We have done this because people were getting confused by what we did. A common misconception was that we were some type of accounting service. When you come up with a name for an Internet company, you have a choice which is dictated to some degree by the domain registration process.

Either you go for a short name that you can register a domain for, which essentially means nothing at all. Examples are Google, Yahoo and more commonly for newer startups silly names like xllat and phhaat and jeesupl. (I made these up so don’t  bother looking for them).

Or you can pay lots of money for a short domain that does mean something – like partner.com. Great name currently for sale. The asking price? ‘Make an offer’. This is not the best way to spend your money on a startup.

The alternative is to go for a longer name that does mean something and might be available. We think that PartnerMaven is a pretty good one. Partner is clearly right in our sweetspot for conveying our value proposition, and Maven means ‘expert’ in Yiddish.

My usual response to this is to ask if they have tried visiting Linkedin lately, putting in the name of their company or any one of their partners and seeing what the results are. Most people are not aware, or have simply overlooked that all of this information is clearly visible on the net already. The barriers to corporate data have come tumbling down – or put differently – the borders of the organization have extended out far beyond the corporate firewall.

This can be seen as a threat as mentioned, but it can equally be seen as an opportunity. Here are two ways in the latter category:

1) By providing your partner community with a list of other partners it helps to create a sense of community. It allows partners to connect with each other and exchange ideas, learning’s, initiatives. Microsoft has recognized this as is clear from their emphasis on ‘partner to partner’ collaboration. There are a host of reasons why you might find benefit in your partners working with each other – hopefully on your products and services.

2) By making your employees visible and accessible, you create multiple points of interaction between people in your organization and those of your partner. This is the essence of any functional business relationship. Savvy partner managers know that recruiting partners to your program is just the first step in the engagement. The harder part is to activate them, and that requires that functional business relationships become established between real human beings. This is what drives business, not legal agreements.

To my mind the benefits here significantly outweigh the potential pitfalls of this type of transparency.

Lately I have spoken with several vendors that are making use of not just one password for their partners, but multiple. By this I mean; partner goes to site and logs in, then tries to access some resource and is asked to log in again with a different password. To make matters much worse, passwords are issued to the partner. They are not able to define and manage them as they see fit.

If your partner facility sounds like this, then it should not be a surprise to you when you monitor the traffic you have on that facility and find that it does not get used at all. This is a wasted investment on your part, in resources, time to develop and effort in keeping that facility updated. The biggest cost to your organization is the opportunity cost of not activating those partners effectively.

The other area of debate is just how much of your partner site really needs to be behind a password. Not all information needs to be protected and therefore could be put on the main site without the need for a password. Unfortunately if you take this approach it tends to split the partner portal into two, with some information this side and some the other side of the password. If you think your password protected facility does not get used enough, try removing half the value and putting that on your public site. This will surely kill what traffic you had to the rest of the facility. So what is the solution?

My recommendations for password protecting your site are as follows:

1) You need to password protect your data. These problems do not obviate the need for security so don’t attempt to break the site in two to solve the issue.

2) Allow your partners to create and manage their own passwords. Just like when you use Gmail, or Facebook, you create your own account and its yours to manage as you see fit. A partner portal should be no different (and AccountMaven works this way)

3) Don’t put silly restrictions on passwords to make them more secure. If your partner likes to always use the word ‘partner’ as his password – don’t make him insert special characters, numbers and upper and lower case. This will just annoy him and make him forget the custom password you made him choose. This is not a bank account so security does not have to be that tight.

4) Finally, and the most important point. Once your partner logs in and you have validated his credentials, don’t expect him to log in again with a different password. If you are deploying additional resources from outside vendors you really need to integrate their security into your primary facility. If they can’t achieve this I would tell them its a deal breaker. Don’t waste your investment on something that will not get used.

From our discussion, I believe that AccountMaven.com offers them advantages that they are not currently realizing with their existing efforts.  Specifically the ability for partners to work with other partners within the channel. Also the ability to tap into partner networks from other companies to help them with their recruitment efforts. Finally in adding to the methods of communication they use to communicate with their partners particularly as joint solutions with their strategic alliance partners.

However, what stuck me most of all from our conversation was the obvious scale of this partnering effort as opposed to probably 90% of all companies out there. If you have 15,000 partners with a core active group of 6,000 to activate you can pretty much not worry about the problems of scaling to critical mass. You have mass all of your own and your partners supposedly will adopt and participate in your partnering efforts and facilities assuming they are worthwhile. For most small to medium sized companies its a very different scenario. Why would one of those same 15,000 partners using this companies facilities come along to those of a relatively diminutive organization and give them the same level of ‘mindshare’? The reality is that they would not, and this speaks to the consistent problem that is evident in the partnering market.

Spending money on developing, deploying and maintaining partnering facilities that nobody uses or even logs into is plainly a wasted investment. It’s hard to understand how companies justify continuing to go down this route in the face of this experience. A different approach is warranted and for the the small to medium sized company, that approach can only be as part of an integrated, multi-dimensional community that has existing scale to tap into.

The net benefits to each and every member of the sales community that participates in that community is greatly enhanced with the addition of both new companies and new individual members. These are the so called ‘networking effects’ which have shown themselves so effective in creating the leaders of the Internet.

When I created this blog, it took me about 15 minutes to set it up and write the first post. I chose the features I wanted from a set of applets, uploaded a custom image and invited the first people to read it. Total investment = zero. Return on investment as yet unknown.

We wonder why it is that running a channel sales program is therefore so prohibitively expensive. You need dedicated channel sales people on salary and customized software from a leading CRM tool. You might have one or more private portals created from scratch by a web designer, and the expense of maintaining and promoting these sites. The worse news yet, is that research shows that these significant investments in partnering, activation and recruitment yield typical results that are very mediocre. I have yet to meet a channel sales leader who is satisifed with the performance of their channel partners.

We think that social networking has the best chance to activate channel partners for these reasons:

• business is about relationships, social networking is about connecting people
• communication is improved
• a unified community is dynamic and interesting

Finally, we think that setting up your channel sales ecosystem with Web 2.0 tools should be no more difficult than setting up a blog. You should be able to do it in 15 minutes, and it should be free until it can demonstrate to you that its improving your bottom line.

This is our vision for AccountMaven – Push-Button Partnering.

One thing that always astounds me is when I ask about the participation rate on that portal. IE: How many partners log-in, how often, and what do they look at. The most common answer to these questions is that they don’t have that information to hand. The sad reality is that these statistics are typically so low as to be too embarrassing to even talk about, particularly after the time and money that has been invested in this facility by the marketing department.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against partner portals. They are potentially an incredibly useful resource for communicating in an organized manner with your partners. They automate many of the routine tasks that you might have to do over and over of you did not have one. Like giving out pricing or product information. Assuming partners used them, the marketing department would relieve large burdens from the channel management folks by keeping good, current, well organized information in the partner portal. So why then is it that sales people (partners) simply don’t log in to these portals?

Here are a few reasons:

1. Sales people are busy and they are focused on sales. They don’t have time (inclination) to go searching around someone else’s portal for information that they would just as soon have emailed to them.
2. They already have multiple other systems to use, Outlook, CRM, Linkedin, Hoovers and others.
3. You are likely not their only partner. In some cases you may be one of several hundred or more.
4. Your portal is password protected. Sure you have them the password, but they lost it or never received it in the first place.
5. When they log into your portal, all they find is information about your company. (one dimensional). This is boring to a sales executive.
6. They have no way of interacting with others once in the portal. In most cases it’s simply a way to retrieve documents and information.

I think the most telling answer to the question of why sales people don’t use portals comes from asking yourself this simple question. How many portals have you felt inclined to log into lately?

There is your answer…

www.accountmaven.com

• What do your sales people know about your channel partners?
• How many of your channel partners are actively pursuing new business for you?
• How important is channel revenue to your organization etc.

The answers all seem to be similar, and it does not seem to make much difference if they are from large organizations (100,000 employees) or tiny start ups with less than $10m in revenue. It seems obvious that there are big problems to solve in channel sales. Here are the problems:

1. Sales people have little knowledge or information about their channel partners
2. Most channel partners are under-performing
3. Lots of money continues to be invested in channel sales management, activation and recruitment
4. Its hard to find and recruit new partners
5. Its even harder to get them to perform
6. Sales people don’t like to use partner portals

We think that there should be a better way to set up and run your channel program. It should be simple, elegant, efficient and your channel partners should want to participate in it. You should only pay for it if it helps to grow your channel revenue. (success based billing).

We are calling it Push-Button Partnering.