Where does the training and support of Partners live?
Good afternoon!
Due to the growth of partner selling and solution outsourcing, one topic that seems to come up often recently is how companies can best equip their partners. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to train and provide support to partners? More specifically, which department best manages this?
From a customer model, Professional Services and Customer Enablement would handle onboarding and training, while Support Services would support the customer with any issues using a company's software.
Is the customer model the best route to go for partner "support" or is this handled by a specific group perhaps within a company's Partner department or somewhere else?
Thanks for any insights!
Chris
Best Answers
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The leader of Education Services reports to varying roles (a CEO or other C-level executive, Customer Success executive, Professional Services executive, or other executive from any of the following - Support Services, Operations, Global Services, Sales, Marketing, HR).
However, there is a general trend reporting into a “Customer Success” executive to align with Customer Success initiatives.
I personally have experienced very positive results when the Customer Success, Education Services, and Support teams all report into the same executive. But, that executive is NOT responsible for the partner program or anything sales related.
From a training perspective, there's content that should be applicable to all audiences (customers, partners, internals). And, there's additional content applicable to partner enablement and advanced support.
Hope that helps!
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I think your model is a working one, I have seen this multiple times and it works. If you ask me which one is the best, I have two answers. Your model is definitely amongst the best ones from my view. the second one is to have Partner Enablement as part of your channel organization, and resources could come from TechSales. This is a model that I have also seen working well. But it separates a bit Client and Partner content, and I think it has the disadvanatge that if this model grows, that there is a risk of creating enablement materials for Partners and Clients in parallel - and they are at the end nearly the same.
I have seen in the last years lots of versions of the above models and also the approach of having other groups taking care of this topic, but there is one key factor that I learned that is the most important fact: any model works well, as long as the channel organization puts a clear budget aside. Then whatever groups executes can do this based on this budget. So, whatever you do, I recommend making sure that the Channel Organization (which I assume owns the Channel revenue and acts like a P&L) sets a clear enablement budget aside for the Channel. You can then run the model you proposed, but you could also change the delivery/responsible team.
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