Less Can Be More

As the school year draws to a close, the series of year-end activities has reached a crescendo: teacher appreciation luncheon, teacher gifts, and the last field trip, among others. It's enough to make you wish for children whining from boredom over summer vacation!

This year, the end-of-year band concert was particularly memorable for its ambition. The (clearly underpaid) band teacher orchestrated a show like no other, bringing together 121 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders of varying talents to demonstrate the skills they had acquired throughout the year.

Kicking off the concert were the fourth graders who played "Blues in F" and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," then five or six additional songs played by small groups of two to three children. After the small groups had performed, the entire fourth grade band treated us to yet another set of three songs. If you've kept up with the math here, that equates to 11 songs (or 37.5 minutes) for the fourth grade.

It was somewhere in the middle of the fifth grade small group performances that the parents started looking at each other with raised eyebrows and it became clear that we were going to be there for a lot longer than we had expected. The room was getting warm, and still awaiting their turn were the 6th grade band and five additional chamber groups. The chairs got harder, our bodies slumped and the auditorium began to smell like a locker room.

The teacher, however, never lost a beat or her enthusiasm. She introduced each piece with pride and closed each with the children standing for applause. At last, we reached the grand finale. All 121 children played the "Star Wars" theme with the school principal as special guest on the bass drum. The audience erupted into wholehearted applause before, after, and during the performance. Let's just say it felt good to be alive (and headed for fresh air).

And how does this experience tie into partner program development?

For one, like the development of most products and services, it's tempting to pack as much as you can into your program offering. This is a natural outcome of striving to please as many partners as possible, not to mention keeping the competition on its toes. At the same time, offering too many features can compromise time to market and devour precious resources. Striking a balance between the number of features, time to market, and ensuring those features are meaningful to the broadest possible audience is equally important when designing and delivering a partner program.

There are three points to take away from this story:

1) Partners are less interested in the number of program benefits than
    they are in the value of each benefit, and how those benefits are
    delivered to help them grow their business. In other words, and
    assuming table stakes are covered, it's less about the "what," and more
    about the "how".

    Most companies cannot match the program breadth of a billion dollar
    company and are better off differentiating with depth of their program offering.
    Fewer songs on the concert roster, delivered well, will keep your audience
    just as happy as sitting though your entire repertoire.

2) Modularizing your partner program to balance the expense is
    smart and cost effective.

   For example, while basic, no charge, technical support is expected, some
   partners are willing to invest more to get premier, people-intensive resources 
   and services. Others are quite used to "no or low touch" models, such as
   technical support offered online.

3) It's important to ensure that the program benefits you offer are
   delivered flawlessly and consistently.

   This includes the ability to process marketing development funds or
    rebates promptly. If you're not sure how well your company delivers on a
    particular program benefit, you may want to test it. Call your partner
    technical support line, for instance, and see how long it takes to talk to
    someone, or how quickly an issue is escalated.

Lest you think me a complete cynic, the concert was enjoyable and I was duly impressed with the talent of our children and their teacher. I'm convinced, however, that I would have been equally impressed by strong delivery of a less ambitious program.

In the spirit of less is more, may your partner program be concise, meaningful, and operationally sound to keep you ahead of the curve!