COMMENTARY: One constant in business, besides change, of course, is that no matter where you live in the organization, there is a need for partnerships. I don’t simply mean internal collaboration; that’s table stakes. I mean, success is generally determined by your commitment to industry partnerships to build your customer base and your brand, reputation, and visibility worldwide. It’s proven that while you can grow direct, you can only scale through the channel. That’s where a partner approach comes in.
In today’s business, partnership is not optional – it’s fundamental to scaling businesses, especially for innovative tech companies. Enterprises would be wise to embrace a partner-first go-to-market (GTM) strategy, making channels and alliances the backbone of their growth and expansion efforts.
Why Channels are Critical to Success
The channel model enables companies to expand their market reach while ensuring customers receive specialized and localized expertise through their trusted security providers. The benefits of this channel-driven approach include faster market penetration. It makes sense that by working with established partners, companies can tap into new regions and verticals more quickly than they ever can alone. In addition, being channel-driven creates greater customer trust and support. This is because customers prefer working with companies where trust relationships already exist. Through partnerships, companies integrate seamlessly into existing security infrastructures, reducing friction for adoption.
Strategic Alliances Drive Growth
Enterprises should actively build alliances with technology leaders to ensure their solutions fit into a larger solution ecosystem. Some of these advantages include:
Access to complementary technologies – No industry is a one-size-fits-all industry. By integrating with leading industry providers and platforms, organizations can ensure their solutions work seamlessly within existing infrastructure.
Accelerating adoption – Embedding solutions in complementary technologies benefits everyone in the supply chain, from alliance partners to service providers, and finally, the end customer who receives the value of partnership.
Driving innovation through collaboration – A partner-first model shouldn’t be about just sales. It should be about co-developing solutions that address real-world security challenges. By collaborating with top-tier partners, organizations can refine and expand their capabilities to stay ahead of the competition.
Ensuring Partner Success
The main goal of any channel program should be to enable partner success. That innovation comes through experimentation and finding unique approaches to create win-win scenarios. That said, partner success rests on a foundation that is based on some pretty simple principles:
Provide generous margins and incentives – Nothing happens unless it’s profitable.
Be easy to work with – Easy to understand and quote pricing, availability to work together during the sales cycle, and responding quickly when needed are all non-negotiable. Your partners should be your customers in this model, and every customer deserves your attention and your very best.
Understand that enablement is not a one-and-done endeavor – Partner first means you owe partners every advantage. It is important that training, product access, and direct work with presales, sales, marketing, etc., are ongoing and evolving. If your partners need something that doesn’t exist, make sure you get it prioritized. If you need to step in more directly until your partners have what they need to drive success, you will be considered members of their team.
Listen and respond to your partners’ needs – Consider your partners as your eyes and ears and leverage them to feed you input that keeps the customer front and center. In a partner-first model, it’s necessary to prioritize partner requirements. A common adage is that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” A partner-first company should be committed to live by this.
To fully embrace this strategy, don’t stop until every partner has the tools, support, and attention it needs. Let your partner-driven model position your company as the go-to technology platform for providers and customers worldwide. With this commitment to partnerships, you can set a new standard for success in your category.
ChannelE2E Perspectives columns are written by trusted members of the managed services, value-added reseller, and solution provider channels or ChannelE2E staff. Do you have a unique perspective you want to share? Check out our guidelines here and send a pitch to channele2e.perspectives@cyberriskalliance.com.
