People often talk about Channel Managers becoming ‘trusted advisers’ to their key partners, but what does this really mean in practical terms? What behaviors build or destroy trust and what ‘adviser’ role can a Channel Manager realistically have?

Channel Enablers Trusted Partnering Relationships workshop builds upon foundation programs to examine in greater depth the skills and processes required to establish optimum business relationships with partners at different stages of maturity. Channel Managers are led to further develop their partner influence skills, and to adapt their personal influence style to achieve improved results from partners.

Not all partnerships deserve the same level of attention and investment by vendors. This program focuses on partnerships that represent a significant proportion of channel revenue, or that have high growth potential – and how to tell the difference!

Participants are introduced to a step-by-step partner profiling process by which partnerships can be explored, assessed, developed and have optimum goals set.

Workshop Content

Day One

• Optimum roles for Channel Managers in a partnership
• Building trusted one-on-one business relationships - identifying your influence style and recognizing the style of your partners
• Channel Manager strengths and weaknesses throughout the partnering influence process
• Facilitating partner problem solving - managing events and people so they don’t manage you
• Gaining commitments from partners
• Resolving partner concerns
• It is our standard practice to invite a partner executive guest speaker as the final item in day one of this program

Day Two

• Building and destroying trust in a partnership
• Profiling high potential partners
• Understanding partner stakeholders and structure
• Assessing stakeholder power and influence
• Partnership costs and economic benefits to both parties
• Partner business drivers
• Stages of growth for business partners - “growing pains” exercise
• Assessing business fit and partner competency
• Identifying partnership goals and opportunities
• Personal commitment planning

Workshop Benefits

Major existing partnerships and high potential new partnerships both typically absorb a significant proportion of channel, technical and marketing resources.

Major partners may contribute a very large percentage of channel revenue, so it is important to: (i) consider carefully the allocation of scarce resources and (ii) to make significant partnerships secure against competitive attack or apathy. This program will help develop and reinforce the knowledge and skills required to:

• significantly improve a Channel Managers personal communications and influence style – leading to deeper, more resilient business-to-business relationships and greater partner engagement
• focus Channel Managers on developing and enabling their partners rather than serving them - establish trusted and equitable business relationships based on win-win outcomes and mutual respect and understanding
• implement a process for capturing, recording, analyzing and presenting key partnership information, issues, opportunities and potential
• develop a greater understanding of current and future partner business issues
• build more resilient relationships at multiple organizational levels
• raise partner awareness of the need to change

Workshop Format and Media

People learn in different ways, so this course employs a variety of learning strategies and media to build understanding of how to establish productive relationships with different kinds of people. These include:

• extensive notes, tools and guides for use in the field and as ongoing references, covering all parts of the partnering influence process
• lectures and discussions relating partner influencing principles to a participant’s own situation, partners and opportunities
• role-plays which are a major part of the program and provide the opportunity to practice selling skills using participants’ own products, partners and channel management situations

We believe in small group interactive sessions, so places are strictly limited to ensure quality. Ideal course sizes are between 10 and 15 participants. Larger groups can be catered for using additional Channel Enablers facilitators.