In the current economy, partnerships are essential for businesses to ensure profitability. Quite a few companies depend on channel partner networks to achieve success through expansive market reach and unparalleled marketing. However, setting up a channel partner program is just one part of the strategy. You must ensure that your partners are driving growth and profitability. Although companies implement channel partner incentive programs, they don’t aggressively evaluate how partners are doing. To do this, you must continuously monitor their progress in increasing sales numbers by measuring a set of critical KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Unfortunately, a lot of companies struggle to identify the right KPIs to track the performance of sales partners.
In this article, we list the KPIs that companies must measure and utilize to maximize channel partner programs.
12 KPIs to Measure Channel Partner Performance
Companies that run channel partner incentive programs must actively track metrics to assess their performance. Aligning incentives with performance will give you the desired outcomes. To effectively evaluate channel partner performance, you must classify metrics across categories. It gives you insights into where your partners need help and design channel partner incentive programs accordingly.
Sales-related KPIs
- Revenue generated over the period: One of the fundamental metrics, involves looking at the total sales that a partner brought in during a period. You can further classify this across products, partner types, and geographic regions. You can increase this number by associating a channel partner incentive program for top performers.
- Deal registrations and prospecting: This KPI looks at the potential business value that a channel partner has generated. These sales opportunities indicate the health of the pipeline and the development activities involved during the prospecting stage.
- Opportunities per partner: As the name suggests, this metric gives you the number of opportunities that each sales partner is producing on average. It helps you identify potentially high performers and reward them through channel partner incentive programs.
- Average deal size: This is the metric that gives you the value of sales that your channel partner has produced so that you can make reasonable sales projections. By associating this metric with opportunities per partner, you get interesting insights. For example, some partners may be producing fewer opportunities, but their order value could be high, while those producing a good number of leads may have smaller order sizes.
- Closed deals: It is essentially the number of sales opportunities that a channel partner could convert into business. It is a measure of the overall sales effectiveness of your partner and must tie into your channel partner incentive programs.
- Customer renewal rates: This KPI indicates the efficiency of your channel partner in providing a great customer experience. If they can retain customers, it means they have been hands-on with the client and providing quality customer service.
Partner Engagement and Promotions
- Partner portal logins: It gives you a peek into how up-to-date your channel partner is with your product or service upgrades and roadmaps. It also indicates if your partners are using your resources and engagement platform.
- Events attended: This KPI measures if your channel partners are participating in your events like webinars, training sessions, certifications, and other promotional activities. You can reward your active partners by giving them access to exclusive resources.
Customer Experience
- Customer churn rate: This important KPI measures the percentage of customers acquired through your partner who is abandoning your products or services. Further investigation could help you discover if your partners are engaging in illegal or controversial sales practices.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS is a metric that measures customer loyalty. Having a high NPS indicates that customers are satisfied with your offerings and service, and are likely to recommend your brand within their network.
Return on Investment (ROI)
- Cost of partner acquisition: This KPI measures the investment you have made in providing channel partners with resources, and training. You can reward top performers with additional investment as a part of your channel partner incentive programs.
- Partner profitability: This is the measure of net profit that your channel partners have generated from the sales after deducting acquisition and support costs.
Measure Critical KPIs Easily with Zaggle Propel
Channel partner incentive programs are essential to keep partners motivated and facilitate better sales and profitability. But to ensure you are rewarding the right partners, you must measure their performance accurately.
To do this effectively, you will need Zaggle Propel, an automated solution to manage channel partner incentives. It is infused with AI capabilities to give you real-time visibility into channel partner performance so that you can make data-driven incentive programs. Some features of Zaggle Propel that helps measure critical channel partner KPIs are:
- Intuitive dashboard for performance overview of all channel partners
- Custom workflow configuration to design multiple milestone roadmap
- Tiered rewards program to gamify performance improvement
Learn more about Zaggle Propel here.
