Omar Fakhri, EMEA Sales Director at AMD, explains how to build a successful partner programme.
The relationship between businesses and their channel partners is evolving. There are new resources, shifting communication methods and fresh opportunities for businesses and their partners. Indeed, a partner loyalty programme is a differentiator. Companies use these programmes for training, supporting and incentivising partners so that they drive brand loyalty and achieve higher sales.
For a loyalty programme to work, it must be well planned, properly supported and actively promoted. This partnership must be a win/win for both – the company and its partners. Simply put, businesses need to give their channel partners every content resource possible to help them succeed, while also educating them on how to maximise those content resources.
Building a loyalty strategy requires thinking holistically about the relationship with channel partners. Understanding how both parties are engaging with each other, the level of commitment in the relationship and the value yielded. The stability of working with the same high-quality sales channels and distributors that know the brand and product is highly valuable to a business. Partners who are strategically engaged with their vendors won’t be tempted by one-off incentive promotions offered by the competitors – these partners will instead be focused on a long-term, strategic relationship to build their business with your roadmap in mind.
What businesses need today is a robust partner enablement strategy. Partner enablement not only provides information about a company’s products and services to their partners, it goes beyond that. It imparts the brand’s vision, aligns the partners with the company’s overall business strategy and empowers them to appropriately represent your business.
AMD is already at the forefront of this strategy, with the AMD Partner Hub – a one-stop shop for AMD partners to find information, news, marketing materials, sales tools, training and more to aid in driving business. It hosts several Meet the Experts webinars each month, providing exclusive insights into AMD products and direct access to AMD experts with live Q&As.
Securing and driving loyalty is also key to fostering these longer partnerships, which many vendors achieve through the help of strategic incentive programmes. On the heels of the incredible growth it has achieved with the sustained momentum of its Ryzen, EPYC and Radeon products, AMD has rolled out an incentivised training programme called AMD Arena to further enhance the partner experience.
AMD Arena allows partners to become experts by gaining AMD product knowledge, earning points and badges all while moving up the leaderboard with every completed learning mission.
After all, it is important to celebrate loyalty and a properly designed rewards programme that brings value to all can be a major game changer.