There is no one-size-fits-all

Working on an article recently about channel relationships, I was amazed how often people suggested the best way to achieve a strong partnership was to “stand in your partner’s shoes”. I could be facetious here – oh, alright then – and say “that’s all well and good, but what if the shoes are too big or too small, or clash with your outfit, would you be so keen to stand in them then?”

There’s a serious point behind it, though, because the other observation that many vendors and channel businesses make is that partners are not all the same. So, if they’re not all the same, then every one of them must have different shoes to stand in.

I don’t know about you, but if I was being told the best way to keep partners happy was to stand in 50 or 100 or even 1,000 different pairs of shoes, my immediate reaction would not be one of unalloyed enthusiasm. Far from it. But if I did it, what would I see? For the most part, the vendor I’d be looking at wouldn’t be much different if I was figuratively wearing size seven pumps or size 10 mountain boots.

So, there’s some comfort in thinking that what I was looking at as a partner would be pretty much the same, whatever partner I happened to be. The difficulty, however, would be that the partner whose shoes I was standing in would be “different” because the entity figuratively wearing size seven pumps would not be identical to the one with size 10 mountain boots. From that perspective, I might want something different from the vendor I was looking at.

But how different? Just how unique would my requirements be compared with another partner? After all, the nature of my business is quite similar to the partner down the road or in the next town. We pretty much want a lot of the same things from our vendors. There might be differences because of our size or the nature of our customers, but there would be a lot more similarities.

That doesn’t mean there’s a one-size-fits-all scheme out there that would fulfil every partner’s every need. But does anyone seriously expect there to be one? Of course not. Such a scheme would be incredibly unwieldy, cumbersome and gruesomely bureaucratic. The plain fact is that you can’t cover every single variation or deviation between partners, but you can produce a programme that covers most of the bases for as close to everybody as possible. A one-size-fits-a-lot scheme.

You can’t do much more than that because the other major requirement for a partner programme is to keep it simple. Partners don’t want to have to spend too much time on their day-to-day dealings with vendors because they just don’t have it to spare. A vendor standing in a partner’s shoes would soon become aware that channel businesses deal with a number of vendors, and the best way to keep their loyalty and business is to make sure it’s as simple as possible for them to work with you.