Forging Alliances
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A 50-person retail AI SaaS startup wanted more from their partner program but where to start?
Our approach to building a partner program revolved around three tracks: prioritizing the roles the channel would fill, building an ecosystem of partners based on the prioritization, and implementing E3 – excite, enable, and execute.
Prioritization
A partner program can help in multiple ways including establishing geographic presence, providing scale, and taking on roles where the company might have limited resources such as implementation and project management. This AI company was almost exclusively focused on North America with a direct sales team, marketing, and services team. As we were still early as a company, we decided to concentrate our efforts, stay focused on North America, and build a channel program where we had critical mass. Our goal, given both direct and indirect in North America, was to develop a partner program that complemented our direct team while recognizing that some conflict was inevitable.
The company initially had one solution around inventory optimization for brick and mortar retailers and quickly added two more. However, all three solutions were leading edge given the unique way AI was applied. Pulling this altogether we have:
A relatively small company with a limited track record in the space.
Leading-edge solutions that required the company’s services team to lead the implementation.
The value from our solution increased in relation to the number of stores and product lines. Therefore, our best prospects were large retailers who constantly had many vendors pitching their solutions.
Given above, we prioritized recruiting “influencer” and “referral / co-marketing” partners.
Ecosystem
The next step was thinking about how prospective customers learned about solutions in this space and how they acquired technology. We found that retailers were actively engaging consulting firms made up of x-retailers, both boutique and large management consulting firms, as well as the industry consulting side of systems integrators for advice. Relative to what we had seen in other industries, these firms played a more prominent role in influencing business and IT strategy.
Our solutions could also be viewed as “specialized” solutions within the world of planning and analytics. Therefore, established software companies who had cross-industry planning and analytics platforms were also potential influencers and co-marketing partners, as well as software companies who had solutions adjacent to our area within retail planning. Finally, we made our channel strategy clear to other people in the company who came into contact with potential partners (sales, marketing, board members) so that we minimized pursuing partners outside our sweet spot.
We divided our targeted partners into two groups: those who advised or integrated products and those who went to market with pre-built offerings. We then divided each of the groups into those companies who specialized in retail and those who offered cross-industry solutions. Lastly, we prioritized each of the four quadrants. As a side note, even though we wanted to stay focused on retailers in North America, many of these consulting firms were large international firms and so in some cases, in order to keep the relationship with the partner moving forward, we did end up pursuing some international opportunities.
E³
EXCITEMENT
E³ is how we onboarded and worked with partners. We first focused on creating excitement - excitement about the space and excitement about the business opportunity for the customer and the partner (when it comes to channels a firm has two customers, the end customer and the partner). As we were talking about machine learning and advanced analytics, which were top of mind with retailers, getting the partners excited about the space and our solutions was easy. In addition, as our solutions dropped significant dollars to the bottom line for prospects who fit our profile, customer ROI was also easy.
ENABLEMENT
The next step in E³ was around enablement. Educating the partners so they could speak “intelligently” about our solution. For some partners this meant helping them deliver the elevator pitch but nothing more. For others, we needed to enable their technical specialists to present our technology and how it fit into their architecture. The main point is enablement needs to match the partner’s business model and how the partner is going to engage, and the enablement needs to be ongoing (delivered in different modes) so that the partner stays engaged.
EXECUTION
The most important piece of E³ is execution because it all comes down to how the teams will work together on a daily basis including a documented and mutually agreed on plan with concrete expectations, check-in frequency, executive reviews, and progress indicators and measurements.
The ROI for the partner was a little more tangential. As none of these consulting firms “resold” our offering nor would they be heavily involved with the direct implementation of the solution, there was no incentive on the product sale and direct implementation. However, in almost all cases, when a customer implemented our solution there were opportunities for the partner around other areas such as data management and organization, process definition and alignment, ensuring integration points were accessible, and change management.
Overtime, we wanted to grow our partner’s commitment to us and the opportunity we represented. In the beginning, most of our relationships started with making mutual referrals. Upon seeing traction, the partner would then be willing to make a greater investment in enablement and, depending on the partner’s business model, more actively promote our solution (many partners wanted to present themselves as “vendor agnostic” to their clients). Some of our partners had door opening offerings around “quick” assessments and we looked to incorporate one of our models into their toolkit. Finally, and we only achieved this with one partner, was to have our software be part of the partner’s solution for those partners who offered “pre-built” solutions.
As our solutions had multiple use cases, we tracked the commitment from the partner at a granular level recognizing that not all our solutions were a good fit for every partner.
Conclusion
Our partnering methodology included prioritization, recruiting an ecosystem of partners, and E³. We recognized that our relationship with partners would evolve, and our goal was to deepen the partner’s commitment to our business and move them further down the funnel.
However, unlike a typical sales funnel, certain partners were never going to make it to the bottom of the funnel, based on the partner’s business model, and it was “intentional” to have partners at all stages of the funnel. We created collateral and tools specifically for partners, and stay focused on the day-to-day execution including keeping the partners engaged and excited, setting clear expectations, and tracking mutual progress. Within one year our approach yielded great results with 13 introductions to tier 1 retailers, including the largest retailer in the USA and the largest retailer in the UK, and we had a top 5 GSI incorporate one of our modules into their pre-built retail solution.
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