Leveraging Partner Networks to Enable Better Customer Experience

Building a positive customer experience is critical for businesses looking to get ahead in a rapidly changing marketplace. Taking advantage of partner networks can help create more unique experiences that ultimately enhance a customer’s end-result and overall satisfaction.

It’s no secret that keeping up with customer demands is critical for the success of any business.

In the B2B software world specifically, the market is seemingly flooded with a sea of options, competitors, and products that make it difficult to stand out from the pack. 

More often than not, distinguishing your brand isn’t solely about the product, but about the experience they have when looking for solutions. B2B customers need to be able to quickly identify products that not only match their goals but are easy to integrate within their enterprise operations.

To meet these customer expectations, companies need to take the time to develop a network of partner organizations and offerings. In doing so, these partnerships become an important tool for B2B companies looking to innovate. Partnerships give companies a unique edge in that they add recognizable names to their offerings, establishing trust with consumers quickly. On top of this, developing a partner network gives businesses the opportunity to collaborate and develop unique options for their software needs that customers may not find somewhere else. 

Don’t Be Afraid to Show Off Your Partners

For any business today, everything comes down to efficiency. And in the B2B software space, the rules of the game are no different. Drawing in buyers means you need to give them the ability to search your offerings effectively and with as little effort as possible. Having an offerings page that doesn’t show the true breadth of applications and use cases for a product severely limits a customer’s likelihood to follow through on a purchase. 

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When companies look at their existing web pages and how solutions are displayed or searched for, it’s a necessity to ensure that these are built with partners in mind. A lot of time and focus goes into displaying a company’s owned solutions and it can become easy to leave out a huge amount of detail on partner capabilities up front. This can end up being a missed opportunity to demonstrate value and highlight the true scope of what a brand has to offer. 

Coupling powerful search capabilities with partner solutions cuts out the confusion, and when you can more clearly display how partner offerings complement and integrate with your own, you increase the likelihood of securing the purchase. Showing partner solutions side-by-side with owned ones can also be the difference in the size of a customer’s transaction. Giving customers all of this information up front serves to simplify the research process and improve the overall buying experience, generating more success in the long run. 

Creating Unique, Impactful Solutions

The last year has shown us just how unpredictable the world can be. Business needs can change quickly, and highly specific and unique problems can arise at any moment. Whether it’s a change in production or a surge in demand, organizations need solutions that are capable of taking on unpredictability. 

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This means that traditional ways of presenting offerings may be inadequate at properly expressing a business’s true capabilities, missing out on countless prospective buyers. Partner solutions are there to enhance, augment, or add value to a given product so conveying that information to customers without requiring them to navigate through several web pages is absolutely critical. If someone needs to dig through multiple pages of product info to find answers to their questions or even more detail on solution capabilities for a partner offering, the overall experience is likely to result in them moving on to look elsewhere.

There’s also been an emphasis on cost-effective and budget friendly solutions, with customers looking to implement ones that go beyond a given task and make meaningful impact on the entire organization. Implementing a solution that turns out to either function poorly or lack compatibility with what’s existing is a risk that can no longer be afforded. Delivering a product that appeals to a customer’s specific goals means that businesses need to be highly flexible, able to pivot at a moment’s notice. 

Putting the Focus on Partners

B2B organizations have a lot of different tools that are intended to help separate them from the competition. But turning that goal into a reality in today’s marketplace is a tall task, no matter the company. To get the job done, businesses need to look toward the partner ecosystem and leverage it for the true asset it is. 

Partners present a unique opportunity to complement a company’s solutions, adding in the peace of mind that comes with highly recognizable brands. Pair that added confidence boost with partners’ ability to drive innovation and create one-of-a-kind products and a potentially tough purchasing decision can quickly become a no-brainer for any customer. 

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]