What a Great Partner Account Manager Does – and What AI Can

If you were to ask ten people what a Partner Account Manager does, you’d get at least eleven different answers. So we’ve done our best to break down what they actually spend their time on, giving you a behind-the-scenes look that can help you make the most of your own partner-sales teams:

Ok. So a typical Tuesday for a partner manager at a mid-sized tech company, with around 80 channel partners, will look something like this:

8:30 AM – One hand holds the cup of coffee that has already gone cold, while the other opens an inbox with 34 unread emails. Twelve of these are partner requests; they need product spec sheets, updated pricing for a specific region, a co-marketing template and so on, and the partner manager starts to go through them, top down. The coffee cup remains half-full. The partner manager has other things on their mind.

9:15 AM – They get a call from a distributor: they’re preparing a pitch for a large customer and need the latest technical documentation, a competitive comparison sheet and confirmation that the pricing in their system is actually accurate. Making sure takes our partner manager 30 minutes: they have to check three folders just to find the technical documents. And the pricing? They’ll get back to the distributor later, hopefully before lunch.

10:00 AM – There’s a weekly internal sync happening. Sales want to know all kinds of things that our partner manager can’t really tell them; like which partners are active, which ones have gone quiet and how the pipeline looks. So they put together some scattered notes from the CRM, emails, and a spreadsheet that seems to have been updated sometime this year. Everyone trusts the partner managers takeaways. There’s no alternative.

11:30 AM – The inbox calls to them. A new partner signed last month and still hasn’t uploaded their first deal. Our partner manager makes a mental note to follow up – but three urgent requests come in before she gets to it, and though they remember, in the back of their heads, that they did promise to send the pricing to the distributor that called earlier, it will have to wait.

1:00 PM – A partner in Germany asks a technical question in German. Our partner manager took Spanish in high school, but that doesn’t help. So they loop in a colleague who, at least, have been to Germany in the past year. The answers they give aren’t perfect, but they will have to do.

3:00 PM – Now, finally, our partner manager sits down to work on the quarterly business review they’ve been postponing for a week. But another request comes in and they sigh, silently, and put the QBR away.

5:30 PM – Our partner manager is done for the day. They’ve done some good work, sure, but the QBR isn’t done and that pricing they promised remain, in the back of her head. They make a mental note to do that tomorrow. If nothing urgent comes up.

Now, when you look at this day, you can split the work our partner manager does into two categories:

High-value work – the stuff only a human can do well. Like building relationships with key partners, running strategic business reviews, negotiating joint plans, identifying growth opportunities, mentoring underperforming partners, making judgment calls about where to invest time and resources.

High-frequency work – the things that eat up most of the day: finding and sending the same documents time and again, answering repetitive product questions, checking that partners have the right versions of the right materials etc.

And if we look at it like that, it is not difficult to see what the problem actually is: the high-frequency stuff simply takes so much time that it’s virtually impossible to get to the high-value tasks.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. Our partner manager doesn’t have to watch their coffee grow cold or get a guilty conscience about not sending someone the pricing. They can, actually, have time for the QBR and so on. At least with the right AI tool by their side.

That said, it is important to remember that adding an AI to the mix doesn’t mean that everything should be automated, and that our partner manager should do nothing at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. Because there are things the AI can, and should do, and what’s better left in the capable hands of our partner manager.

For example, here are the things that our own PAM AI – the world’s first autonomous Channel Manager – can do at the moment you employ her:

All those requests and questions that take the bulk of our partner manager’s time? PAM can answer them instantly, using only your approved knowledge base. Including product sheets, technical documentation, videos, images, and whatever else you’ve made available as your single source of truth. PAM will simply index it, understand it, and then and provide it to the right partners.

Remember the distributor from our story? The one that may still be waiting for the pricing, because our partner manager couldn’t find it, and didn’t have time to call around? PAM could have found it in an instance.

Every answer PAM gives will be transparent. You can always ask “Why this answer?” and get a real explanation. Like what what document she used, and why. And the admin interface of SP_CE will let you search through conversations and track down whatever it is you need to find.

As PAM enforces access based on who the partner is, such as their market, or tier, she will only ever provide material a partner should have access to.

Yes, it would mean that our partner manager has time to finish their coffee. But more importantly, there is suddenly time for things like building relationship, structuring joint business plans, that QBR that wasn’t finished, and all those strategic calls that actually matter. In other words, they get time for the things you actually hired them to do.

PS. Curious to know how our partner manager’s day would look with PAM at their side? Book a demo and we’ll show you.