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When stepping into a channel chief role, you’re hired for one of three missions. Run a channel, build a channel, or rebuild a channel. The rebuild is often the most challenging. Someone before you built a channel then lost it. And now you’ve got to step in and regain the trust of your partners. Lynn Tinney, SVP of Global Partners at Zayo, faced this most difficult challenge. That’s why I’m thrilled to have her on the show to share how to achieve the two key ingredients to successful partnerships, mutual relevance and mutual commitment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Here’s what I learned from Lynn about building mutual relevance and commitment:
- Relevance is the foundational element of the organization itself. It’s what your channel team and your sales team is given to go sell.
- Relevance to partners is what will bring them differentiation, what will make them more important to their customers. It’s delivered by your product organization and polished by your marketing and finance teams.
- Partners need the right balance of volume and margin with your products for you to be relevant.
- Mutual commitment is about building a relationship that allows you to be fair to each other. It starts by getting out in front of your partners, face to face.
- Joint business planning builds mutual commitment. It helps you understand how the partner wants to appear to their customers and how you resource align to your partners to help them acheive that.
LINKS & RESOURCES
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- Follow Lynn on LinkedIn
- Listen to Nima Badiey on The Key To Successful Alliances
- Daniel Graff-Radford shares The Digital Body Language Of Successful Partners
- Hear Mark Brigman on The 5 Phases Of Successful Partnering
- Learn more about Allbound
