"Making Partner Recruitment Productive and Effective"

Recruiting the right channel partners in a new territory who can generate the required level of target revenue, can be daunting task for any organisation. This is especially true when you consider that depending on whom you talk to, that there are between 3,500 to 5,000 active partners in the UK alone, with over 25,000 in Europe. These can range from one-man organisations, specialist value added resellers and multi-levelled System Integrators employing 1,000’s of people.

As a result, making the right selection of partners for a successful recruitment campaign can often be a time consuming and expensive task. Many organisations spend a significant amount of time selecting and recruiting new partners, but often end up takingan ad-hoc approach.It takes time to not only find new partners, but also qualify them to ensure that with the right level of empowerment, they will produce the required level of sales revenue.

So, finding the right partners to approach is crucial to achieving the highest market penetration, with the least amount of conflict. Over the years we have built an extensive network of partner contacts so that we can quickly reach out to particular target resellers. We have also developed our own “RAMP” methodology “Recruitment and Measured Prospecting”, to ensure that our partner recruitment campaign is successful.

The Bassi RAMP Methodology uses the following 3 step process:

objective

It is important to define clear objectives from the outset and to understand the expected results from the recruitment campaign. For instance we would need to define the profile and number of partners needed to make the campaign successful. The best result from any recruitment campaign is to have the maximum number of committed partners signed, and each with an agreed business plan in place. This will mean that there will be less time and money wasted on recruiting partners who promise a lot, but deliver very little.

profiling

We then begin profiling the type of preferred partners by:

• Developing selection criteria based on skill set, customer base, location, and product offering.

• Researching resellers and qualifying them against carefully established selection criteria.

• Qualifying out any non-complying partners in order to create a target list.

• Establishing contact details and right decision makers to engage with.

• Compile final qualified report including potential revenue production.

qualification  

The next stage is to establish the potential with each partner by the following criteria: 

• Do they have the correct skill set needed to deliver your products?

• Have they got the bandwidth to comfortably build an increasing revenue stream?

• Can they quickly engage with the right target customers?

• Will they commit to a revenue target?

• Are they prepared to sign a reseller agreement?