What are your partners thinking? Find out with a Voice of Partner program

Your partners are much more than merely your partners. More often than not, they are your mouthpiece, your face, your hands and feet. They are the ones rubbing shoulders with the market, with end-users, customers and clients, generating demand, fuelling sales and great satisfaction ratings. Or not...

And so, knowing how well they are getting on is critical to the success of your business. You need them in top form, well-informed and enthused about your product and motivated to give their best for mutual benefit. You need them, too, willing and able to freely share with you their product and market experience and insights. They are a precious source of up-to-the-minute business intelligence, able to teach you something about customer preferences, purchasing patterns and decision-making habits. They may even alert you to emerging changes threatening profits or presenting new opportunities for growth.

Your product and marketing teams will eat up all such morsels.

To realise this potential and optimise engagement with your partners, a Voice of Partner (VoP) programme is the best tool in the shed. Anecdotal evidence and assumptions just won’t do. At its best, a VoP programme is a suite of techniques that strategically, systematically and naturally harvests feedback and insights from partners in a way that helps you to continuously improve your business.

How do you craft such a programme?

While making use of a third-party with VoP expertise is preferable, you can develop one for yourself, especially if you have someone on your team who can analyse and interpret the voice and use it to advocate for effective action.

Here’s how to build an effective VoP programme:

1. Decide on the questions you need to have answered.
2. Map out your Partner Journey.
3. Align the questions you want answered to existing touchpoints.
4. Decide on how you will collect the feedback.
5. Decide on how the feedback will be collated and presented.
6. Use what you have learned to improve your product or relationship.

 

Decide on the questions you need to have answered.

If the programme is a solution, you will need to know precisely what problems you want to solve before you craft it. What exactly do you want to know about your partners? What information do you want from them? When do you want it? Which partners do you want to hear from?

Here are some typical questions that a VoP programme can help answer:

• How are partners feeling about the relationship?

• Which partners are motivated and engaged? Why is that?

• What do partners understand about your product? What knowledge is missing?

• What do partners need to be successful?

• What rewards are most motivational? Which segments is this true for?

 

Map out your Partner Journey.

As a team, map out your relationship with your partners. Identify the phases in the relationship as well as existing touchpoints, that is, points of contact you already have with your partners (e.g. onboarding, product support). Doing this will help you to visualise the cadence of the relationship and give you clear opportunities for reaching out and gathering data. Go online and source partner journey templates to facilitate this. There are many different types, just choose or adapt one that suits your needs.

 

Align the questions you want answered to existing touchpoints.

Identify touchpoints that would lend themselves to eliciting feedback from your partners. Then, decide exactly which feedback would best be collected at that point.

 

Decide on how you will collect the feedback.

Surveys are the obvious choice here but be warned, these are only as reliable as the quality of the wording of each question. You may benefit from expert input here.

To ensure that survey questions do hit the mark, you can pilot test them by using the Cognitive Interview method. For each survey question you draft, grab a few volunteers (colleagues will do) and have them read and respond to each question. Then, put these three questions to them:

 

1. In your own words, what is this question asking?

2. How did you arrive at your answer?

3. How sure are you of your answer?

 

These interviews will quickly and easily identify problems with the wording of the questions. Skipping this step may result in either junk or, worse, misleading data.

Once you’ve pilot tested your questions, iterate and test again until you’re confident that your questions are going to be readily and rightly understood.

Remember that surveys are best used to reveal trends and patterns or to surface issues needing resolution. To fully understand any of these, you will need to follow up with 1:1 interviews.

Besides surveys which elicit and collect direct feedback, consider whether or not you are already receiving partner voice, indirectly, through existing channels. For example, perhaps some team members are in regular email contact with partners. If so, explore whether or not there is value in analysing such communications for the purpose of identifying trends in sentiment or issues. There are AI tools available for such tasks. Such data can be used to interpret data collected through surveys or other channels.

Once you’re clear on what you want to know and all your questions are set, you’ll need to decide on how and when to put them to your partners. Will you email survey questions to them? How many at a time? Will you provide a permanent feedback tab somewhere so that they can provide feedback anywhere, anytime? Where is it best located? 

As you work through these considerations, be guided by the Goldilocks principle . . . . Not too little, not too much. Aim for just the right amount of feedback at the right time.

 

Decide on how the feedback will be collated and presented.

With any luck, you’re going to have a stream of crystal-clear, sparkling data flowing in . . . Before you go live, however, decide on how the data will be collated and presented.

If relevant and appropriate, consider allowing your partners to influence how you do this. Some mechanisms might make sense to you but not to them. Some questions worth putting to them might include:

• How do you want to tell us when things aren’t working? 

• How do you want to share ideas that you have?

It makes sense to group survey data by key partner categories (e.g. size, annual turnover, organisational size, location, sector) to deepen understanding and more quickly spot problems or opportunities unique to specific categories. You can then follow up to gain an understanding of context.

Design and create a dashboard that makes it easy for you and your team to share, see, and understand all the important metrics. Locate the dashboard conveniently to ensure maximum engagement.

 

Use what you have learned to improve your product or relationship.

Honour the time and effort your partners have expended, at your request, by actually using what they’ve given you. Use their feedback to make real and visible improvements in your product and relationship. Appoint someone on your team to be responsible for reviewing the data, sharing key insights and advocating for improvements.

Consider sharing your results and actions with your partners to enthuse them about the value of the VoP programme.

 

Summary

If done well, your Voice of Partner programme will train you and your team to do more listening and less talking. In a diverse, distant and fragmented marketplace, that is an essential habit worth cultivating.