Summary

While most companies gravitate towards a full-time partner manager as their first partnerships hire, there's a case for hiring a consultant instead. Working with a consultant can help you experiment with channel efficiently and be quicker to market.

Make sure to give your consultant a strong mandate, set clear KPIs and milestones, and focus on building out a partner product. Finally, once you're ready don't hesitate to bring the program in-house.

Here's what we cover

Introduction

Building a great channel program is a dream for any B2B business. Having teams of people out there promoting your brand, sending you leads, or even better yet closing customers? Sign me up ✋🏼

When tasked with building a channel program most founders immediately gravitate towards making a hire — the partner manager. And we’ve all seen that strategy work. But could there be another way to get started?

Having always worked “in-house”, I recently consulted for the first time as a channel expert at ROAS Media and I observed how beneficial such an engagement could be. So I caught up with my friend Mark Cohen, who’s been consulting for a lot longer than I have, and we discussed how working with an external consultant can help startups experiment with channels more efficiently, build a robust infrastructure quicker, and be faster to market.

Here’s our take on why startups looking to build a channel program should consider working with a consultant to get started 🤔

The benefits of working a consultant

Channel partnership programs take time to build out. Getting the basics right and properly executed by an expert can accelerate your program by months or even years.

A consultant who understands channel programs will be able to provide structure, processes and actionable insights into:

• Building out your partner product
• Selecting the correct Partnership Relationship Management (PRM) system
• Understanding the partner stages and flows within your CRM system
• Acquiring potential partner prospects
• Onboarding and enabling new partners
• Providing ongoing support to the partner and the sales team from first lead → close
• Ongoing relationship management strategy

The list goes on…

Another under-appreciated point is what we dub “the grind”. Even with a basic program structure ready, there need to be many more conversations in order to understand your Ideal Partner Profile (IPP) and develop your relevant Minimum Viable Partner Product. This requires a level of experience that a proven consultant can help deliver upon.

Finally, there’s the opportunity cost of hiring someone full time to run the program — is this where you want to put in your time, effort and energy, when there may be other scalable channels that you want to focus on. It may make sense to treat the channel program as an experiment and working with a consultant to test it and prove it out. Once you’ve proved out the experiment you can bring this in-house and hire your partner manager (which may in-turn be the consultant who built out the program)!

How to set yourself (and your consultant) up for success

When picking a consultant to build your program, it’s important to find someone that is a good fit for your business needs and setting the right expectations for them to be successful.

1. Help them build out the partner product

Your partner consultant should first look to build your partner product (the product that you go out and pitch to partners), and that requires support and time from key team members, including product, marketing, sales, customer success and the founders.

Help them get this support from the team until they get the first version of the partner product ready. Once that’s done, they will probably not need as much time from your team as they go out and start acquiring partners.

2. Break down the engagement into key milestones

Ask your consultant to break down the project into key milestones. Where each milestone is ideally defined by clear end objectives, KPIs that you want to track and milestone start and end dates.

By the end of the project you should have a playbook on your partner program that a full-time partner manager can refine and scale.

3. Be clear on your KPIs

Having clarity on KPIs is helpful for both parties in the engagement. Work together with your consultant on what KPIs (in the form of metrics, outcomes, tasks, etc.) make sense at each stage of the engagement.

In your weekly catch ups with the consultant, you can go back to the KPIs you’ve set and see how the project is tracking and where your consultant may need help. Also, don’t be held hostage by poor KPIs and change them if they no longer make sense.

4. Make them the expert

Which means giving them the responsibility to educate your team about what your partners look like and what are the best ways to engage them. Your consultant will need to set the tone for the project and how best to engage partners, and what resources they’ll need from the team going forward. Empower them to do this and make them the expert within the team.

When to bring this in-house

With your partner product ready, key milestones in place, and the “grind” you should be beginning to see some level of recurring lead and revenue generation.

Make your consultant’s final milestone to give you a signal when it’s time to hire someone full time. In our view, the moment that the process becomes repeatable you should look to bring it in-house to better manage the day-to-day relationships, and expedite growth.

Hope this helps ✊🏼

… and I’m glad that I could write this post together with Mark Cohen. Mark is a former teammate from TradeGecko and a channel expert who has consulted for several SaaS companies including Stamped.io, CartRover, and Katana and currently heads technology partnerships at Katana.

Writing this post together was a fun process, done over Google Docs, and one that we completed in just a week’s time — going from a crazy idea on a call (“hey let’s work on a piece of content together”) to getting the piece published.

If you have questions or are curious to learn more, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter. 👋

You can also follow me or hit subscribe to keep in touch. I write regularly about growth, marketing, and partnerships in tech and fintech.