Be Careful What You Wish For

We have a massive deck over the garage off the front of our house. For the first couple of years, it sat there with no design or purpose. We eventually bought two wicker chairs to put on the deck. One evening, we sat there complaining about the lack of privacy and one of us (likely me) had a stroke of genius.

The solution was to plant a wisteria vine at the base of the deck so that the foliage would eventually enclose the space and provide us with privacy. We planted the vine one weekend and eagerly anticipated its growth. In the coming years, the vine grew up and around the corner and began to fill in the slats.

Yet, we were still without the vibrant blue blossoms for which wisteria is well known. We researched and learned that we needed to trim back the vine periodically and vigorously. To great acclaim, there are now hundreds of buds ready to flower and the foliage continues to thicken dramatically — maybe a little too dramatically.

While it's beautiful and has delivered the desired affect, the wisteria now resembles the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. While it's not literally requiring blood to stay alive, it has taken on a life of its own with, well, special demands. Kids have set up shop underneath its canopy and we've wondered (dreamed?) on more than one occasion if we might lose one in the thicket. The need to cut it back is unrelenting. If left untouched, the vine wraps itself around the limbs of adjacent trees and puts stress on the deck railings and support structure. Let's just say our wildest dreams have come true.

Now for the segue: in the spirit of being careful what you wish for, it's important to be prepared for your indirect channel to grow in popularity and value to your company. If you are unprepared for partner success, you may be caught without the proper infrastructure and resources to support rapid partner growth, putting incremental revenue at risk. What's more is that once partners lose confidence in your ability to support them and their customers, it can be difficult to get them back into your fold.

Like the wisteria's growth, partnering success doesn't happen overnight. So, utilize the incubation time to prepare by considering the following questions:

1) How many partners do you need to support your revenue goals?

    A manageable portfolio of strong partners always trumps a hundred
   (or a thousand) unproductive ones.

2) What infrastructure and resource requirements are needed to
    enable and to support your partners?

    Some requirements are table stakes. If you can't deliver the resources and
    tools to get and keep partners productive, there's no sense bringing them
    into the fold. Others, however, can be phased in over time as you scale your
    business.

What's more, as your revenue from business partners grows and begins to represent a bigger share of the pie, you may find that your progress gains attention from people who, until now, wouldn't give you the time of day. Some of this attention is productive, but sometimes it calls into question the value of existing strategies and resources. At times, partner momentum can be threatening to a direct sales-focused company, pitting investments and resources against each other. Ensuring alignment across internal constituents will minimize the inevitable strain on resources. And, this brings us to our third and final question:

3) To what degree is your partner strategy integral to the company's
    business strategy?

    If business partners are considered a necessary evil, rather than a strategic
    imperative, partner growth becomes increasingly stymied as the ongoing
    quest for resources taxes your initiative. The healthiest companies consider
    direct and indirect channels holistically, part of one go-to-market strategy.

While we can't always anticipate when the vine will blossom, planning for success with partners will help you to stay Ahead of the Curve.