Collaboration suite for knowledge sharing & social business networking

Overview HR & Corporate Communications Marketing & Sales Field Service Professional Services Partner Management

Your partner management people attract and build an ecosystem of resellers, integrators, application providers, service providers, distributors, and other types of business partners, to create “surround sound” for your products. Their first step is to recruit partners, but their more challenging task is to get partners to fully engage with your enterprise. Their strategic challenge is to create a highly committed ecosystem of partners who amplify your business. When they achieve this, they have elevated their position – and the position of your partners – into a strategic role that expands your business on an ongoing basis.

Partner relationships are invaluable not only for the credibility and ongoing boost in sales they bring, but also for the market insight and feedback they offer. Today, however, the value that can be gained from partners is severely throttled by the way you are able to share information with them. Most information is shared with partners in isolated exchanges between a select person or two in your organization and one or two people in the partner organization. The only people who benefit from these conversations are those who happen to be in on the thread. And the conversations are transient, with no lasting memory of the information that transpired. It is hard to get partners fully engaged this way.

By committing to do business with your organization, your partners have taken on risk. They have a stake in your success, and you have a stake in theirs. To fully engage a partner, you have to treat them like a stakeholder. This involves giving them access to other stakeholders, and to the information they need to make fast and informed business decisions and run their operations smoothly.

To create an engaged ecosystem of partners who you can count on to amplify your business, your partner managers need to enable partners to tap into and leverage each other much more effectively – to leverage each others’ knowledge of the product and customers, to detect and collaborate on early market trends, to follow each others’ best practices, to tap into a collective memory on important topics, and even to re-use each others’ work.

A strategic and essential tool for your partner management people is one that enables them to support active, ongoing conversations between partners and other stakeholders inside and outside your organization – conversations that help partners build competence and expertise and that help them succeed with less risk, effort and friction. These ongoing conversations not only get partners engaged but bring valuable feedback to your organization.

The Socialtext collaboration platform lets you create a social extranet where partners and stakeholders can share valuable insight with each other. Your partners can share experiences, collectively create a portfolio of best practices, answer questions, ideate on product and service improvements, and even get into business arrangements among themselves. Your partner management team plays an active role in initiating and guiding these conversations. Since they work openly and transparently with partners, their guidance to any one partner can help all partners, so your expensive resource is much more leveraged. With a means to communicate across partners, your partner management team can roll out new products and drive change much faster, with less risk and effort. With the ability for communications to flow in all directions, and for topics to be persistent, searchable and findable, you can truly tap into the power of a partner network.

Socialtext's solution for partner management combines our collaboration platform with a number of surrounding resources created for partner managers: professional services tailored to best practices for partner management teams, and dozens of templates – for workspace pages and dashboards – designed for the partner manager function.

With the Socialtext collaboration platform you not only get a highly energized and committed group of partners who sustain your business, but you also get a rich source market and customer insights to guide your company.

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