participation
Samsung was building on a single sales structure – which took product direct-to-consumer via telcos and storefronts – and adding another channel: partner sales. The sales organization would need to add partners who had contacts and a sales culture vs. the fulfillment partners they were currently working with.
Streamlining Partner On-boarding
To onboard 250 partners in 6 months, efficiency is paramount. Robinette started at square one, establishing procedures and checklists for partner on-boarding and evaluation. Working with Channeltivity, she converted her contracting procedures to an online tool (available as the “Click to Contract” feature to Channeltivity customers) that allowed her to accept 65 distinct contracts from partners around the world without having to go through the back and forth of a contract’s red line process.
Forget the long contract red line process and speed partner on-boarding
A long and cumbersome process was replaced with the ability to quickly collect the signed contracts and allow new partners to get to selling right away. It also made the contract process do-able for such a small channel team.
Easier for Samsung, Easier for Partners
Robinette also ensured those new partners had easy access to the channel marketing materials they needed hit the ground running. Those materials had been spread among shared drives that were a challenge to access and download from. Now they are easily found and downloaded from Samnsung’s partner portal.
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Stay tuned for Part 2 of “How to Ramp Up More Partners Faster,” where we’ll cover best practices to bring partners on more quickly.