A channel partner program can supercharge your sales efforts.
Nearly three quarters of business respondents say that partner training improves customer relations and more than two thirds say partner enablement improves customer awareness of products and services.
So it’s essential to build an effective partner onboarding process. Building a winning channel partner strategy requires aligning goals, identifying competency overlaps, and enabling best practices.
While those goals and metrics are great to prioritize, a successful ecosystem has to also include a comprehensive process to streamline the onboarding program from the moment a new partner enters the equation.
Your channel partner engagement should do more than just make a great first impression. It should give everyone in the relationship the background, knowledge, and incentives to work toward mutual success.
Are you looking to build a more successful onboarding plan for your current and potential partners? Use this guide to get you started on partner enablement. But first, let’s digest what exactly is partner onboarding.
What is partner onboarding?
Imagine the moment a new user signs up for your product. You probably have a whole series of onboarding steps ready—maybe it’s an email sequence, in-app tutorials, or even hands-on support.
The objective is clear: show users the value of your product as quickly as possible so they’ll stick around, becoming loyal, long-term customers who contribute to sustained revenue.
Partner onboarding works the same way, but for the partners entering your program. While new partners may have a baseline familiarity with your product and audience, they still need guidance to become true experts.
But as your partner program grows, offering personalized onboarding to every new partner becomes unfeasible.
That’s where an AI-driven learning program or learning management system (LMS) can transform the process. An AI-powered LMS or learning program streamlines partner onboarding by automating the delivery of key resources, adapting content to individual learning needs, and providing data insights to refine the experience.
By enhancing accessibility and automating touchpoints, an AI-driven learning program ensures partners receive support exactly when they need it, allowing them to become proficient more quickly and at scale.
Think of partner onboarding as the cornerstone of a successful business relationship. It’s more than a quick run-through of technical skills; it’s about setting the stage for a partnership that runs smoothly, with both sides aligned on expectations and goals from the very beginning.
Detailed onboarding doesn’t just teach partners how to work with your products and teams; it creates a shared understanding of the mission and vision they’re stepping into, ensuring everyone is moving in the same direction.
Let’s look at some benefits of partner onboarding.
Benefits of Partner Onboarding
1. Improved sales and loyalty
When partners are well-trained and familiar with your products, processes, and customer base, they not only perform at a higher level but also feel more invested in the partnership.
This deeper knowledge and connection translate into better sales performance, higher customer satisfaction, and increased loyalty, as partners are more likely to stay engaged and committed to a long-term relationship.
2. Wider Market Reach
Effective onboarding equips partners with the tools and confidence to expand into new markets on your behalf.
By embedding your brand's knowledge and strategies, partners can open doors to new customer segments and geographies, multiplying your market presence.
Each well-integrated partner acts as an extension of your business, allowing you to scale your reach without the full overhead of direct operations.
3. Brand Consistency
When partners are thoroughly immersed in your brand’s values, messaging, and standards, they become ambassadors who can represent your company authentically and consistently.
This alignment ensures that your brand experience is cohesive across markets and channels, maintaining trust and reliability with customers.
A unified brand voice, carried by partners who understand it fully, strengthens brand reputation and customer loyalty, making it easier for your business to stand out in competitive markets.
Now, let’s take a look at exactly how you can create a successful partner onboarding process.
Steps to creating a successful partner onboarding process
1. Create a general channel partner onboarding roadmap
Onboarding new partners can be a pretty standard process. It tends to follow the same steps and workflows as the typical onboarding program, from the kick-off call to regular check-ins throughout the partner journey.
So start by mapping out what those processes might be based on what you know about the existing members of your partner ecosystem. Conducting a needs assessment for those members would be a great place to start. More on this later!
Based on what you have found in your partner ecosystem, and what you want to accomplish, you can create milestones that should be reached in 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days, for example.
By creating standardized steps, you can easily optimize the partner onboarding experience for every new channel partner, ultimately allowing you to drive incoming partner businesses through the same optimized process.
2. Designate responsibilities for key onboarding tasks
Once you have a roadmap in place, you can assign tasks and milestones to channel managers and other members of your own team.
For example, aligning marketing collateral and messaging probably requires your marketing team to take the lead.
Background product knowledge, on the other hand, might be best left in the hands of your sales and learning professionals.
Consider following the RACI matrix template when assigning those responsibilities. That way, you can always be sure that your internal team is accountable and actively involved in the effort to help partners become as successful as possible on the right timeline.
3. Automate your partner program’s repetitive tasks
Every channel partnership you build is, at least on some level, unique.
But the bottom line is that there are plenty of pieces to the channel onboarding process that remain the same and where keeping things consistent will not negatively impact your partners' success on your behalf.
That's where automation becomes an invaluable piece of the puzzle. Rather than relying on time-intensive manual task management and training, you can implement several partner onboarding best practices without significant human touch.
Imagine this: tasks flowing automatically from your responsible partner marketing leads to each other when the prior task is required. New training courses or webinars become available once others are accomplished. Product updates are dynamically pushed to partners as soon as they're released.
What’s best? Automation can even go beyond the onboarding process.
For example, new sales opportunities or referral possibilities can move seamlessly between you and your partners, ensuring better efficiencies as you look to optimize your channel sales.
4. Perform a customized needs assessment for new partners
Building a standardized partner onboarding process can only take you so far. But not every partner is built equally, and also chances are you’re not their only vendor.
A personalized experience is important for engagement. If having successful partners is a core part of your business plan, you also need to develop mechanisms to account for their unique needs.
You can figure out how to best personalize your onboarding process through a needs assessment.
A needs assessment can help you understand your channel partner's goals in the partnership.
It can also help you evaluate what currently prevents them from reaching this goal and where you can help.
The more you understand about what they are looking to get out of the partnership on their end, the better you can adjust your processes in a way that consciously drives successful onboarding and partner retention.
5. Write a detailed outline of incentives for each new partner
Part of a successful partnership is offering each partner the right incentives to sell on your behalf. The better they understand these incentives, the more they'll work toward them on their way to creating a mutually beneficial relationship.
It's why any welcome packet you prepare for your partners should include an outline of relevant incentives. And, the more structured the incentives are to their unique needs and situations, the better.
That's why this is a step best served after the needs assessment.
Consider adjusting what you offer to the personas your individual partners represent. You can also offer custom incentives based on individual milestones your new partners hit as part of the onboarding process.
6. Establish a partner relationship management (PRM) platform
Manually building all of your partner onboarding process steps sounds exhausting. It doesn’t need to be.
The right platform can help you with anything from automation to partner training.
Think of your PRM software as a partner portal. It should hold all the relevant information your partners need, from marketing materials they can leverage to joint lead management efforts.
Of course, you also have to find the right platform.
Look for software with relevant experience and clients in your specific industry, and ask for references.
Match up the pricing options with your budget. The more intentional you are about the selection process, the better the platform will eventually be able to serve your needs.
7. Set specific training modules for any unique aspects of your company or product
Within your PRM software or outside of it, your new partners need to learn about you.
Not just your company as a whole, but also the products on which you're partnering through the channel.
How else can you empower your partners to succeed in selling your vision?
The better you build the training modules for these elements, the more successful your partner onboarding process will become.
Use training modules to highlight past marketing campaigns. Show case studies of other successful partners.
Depending on the relationship you're building, you can even ensure that new partners take in the right information by giving them quizzes after each module, or other engaging gamification.
Most (83%) employees say they feel motivated when learning with gamification, while just 28% feel the same with non-gamified training.
Make your modules engaging, and your new partners' attention retention will skyrocket.
8. Draft a partner onboarding checklist that your channel managers can use during onboarding
Based on many of the above components, your onboarding process will likely be relatively structured.
But individual channel managers will still want, and need, to know exactly where newly established partners stand in the overall process.
That's where a partner onboarding checklist can come in handy. It provides channel managers with key steps that each new partner needs to go through, from training modules to getting into the PRM software or starting to integrate into marketing campaigns.
It can be as simple as a bullet point list that accounts for the key milestones.
But once you have it, managing the partner onboarding process can become quite a bit more streamlined.
📌 Related: Channel partner onboarding checklist
9. Establish a partner ecosystem that goes beyond the initial roadmap
The partner onboarding process is crucial to get right, but it’s no small feat.
True partner enablement requires constant nurturing that reaches far beyond the initial roadmap or onboarding.
Partners will need to be trained on product updates or changes, kept in the loop about any changes to your company strategy or business plan, and, of course, feel involved in your larger partner ecosystem to leverage their expertise and connections across channels.
The more you can build that larger ecosystem and continue prioritizing partner enablement, the better.
To foster a partner ecosystem, you could build a partner academy through a PRM, which would facilitate communities of partners so they can share their expertise in selling your product.
10. Evaluate the success of your B2B partner onboarding
The most strategic onboarding process should not rely on hunches or generalized best practices.
Your partner enablement strategy should definitely include evaluations and assessments of the process, and success of onboarding new partners.
That means identifying the right KPIs to track and determine what actually makes a partnership "successful."
It also means using data to understand how your onboarding and learning process impacts business success.
Once you begin managing your partner onboarding process, you can use that information to improve it over time.
Hone in on the successful steps, adjust the less successful steps, and watch your channel partnerships thrive.
A PRM with advanced analytics can also help streamline the evaluation process.
Case study: Ready to build a more effective channel partner onboarding process?
Onboarding new B2B channel partners is no easy task. It requires careful thought and action, alongside plenty of tools like the right PRM to get it just right.
Don't underestimate the power of a learning management system or learning platform in that process.
With the right platform by your side, you can ensure that your new partners will learn exactly what they need to do to help your business succeed. You can also build engaging modules designed to draw and keep your audience's attention.
Take for instance, Flix, a global provider of transportation services like FlixBus, Greyhound and others. Their onboarding process was mainly manual.
But having expanded beyond Europe into the US and Latin America, managing onboarding manually was no longer feasible. So they turned to a flexible and scalable learning platform that enabled them to onboard and train their large ecosystem of drivers, employees, vendors, and hundreds of bus partners.
By streamlining and automating repetitive tasks, and fostering better engagement through personalized journeys, Flix’s use of a partner relationship management platform allowed them to save 135,000€ in onboarding costs each year for a decade!
Ready to start improving your program? Request your demo from Docebo today.
Learn how our platform can help you build and implement powerful learning solutions that reach from your own teams and employees to your channel partners and far beyond.