Amazon Consulting just completed facilitating another Partner Advisory Council (PAC) and I’m pumped up! Yes, you heard right – we regularly facilitate partner advisory boards for our clients. There are several benefits our clients receive from having an outsider come in and facilitate the meeting. The partners have working sessions without the vendor present in the room, thus the partners can provide honest feedback without grandstanding or worrying about retribution. These partner-only sessions result in the PAC developing into a unified team. The PAC members talk amongst themselves and present a single voice to vendor management – instead of many PAC sessions where the partner talking the most and loudest get’s their point across and the quite ones waste their time. We remove the “the squeaky wheel getting the grease”. The entire PAC membership has to agree on the issues that will be presented back to management. The meetings result in 10 – 12 prioritized issues or concerns presented directly to the vendor management team - not hundreds of complaints and stories thrown around for two days without any structure or sense of impact or urgency. This relatively anonymous and prioritized feedback helps the vendor understand which issues are the biggest hurdles to the partners’ sales, profitability and loyalty.

The meeting the last two days went great. The vendor did their job (mostly) of listening to the partners and only asking clarifying questions. Often in these types of feedback meetings the vendor argues with the partners or tries to tell them that the particular issue or concern their highlighting isn’t really that bad or it’s already fixed. To the partners, perception is reality. If the partners are perceiving behaviors in the field, channel or market as hindering sales or profitability – then they most likely are– regardless of whether the vendor thinks the issue is solved or not.

It was also great because the partner community had good exposure to the vendor executives. The meeting was held at the vendors’ headquarters, which we tend to recommend against (too many distractions), but in this case it worked great. The senior executive leadership was able to be in attendance to discuss the vision, support the partnering efforts and answer the tough questions (when will you create compensation neutrality with your field sales team?). The vendor partnering teams focused on the partner meetings, and during the “partner only” sessions they met to discuss the last round of feedback from the PAC members.

Of course it wasn’t perfect. In my opinion, the vendor presented too much. Too many presentations on the newest program, product, solution, service offering. Its good information, but the PAC members should have this ahead of time to be able to come to the table with this information already digested and a response to how it will impact their business. Also the agenda was skewed heavily to the issues the vendor wanted to discuss – increasing sales, penetrating new markets, selling solutions. If we had been involved in building the agenda, we would have recommended reaching out to the PAC members before hand to ensure the issues and roadblocks they were seeing were on the agenda. We stuck to the agenda topics the vendor wanted from us – and I think they missed an opportunity to get input on areas that would have a greater immediate impact on sales.

I’m totally excited about the opportunity to facilitate change in organizations in order to make them more collaborative with their partners. advisory councils provide a great opportunity to develop a true partnership with the solution provider community – and help create a partner centric organization – where the issue of partnering is core to product, sales, finance, marketing, support, and legal teams’ decisions.