An excellent way to boost revenue without incurring excessive costs to the end users is to leverage on your partners. They also deliver the benefits of effective co-marketing opportunities.
Given how much positive impact partnerships can have on businesses, it is common for people to ask questions about setting up successful SaaS partnerships.
Read further on how to build a successful partnership management strategies
In this article, we will look into how to set up SaaS partnerships, and what mistakes to avoid.
Setting up a SaaS Partnership Program
There are several factors to keep in mind as you setting up a SaaS Partnership Program. Some of those factors are:
- Creating partnerships with reputable resellers will take significant time and effort in the beginning. The pitch to your prospective partners must show that you unmistakably understand their business.
- You are required to enable your partner’s sales team to resell your product. What this translates to is, sales enablement content will be vital for success.
- Your channel needs time to get to the revenue-generating point. In fact, it’s common for it to take a year or more before you start achieving desired results.
- The product-development response cycle from your partners won’t be as swift as you get from your direct customers, and this means you should ensure that you’ve reached product-market fit prior to committing to a partner network.
Organization and Outreach
No business works well when its departments are not organized or aligned. Sales and marketing should be brought into the loop with your partners in place. Here’s how it works:
When partners have questions, they ask sales, sales provide answers, and marketing utilizes those questions and answers in updating FAQs and promotions. This whole process is mostly based on listening for producing more marketing content.
The next thing you need to do is to figure out your outreach and onboarding strategy. This is usually characterized by trial and error. It is all about figuring out the kinds of content that are effective in winning partners over.
The best action to take involves getting sales and marketing to work together. Do well to ensure that you are including both informational material and sales tips in your messages throughout the process. Place your customers in the center of your organization so you know exactly what is going on while making sure everyone is aligned.
Enablement and Ramping
This is the great part, where you get to start seeing the results of your hard work. Onboarding is underway and your partners are already sending referrals, and now you need to build an environment that gets partners motivated to work with you.
You should embrace the use of metric-based KPIs. This allows your partners to easily see what’s going on, and they can also keep track of how their performance. Newsletter, exciting news, and other upcoming updates allows you to easily connect and engage with all your partners.
To ramp up your SaaS partnership program, you need to create more video content and employ a partner manager who will handle communication with your partners.
Mistakes to Avoid
Not Utilizing Resources
Specifically, not taking full advantage of outsource teams that have the ability to do what you cannot do. Stick to what you know how to do best and recruit experts to take care of the rest.
Outsource teams characteristically have experience working together, know each other’s strong points and weaknesses, have a specific process for executing tasks, and are likely more educated on building a SaaS partnership program than you are. Don’t write-off an outsource team just because you feel like you can get the job done. The quality and integrity of your entire system may depend on it.
Missing the Launch Window
Launching too late or too early can make all the difference between having a successful SaaS and having an unsuccessful one.
If you launch before the system is ready, you face the risk of putting out a sub-par product that won’t stand out from the competition. However, if you launch when it is too late, similar products may flood the market, making it borderline impossible for your great product to stand out in the crowd.
Taking one or two shortcuts is likely to happen, just be extremely careful in which areas you decide to make the cuts. And ensure that you don’t sacrifice customer experience in a bid to meet the perfect launch date. It’s hardly ever worth it.
Failing to Formulate an On-boarding Process
If you create a SaaS partnership program but have no game plan for when sales start increasing, you’ve just shot yourself in the foot.
Customers expect to get a workable product with a clear starting process when they sign up and spend their money. This could manifest in the form of a FAQs sheet, a user manual, tutorials, or case studies.
Whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of assuming that customers will automatically know how to set up whatever product you give them. There are customers that won’t stick around long enough for you to put a process in place, so have it figured out and designed before you launch.
Negligence
Well, not necessarily. As much as we would all like for all of our business endeavors to automatically attract target audiences, life, regrettably, doesn’t work out like that.
Conventional marketing strategies still apply here. Price your SaaS fairly, stay disciplined in your sales and aggressive in your promotional campaigns. Remember to determine your target market before anything else. If you don’t, you’ll just be sailing off course.
Undervaluing Your Time
Don’t just assume that the six hours you set aside for customer support and maintenance will suffice. Frankly, you should aim for spending at least a week or two after launch to take care of initial customer support. Rectifying the unavoidable hiccups customers will also encounter. And updating the product whenever the need arises.
You likely won’t get a lot more done; that’s a fact. Your SaaS partnership program will require a lot of time and attention within the first few weeks. And this will impact your productivity in other areas. If you give yourself some margin and make plans for a drop in productivity for a few weeks, you can avoid unnecessary stress and complications.
