Many companies running a Channel Sales model find themselves hitting a wall: their partner managers can only take care of some 20-25 partners. After that, things fall through the cracks. Forecasts come late if ever. Partners wait for material for weeks and weeks and so on.
Now, if you have an endless budget you can solve this issue simply by hiring more people, but odds are you want to be more cost-efficient than that. After all, skilled partner managers cost quite a lot, take a long time to be ramped up and, besides, by the time they’ve found their footing you’ve already signed another batch of partners. And so the cycle continues.
So, how can you solve this? We’ve spent a lot of time interviewing channel sales companies to be able to answer this question – and started out asking one of our own: what exactly do partner managers do all day?
Where your partner managers’ time goes
Across 16 customer interviews, what we found was that most partner managers’ time is spent on the same, repetitive, reactive work. You know, things like:
- Answering the same product questions from different partners in different countries
- Searching for the latest version of a spec sheet, sales deck or price list
- Sending onboarding material to new distributor sales reps individually
- Translating value propositions into local languages
- Hunting down forecasts, deal registrations and pipeline updates
- Reminding partners about the training they were supposed to complete
And the remaining 20%? That’s how much they spend on the stuff you actually hired them for – like joint business planning, QBRs, conversations with underperformers etc.
“Can I fix it with AI?”
OK, now that we know what partner managers do all day, the question is how to give them more time for those last 20% of activities that really matter. Of course, we could just answer it with a simple “throw some AI at the problem and watch it go away”, but sadly enough it’s not that simple. Why? Because generic AI hallucinates. It gives information that may be right, may be wrong, or may be somewhere in the middle. And that’s not good enough.
Second of all, generic AI really has no idea what your partner is actually allowed to see. It can’t know that a Tier 2 reseller in Spain shouldn’t get the same answer as a strategic distributor in the US, that a medtech partner outside CE-marked markets shouldn’t get pulled into a conversation about a product that isn’t approved there and so on. It simply knows what it’s been trained to know. That’s all.
And what happens if you try to solve the issue with these kinds of generic AI solutions? Well, most companies end up having to babysit their AI, and lose out on all those productivity gains that it promised.
What “AI-powered Partner Account Management” SHOULD mean
But worry not. Generic AI may not be up to the task, but this is exactly why PAM – our AI agent inside SP_CE – exists. It works the way a great Partner Manager would, only across the entire network. It only answers questions from content YOU approve. It provides information that can be traced back to the source and always, always, respects the access rights you’ve set.
In other words, it’s an AI that can actually help you and your partners, and that doesn’t fall in the traps generic AI tend to do (like wanting to answer so bad that it gives the wrong answer, sharing information with sources that are nonexistent or just plain hallucinated).
So no, you don’t have to hire your way out of this. There’s a better path – and in our next post, we’ll show you exactly what changes when PAM joins your team, and what it looks like whether you’ve got a full Channel Sales team or you’re squeezing partner work in between everything else.
Want to see what this looks like for your team?
Book a demo here below or reach out to us directly. We’re happy to talk!
