As I highlighted in the first blog on partner value, partners provide meaningful value when the dynamics between vendors, partners, customers, and products are aligned and leveraged. This value contributes to the success of vendors, partners, and customers. The key benefit I will address in this post is ‘optimized customer time-to-value’. Reducing time-to-value is important, but effective time-to-value can ensure quick and long-term success. Optimized time-to-value ensures fast and long-term customer success.
Partners help optimize customer time-to-value by:
- Ensuring the right solution was sold and implemented
- Provide integrations and functionality that deliver business outcomes
- Utilize an agile approach to onboarding/implementing
- Mitigate friction between customer and vendor
- Provide out-of-the-box configurations based on industry expertise
A partner’s intimate knowledge of their client’s business models and what is required to produce the desired business outcomes are keys to ensuring the right solution is proposed to begin with. They identify the technologies, platforms, and vendors that work best for their clients. Then plan, deliver, and integrate a solution that provides the desired business outcomes. Value is achieved much sooner when the solution is focused on the outcome as opposed to features and functionality.
Outcomes are more comprehensive and faster to produce when partners leverage their products, services, and integrations to augment the vendor’s product or platform. Partners have teams of experts and engineers who have decades of experience in designing solutions with augmented functionality and real-time integrations. These partner assets are generally aligned with industry or market expertise which provide outcomes directly related to their customers’ business.
Partner organizations are generally not burdened by large, complex implementation processes like those adopted by vendors who must address the needs of the broader market. By specializing and managing implementations in sprints, Partners provides a faster and more agile delivery.
Similar to implementation process overhead, vendors may also have purchasing and support processes that slow time to value and create customer friction. Vendors should work closely with partners to streamline all interactions with the customers by leveraging the partner’s ability and willingness to take an agile approach to these processes.
Partners that have created out-of-the-box configurations that produce specific industry and market outcomes can provide the fastest time-to-value for customers. A partner could for example offer an out-of-the-box CRM solution that creates a streamlined and simple patient admittance experience for rural healthcare providers. The customer receives the outcome without having to worry about vendors, products, integrations, or configurations. The partner delivers the outcome quickly by leveraging all the out-of-the-box solutions they have already built.
Faster time-to-value maximizes operational effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, ultimately contributing to improved profitability and sustainable growth for vendors and partners. In the next blog, we will review how partners can provide access to new markets through their customer relationships and industry expertise.
Did you miss Part 1 of the series? Click here to read the article
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