Creating Partner Personas: 

The Ultimate Personalized Experience for Partners 

One size doesn’t fit all. As we’ve all been at home a lot more lately, shopping online has become a regular way of life. Every time you log in to Amazon, you see things that are strategically positioned to your liking and interest. This obviously benefits Amazon, but it also benefits you, as the consumer just as much. Because it’s not one size fits all, you don’t have to wade through products that don’t relate to you. This is the exact reason partner personas are so important to create for your partner program. 

You may have already ventured into the segmentation of partners by type, size, or other criteria, which is a great start, however, creating partner personas digs into the next level of personalization to enhance the partner experience. There may be multiple titles at one organization logging into your partner portal and typically they don’t all want to see the same content. Not only that, but they typically should not see the same content. A marketing contact at your partner account does not need to have the same experience as a sales contact logging into your portal.  

As discussed in our recent Channel Chief & Chill best practice discussion, building these personas not only benefits the partner, but it also lets you, as the vendor, see what personas are accessing various content and pieces of training. These reports give you an advantageous viewpoint on how your partners use the resources you give them. Once you have these insights, you can reevaluate and revise the experience and the journey you are giving to partners based on actual data and activity.  

If you have not yet created partner personas for your program, here’s a tip to start: Put yourself in the shoes of the different people logging into your portal. Physically map out these personas on a spreadsheet, on paper, or any way that feels right to you. What would you want to see if you were that partner contact? From there, decide which resources should be accessible to which personas and what experience you want each of them to have in your portal. With these changes, your partners will realize how easy it is to do business with you and how much you enable them to do their job effectively.