What is Partner Experience? Partner experience is what an alliance partner, channel partner, or development partner experiences: partners’ perceptions about how well the partnership supports their intended outcomes.

Partner experience is measured by partners’ realities vs. their expectations.

A good partner experience is a 1-to-1 ratio for what a partner experiences versus the partner’s expectations.

Expectations are based on a partners’ intended outcomes.

What are Strategic Partnerships? Strategic partnerships are contractual arrangements between two or more separate parties to provide mutual value to customers and one another. Strategic partnerships aim to fulfill strategic needs, providing advantages in the marketplace that could not easily be achieved by one party without the other. Therefore, relationship strength between the parties is emphasized.

See also: Partner Experience Playbook

https://customerthink.com/how-to-cross-pollinate-customer-experience-employee-experience-and-partner-experience-growth/

What is Partner Experience Management? Partner experience management is what the primary party does to react to or be proactive for partner experience. Partner experience management is an organization’s (a) efforts to nurture partners as brand allies and (b) remedies for potential partner turnover. Partner experience is measured by (a) partner productivity, (b) positive word-of-mouth minus negative word-of-mouth, and (c) partner retention.

What is Partner Experience Leadership? Partner experience leadership is alignment between what each partner provides and what each partner expected. It elevates partner experience management by being more partner-centric than self-centric.

A prerequisite is company-wide alignment between what’s promised to customers and what customers experience.

This is because waste with customers translates to waste with partners, and vice versa.

How Does Partner Experience Impact Customer Experience? Partners are relied upon to carry out significant needs in the customer experience. Therefore, transparency, timeliness, efficiency and effectiveness (among the partners and by each partner) are pivotal to customer experience excellence.

Failures in the partner relationship or by either partner can cause significant waste in costs, resources, opportunities, and reputation for all parties involved. Good partner experience is ease of work and good customer experience is ease of doing business, where ease means minimizing negatives related to intended outcomes.

See also: Partner Experience Playbook

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What is Partner Experience Strategy? Partner experience strategy is executives’ shared vision on how partner-oriented management will maximize value.

1) Start with your high-potential partners’ expectations as your company’s PX goal.

a) Conduct secondary and/or primary expectations research: what are the 2-3 overarching intended outcomes among high-potential partners, and the expectation themes associated with those outcomes?
b) Conduct a SWOT analysis: what are partners’ views of external opportunities and threats (yours and theirs) and internal strengths and weaknesses (yours and theirs)?

2) Reality-check your organizational objectives, values, structure, cap-ex criteria, and so on relative to the PX goal.

3) Reality-check your reviews, agendas, development objectives, recognition criteria, and so on relative to the PX goal.

4) Plan how you will bring to life and make these a way of life throughout your company: VoP, partner intelligence, partner lifetime value, partner experience improvement, design, and innovation, partner engagement, and PX performance metrics.

What is a Partner Experience Journey? A partner experience journey is what a group of similar partners see, hear, taste, think, feel, and do across the timeline of their relationship with your brand.

A journey map summarizes a partner experience journey in columns for the steps partners take and with icons or pictures to represent what partners care about, their expectations, consequences when things go well or not, and your performance gaps.

What’s the Best Way to Improve Partner Experience? There are 3 levels of partner experience improvement: resolve the instance, prevent recurrence, and prevent occurrence.

1) Listen to partners. What’s costing them the most worry, time, and resources? These are your top improvement priorities.

2) For greater clarity, ask partners to rate various aspects of their realities, plus an overall loyalty question.

a) Then conduct a correlation analysis to identify which PX aspect is strongly correlated with overall loyalty.

b) Next, conduct a Pareto analysis to identify which subthemes of that PX aspect are the vital few contributors to partners’ grief.

c) Then conduct a 5-why’s analysis to identify the root cause of the vital few subthemes. Make a plan to prevent the root cause!

d) Maintain high visibility of each action plan: review in staff meetings, ops reviews, senior execs’ preparation for analyst calls, etc.

You may find this recipe sufficient for driving significant changes and PX ROI. Journey mapping is optional, not required.

How to Start Partner Experience Leadership: Start partner experience management with your business objective and a plan for who should do what, when and why.

Avoid the temptation to buy a technology or start a survey until you have created your plan.

1) Example business objective: retention, differentiation, industry leadership, partner value, profitability, or risk minimization.

2 ) Who are your core-growth partners? What do you already know about your them regarding this business objective?

3 ) Who in your company (and its ecosystem) is a contributor to these partners’ behaviors regarding this business objective?

4 ) How has a previous initiative with these contributors succeeded or failed? What lessons learned can you borrow?

5 ) How can you engage these contributors in aligning their behaviors with your answer to question 2 above? What will you need to do to minimize their resistance and workarounds, and to maintain their ongoing energy for these behaviors?

6) Referring to your answer to question 2 above, what will make the most sense to your partners as ways to engage them toward your business objective?

7) How can you tie-in your answers to questions 5-6 to the routines of contributors and customers? Routines include planning cycles, reviews, meetings, and so on.

8) Communicate your answers to questions 5-7 above to the contributors and engage them in making a difference.

9) Engage partners, buy technologies, and so on in accordance with your answer to question 8.

See also: Partner Experience Playbook