This article was written by Andy Ranson, CEO of K1 Channel Consulting. Andy has over twenty years of partnership experience across international markets and has built partnership models for SaaS start-ups, scale-ups, and enterprise software companies. For the last two years, Andy went through the process of simplifying the established process and started the sequence strategy work with the built work, and the end result is a fractional partnership consultancy that has a range of rapid accelerators, structure, and resources that will enable saaS companies to build their partnerships businesses that can accelerate growth, reduce risk and make the process of setting up professional partnerships business affordable.

Introduction

SaaS companies often face the challenges of affordably growing their channel revenues and constantly have questions on how they drive channel revenue and growth from high-value business partners in both local and international markets with limited resources.

The Challenges to Achieving Partnership Growth

To achieve growth, many SaaS companies need to recruit high-value business partners, which takes resources and an understanding of the partners in various regional markets and local countries.

Partner recruitment is also often a very labor-intensive exercise and is often overlooked by companies who may have one partner manager who is already stretched. To add value to this process, K1 has a partner recruitment (as a service) offering with over sixty thousand partners in our network and a team where we can support the development of your ideal partner profile value proposition and manage the outreach process across global markets.

Our team has worked for many companies growing the channel, so we have developed a solution and methodology that makes partner recruitment and achieving growth and scale affordable and highly scalable.

Partner Recruitment Best Practices

As companies’ partner recruitment activity develops, you need an effective way to track the partner recruitment process, which is often managed in spreadsheets. With Kiflo’s partner prospection pipeline module, partner managers can now track the partner recruitment process via defined stages, which provides management with visibility that the partnership business is growing across global markets.

Since 2023, we have successfully managed over 250 partner recruitment engagements, delivered over 5,000 “warm partner” introductions, signed over 1,000 partners, and delivered over 15 million dollars of SaaS revenue (MRR growing every month), and we have worked with many different SaaS companies ranging from start-up and scale-ups to enterprise companies.

Partner Onboarding and the Business Partner Experience

As a business partner also moves from the recruitment process into the company's partner program, Kiflo can support the design of the onboarding process per partnership type, which provides professional engagement and improves the partnership experience. So, what is partner onboarding?

Partner onboarding is the process of bringing a partner into your partner program and may include training, building partnership and GTM plans, and alignment with resources within your organization. The more professional and tailored your partner onboarding process will improve the partner experience and drive more long-term engagement and revenue.

Global Innovation & Competition

With more and more competition in the global marketplace, improving your strategic partnership experience is becoming increasingly important as partners will not only be assessing your product and value proposition, but they will also be assessing your partner program, which is often providing more incentives, providing enhanced support and resources for its partners.

Partner programs are also providing more tools and resources to boost go-to-market activity, co-market and co-selling, and solution development and integrations. This trend will continue as increased collaboration and revenue will drive future engagement.

Kiflo Partnership with K1 Channel Consulting

Kiflo, in partnership with K1 Channel Consulting, is now able to provide the right support to SaaS CEOs who are in the early stage of their partnership journey or looking to grow to the next level. So, what is K1 channel consulting, and what does it do?  

K1 Channel Consulting is a fractional partnerships consulting firm that specializes in working with SaaS companies to establish, build, and grow their partnerships businesses. K1 has built several rapid accelerators for SaaS companies, including channel sales, partner program build, channel partner recruitment (as a service), and PRM solutions that integrate with the consulting offerings.  

The team at K1 also provides fractional partnership resources that can augment your existing company, which allows SaaS CEOs to kick start the project in the right way, which is affordable.

K1 Fractional Partnership Services

• Channel Sales Strategy;
• Partnership Program Build;
• Partnership Recruitment (as a service);
• Fractional Partnership Resources;
• PRM Solution “Kiflo”.