COMMENTARY: All vendors that sell through the channel tout the benefits of their partner program. Maybe that means generous marketing development funds (MDF), reams of customizable marketing materials, or an easy-to-use partner portal. Regardless, these benefits are a critical component of successful programs—incentivizing mutually beneficial partnerships that drive toward a shared goal.
But a crucial “benefit” that’s rarely mentioned is how a vendor treats its partners. Beyond the bottom-line considerations like rebates and payment terms, it’s critical to question the quality of service you’re signing up for. That can mean factoring some out-of-the-box questions into your typical selection process. How personable is the team? Do they prioritize quality service? Are they kind?
“Kindness” in a business context might sound trivial, but choosing service-oriented vendors can be the key to ensuring customer satisfaction and business success for all parties.
Why does kindness matter?
Jay Mohr famously said as sports agent Bob Sugar in Jerry Maguire: "It’s not show friends, it’s show business."
Yes, channel sales is a business, but do you know anyone who wants to do business with an asshole? We’ve all had to endure it, and none of us want to do it again. It’s important not to mistake kindness for niceness here. Niceness is surface-level friendliness. Kindness is the way that an entity conducts itself that sets the foundation for a relationship built on mutual respect, understanding, and shared goals, and partners should be looking for that kindness in their vendors.
You may have heard the term “clear is kind,” and that’s what we’re aligning to here. Let’s examine how kindness in a vendor-partner relationship looks.
Smart vendors know they can’t do it all alone. Some may not even start out with a deep focus on the channel, and eventually find religion and evolve to make it the core component of their go-to-market effort. Why? They realize that partners are a force multiplier for them, adding critical resources, expertise, and reach those vendors otherwise couldn’t access. And they see that embracing channel partnerships will help them get from where they are to where they need to be.
Sometimes you get to kind–it’s the destination that matters. Kind vendors know this and will work closely with partners to help them achieve their business goals, close sales, and provide long-term support to customers through consistently positive interactions.
This kindness can take many forms, like rapid legal review processes, favorable financial conditions, extensive enablement, and perhaps most important, transparency into the vendor’s business as well as its technology offerings and support processes. It all sounds pretty logical, but partners often have to contend with vendors that are slow to respond, take partner-sourced deals direct, fail to offer favorable terms, or just provide a low level of support.
This can even happen with big, well-known vendors, whose names are good to have on your website, but end up treating partners poorly (just because they can). It’s not a stretch to wonder: If this is how these vendors treat you, what’s to keep them from treating your customers the same way?
Identifying kindness
Unfortunately, it might not be easy to identify kindness as a core attribute in vendors. Their websites don’t tell you if they’ll stab you in the back when you register an opportunity with them, so you have to look under the hood.
Start by asking some questions:
● Does the vendor listen to you? Seems basic, but kind vendors will actually hear, acknowledge, and understand your concerns and take deliberate actions to mitigate them. They’ll consider your business goals alongside theirs.
● Is the vendor open and honest with you? It’s a good sign if the vendor is clear and transparent about their program, their solutions, and their customers. No vendor is perfect, so if they purport to be without flaws, that’s a red flag.
● What do your peers think about the vendor? Word travels fast in the partner community, so talk to your peers and contacts about the vendors you’re considering. Taking advantage of your backchannels can reveal some surprising truths you won’t get from marketing materials (both good and bad).
● How can the vendor’s tech enable your success? At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how kind the vendor is if their solutions don’t meet the needs of your customers. The best vendors will be able to clearly articulate how their offerings will enable mutual success for you as their partner and for the customer.
● Does the vendor prioritize customer success? A good vendor cares about its partner’s success alongside its own. A great vendor also prioritizes the satisfaction and success of the end customer. After all, everyone’s goal is to keep a happy customer on the books for a long time, right? Kind vendors will bend over backward to help a partner ensure a customer is happy, satisfied, and sticks around. If you’re evaluating a vendor and they pass the test on the questions above, you’re probably well on your way to identifying a company that will benefit your bottom line. In fact, you may find that kind vendors can be your secret weapon.
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