You see the end product but we’re bringing you closer to the people behind it ! 

Among our recent partnerships, we joined forces with Ubility.  

To bring the service provider closer to YOU, we sat down with their CEO Khaled Dassouki, to gain firsthand insight on the things they do and the types of human capital profiles that drive their success.  

Khaled is a Lebanese national with an engineering background and PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Security obtained at Université de Technologie de Troyes, France. 

As a result of over 20 years in the field, Khaled decided to establish Ubility in France and build it on a base of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience, which was considered to be highly innovative as it was a niche field.  

Khaled was quick to notice that there had been a shift in the way business was carried out, the shift had been made to be more customer-focused. With that came new challenges, the ease with which customers can connect with the business led to a huge influx of queries and requests for support, which was very time consuming, tedious, and required businesses to grow their customer support teams leading to higher costs. 

While growing their teams did solve some challenges momentarily, organisations were quick to realise that the complexity and average time required to resolve customer challenges was growing which eventually led to dissatisfied customers. Not only that, customer service agents were quickly burning out as they were answering an ever-growing list of routine questions rather than helping solve complex problems and offering innovative solutions.  

Taking all that into account, Ubility offered an AI-powered platform that learns from interactions between an organisation’s customers & their customer care team to enable quick suggestions of appropriate solutions that could solve a customer’s challenge in seconds rather than minutes.  

In addition to that, Ubility also offers AI training for professionals in the IT industry, a sales chatbot that is based on a recommender system and knows the sales cycle, and AI Consultancy in which they are recruited to build and implement AI services in response to an assessment of an organisation’s processes. 

Success Story 

Ubility was commissioned by a Telecom operator in the gulf to assess and analyse their IT processes. After a thorough analysis done by their team of experts, it was concluded that a huge portion of their IT processes had an opportunity for automation.

After studying the best ways in which they could automate their processes, they determined that incorporating AI would allow the elimination of a manual process by looking at historical data. Instead of their operational costs raking up to 50,000 USD a month, they were now cut by 80% to be only 10,000 USD.  

Intrigued and want to learn more?

Click here for a free trial !  

Building and managing a proper partner ecosystem relies on the framework you have supporting it, while a large number of the below elements aren’t new they usually aren’t managed properly, you can check some of the problems in the below articles:

• Information technology partner programs are broken
• How to recruit channel partners the right way
• The Top 3 Issues in On-boarding the Right Channel Partners

Please keep the above in mind. The following has been written to set a basic understanding of the different elements involved in building and maintaining a proper partner management framework.

The 6 elements of a Partner Management Framework

Screen

Depending on the size of the organization, this can be merged with the recruit phase or left separate. The objective from Screening is to check the potential partner’s fit with your business and make the decision on whether they should move in the process or not. During this stage no commitments are made, it is simply a step to identify the fit. During this stage you might engage in the following activities:

• Signing the NDA
• Sharing information about the business
• Sharing information about the partnership program
• Describing the partnership process and expectations

Recruit

During the recruit phase, the process of adding a new partner starts, and this will include in-depth understanding of who the partner is, what they do, who their customers are, how developed are they, what the are their strong points and weak points, what you can give them and what can you expect from them. Towards the end of this phase you will make a decision to either proceed together or not. Typical activities include:

• In-depth presentations about both companies
• Meetings between various individuals from both companies (sales with sales, marketing with marketing, etc…)
• References and background checks

On-board

During the on-board phase, this is when the partners make things official and preparations are underway to bring the partner up to speed about the business and build the foundations of the mutual plan between them. Typical activities include:

• Sign Partnership Agreement
• Social activities to introduce the teams to each other
• Sales Training
• Technical Training
• Discuss and start thinking of the different elements of the business plan

Launch

During this phase both entities should ensure that are aligned to what is expected from both of them. Building a realistic situational aware business plan will ensure both entities are motivated to achieve the intended results. The Other elements of this phase include creating market awareness and building the initial pipeline. Typical activities include:

• Build the business plan
• Build the marketing plan
• Account Planning
• Launch Activities

Manage

During this phase, the purpose is to ensure continuous alignment between partners and identify problems early on sot hey can be mitigated. Typical Activities include:

• Weekly health checks (Early in the relationship)
• Bi-Weekly Health checks
• Monthly Review checks
• Quarterly Business Plan Reviews

Monitor

Monitor isn’t really a phase, it’s a continuous activities conducted with any/all partners who have passed the on-board phase. The purpose of this activity is to ensure the various metrics identified and agreed on with the partner are healthy and that there isn’t any major problems you need to tackle. Some of these metrics include:

• Number of leads generated
• Conversion rate into Qualified Opportunities
• Conversion rate into Orders
• Opportunity Velocity
• Achievement vs. Target
• Satisfaction Index (Customer satisfaction from partner, partner to partner, etc…)

Note: these views are a result of personal observations and as such do not represent the views of the organizations I am affiliated with. I welcome any points of view and would love the chance to debate them and enrich my understanding and the content I am producing. Looking forward to interacting with the rest of you

Note: Some companies don’t differentiate between partner recruitment and partner on- boarding. Please read this article if you would like to understand the difference between them.

By now you have managed to recruit the right partners, but this is just the beginning. Most of the problems in the channel business happen during the recruitment process and a lot of assumptions are usually made along the way. These assumptions should be minimized by understanding the channel partner’s business and structure in a better way during the recruitment phase yet vendors still make the mistake of treating all potential channel partners the same way. In this post we will be discussing three of the most important issues vendors face when on-boarding Channel Partners.

Automation

Automation is good and it ensures that the right process is identified and implemented every single time. The problem is that Vendors these days rely heavily on automation to the extent that with some of them the only time a channel partner meets a vendor representative is when they need help on a deal they are trying to close.

Let’s take a realistic scenario of what is happening today:

1. Channel partner finds vendor’s website and applies to become a partner by filling a form
2. Channel partner gets an e-mail confirmation
3. Channel partner doesn’t have a clue what’s happening next, he usually waits a week or so until he receives an e-mail telling him he is approved. Usually with the e-mail there is an attachment describing the partnership program and either a partnership agreement he has to print and sign or a document that he can digitally sign
4. The trail of e-mails continue asking them to register on the partner portal, start the online training courses, etc…
5. Channel partner is requested to enter his company and customer data into a partner portal
6. A standard target is assigned to them based on all the above and the Channel Partner is assigned a partnership tier.
7. Based on that tier either someone will visit them to start driving the business or they will be managed remotely.

The above is just an example (I would love to say it’s an extreme but it isn’t) and will lead vendors to have 100s if not 1000s of partners where only less than 20% of them are responsible to generate 80% of the revenue and the rest are opportunistic who live by winning a deal here or there.

Solving this issue will not require a vendor to leave automation, this will increase their cost which is why they turned to automation in the first place. Solving this will require setting up a guided and automated process that will adapt to channel partners depending on their situation. A partner manager will start engaging with them from day one to identify if they are a fit for the vendor’s business and vice versa. The partner manager needs to ensure clarity on all the steps and requirements and start building the basis of mutually agreed on objectives.

Standardization

You have 10 fingers and not a single one of them is the same, however vendor’s make the mistake of treating all their channel partners in the same way. A standard part of the on-boarding process is certification. Usually the vendor has a set of standard technical, pre-sales and technical exams that the partner needs to take in order to be certified as a channel partner.

Take a minute to think about this and then think about the school system. Standardized testing was a big part of the educational process and by now we all know how wrong that is. You can’t take 100 kids and assume that all of them think, act, behave and learn in the same way. Some children might be strong in a specific topic and not others, some children might be more interested in creative endeavors, others scientific experiments and others physical sports. The modern outlook of education is to work with these children to identify their where their strengths and passions are and then properly develop them to become the best in what they are interested in instead of treating them equally creating frustration and instilling the feelings of hate and carelessness about learning.

Channel partners are similar to school children. Some channel partners might have a strong sales team but their technical team isn’t yet ready or it might be the other way around. When dealing with a standardized process those who aren’t ready will resort to unorthodox ways to pass them such as checking out online brain dumps or having others take the exam on their behalf. The traditional response from vendors was to add more standardized layers to the on boarding process such as tiered level training, requiring certain revenue targets to be achieved before proceeding to the next level in readiness and so on. Ultimately the above will work with some channel partners and not everyone, the question you should be asking yourself is that just because someone passed the test you gave him are they right partners for you?

Solving the above is not complicated and will require you to engage in situational partner management. Since channel partners are different as a vendor you should be able to analyze them, identify their strong points and weaknesses and tweak your on-boarding process to adapt. As an example if a channel partner has a weak marketing practice engage with them to improve it, if their sales team are not subject matter experts in your field simplify things for them and slowly bring them up to the levels you expect and if their technical team isn’t on par with your expectations offer them the services of your technical team who can shadow and supervise their work for a period of time; doing this will show the channel partner that you are invested in them, you care about their success and by default will start dedicating more time, energy and resources to support you.

Misaligned objectives

The best way to start any relationship is by setting the right objectives. However these days partner management objectives are usually not aligned with the-objectives of channel partners they want to work with. As an example, every partner manager has a sales target assigned to him. Usually that sales target is not related to the target of the channel partner she is working with. This means that the channel partner can achieve his target from a large number of channel partners even if those channel partners don’t achieve their own. This objective misalignment between partner managers and channel partners will lead the latter to reduce the focus on the partner manager’s business to focus on more beneficial revenue generating activities.

The way to solve this is very simple but will require a fundamental shift in the vendor’s commission schema. If the vendor did the right research and identified the right number of channel partners required per geographical location they should tie the partner manager’s achievement and commission pay to the achievement of those partners. As an example if your goal is to generate $1 Million and you have 3 channel partners the partner manager’s targets should be to generate $500k from Partner 1, $200k from Partner 2 & $300k from Partner 3. This type of activity will make the partner manager and channel partner understand that the only way they can both succeed in this relationship is by working together. Setting the right objectives and expectations will be crucial when you move from the recruitment phase to building a joint plan to launch the vendor’s product(s) through the channel partner.

Note: these views are a result of personal observations and as such do not represent the views of the organizations I am affiliated with. I welcome any points of view and would love the chance to debate them and enrich my understanding and the content I am producing. Looking forward to interacting with the rest of you