How to work with partners as a product manager.

1. Working with Partners
Product Management Festival 2018
Lilia Gorbachik, Intermedia

2. About me
Lilia Gorbachik, Product Manager at Intermedia
More than 10 years in IT
QA -> Test Lead -> Project Manager -> Product Manager

3. Agenda
The target of the presentation is to share my experience in product
management for partners.
 Who are partners?
 Why are they important for product managers?
 How to create products for partners?

4. VAR
Value-added
reseller.
OEM
Original equipment
manufacturer.
Resell another
company's products
under their own
name and
branding.
REFERRAL
Sends prospective
leads
MSP
Managed Services
Provider, uses
products to build
a network or IT
infrastructure for
their customer.
What/who is a partner?

5. Why do we care about partners?
Up to 70% of IT purchases are made through partners.
According to analytics.

6. The double sale
Sale #1 Your Company -> Partner Sale #2 Partner -> End-Customer
&
If you don’t focus on Sale #1, you wouldn’t have Sale #2

7. What’s important for a partner?
 Trust;
 Easy to deploy solutions;
 Margin;
But at the end of the day it’s all about making money! And, the
easier it is for the partner to work with your product, the more
money they make.
 Add value (setup fee, installation
consulting, support);
 Complex enough solution, so customers
would need partner’s expertise to
make a purchase and maintain it

8. How to approach partners?
You need to treat partners as you treat your
end-customers:
Features
Tools
 Education
 Support

9. How to develop products
For partners
Keep in mind their values
Create tools that help close the deal faster
Create tools that provide easier to support, troubleshoot,
maintain

10. Example
My company, Intermedia sells UCaaS (Unified Communications as a
Service), including voice (VoIP).
 VoIP requires a certain level of bandwidth
 Partners need to make sure customer’s network is voice-ready.
 We provide QoS (quality of service) tools for partners to test the
network.
 Value – partners don’t provide poor service on top of poor bandwidth,
they help customers to improve their network before a voice
purchase.
Feature for partners

11. Value
You need to bring value to a partner
Easy start
 Onboarding process
 Education
 Marketing materials
 Automate routine steps
 Provide additional tools

12. Value
You need to bring value to a partner
Less time to sell
 Decrease number of steps in a sales process
 Automate routine steps
 Provide additional tools

13. Value
You need to bring value to a partner
Upsell
 It is easier to upsell than to make a new sale
 Do you have enough products to upsell?
 Provide a framework to identify potential customers to upsell.

14. Value
You need to bring value to a partner
Own, monitor and support
 Quality of Service dashboards
 Analytics dashboards
 Troubleshooting tools

15. Summary
• Why are partners super important?
• Who is a partner?
• Product Managers need to create products for partners keeping in
mind their needs
• If you don’t bring value to partners, they will quickly select another
vendor
• How to create products for partners?

16. Q
A
Questions?
Lilia Gorbachik
Product Manager
Lilia.Gorbachik@gmail.com
LinkedIn -
https://www.linkedin.com/in/liliagorbachik/
Facebook -
https://www.facebook.com/lilia.gorbachik

17. Thank You