CX Best Practices in a B2B Setting
Problem
A large, global biotechnology company had experienced tremendous growth in just a few years. In many countries, they were leveraging a network of Channel Partners to indirectly sell and service their products. Their Channel Network had expanded to over 200 partners with varying size, experience, and resource levels. The company wanted to better understand the needs and values of these partners so they could best support them in their sales efforts and ultimately provide a better service to the end customer. They also wanted to develop a more personalized approach to supporting the Channel Partners but needed to do so in an efficient way in order to drive scalable growth.
Excelerate was engaged to help the company understand their Channel Partner Journey through a data-driven, customer focused point of view. Excelerate was also tasked with developing a partner segmentation that would allow them to engage with partners in an optimized and scalable way and would help identify the best opportunities to achieve scalable growth in the Channel Partner business.
Approach
Excelerate began the project with an analysis of the existing date on the Channel Partners. The team also interviewed key stakeholders both within the company and from Channel Partners around the globe. The team used the analysis to develop a Channel Partner Journey that mapped when and where the company was currently interacting with partners, beginning with the training process and ending in customer service. Through the journey mapping process, Excelerate began to identify opportunities for improvement including some quick wins as well as some opportunities that would need to be further vetted.
During the second phase of the project, Excelerate conducted a quantitative study with over 200 Channel Partner companies. Excelerate utilized this study to dig deeper into the needs of each partner and uncover how the company could best support them in driving sales and supporting the end customer. Based on the study, Excelerate was able to segment the partners into 5 categories that would allow the company to take a more personalized approach but still in a scalable and efficient way.
Results
Excelerate developed and presented the customer with a clearly articulated and visualized Channel Partner Journey that would serve as the foundation for their strategies moving forward. The team also created a new Channel Partner Enablement Strategy to guide the approach and strategies for how the customer would engage with Channel Partners. On a tactical level, over 60 opportunities were identified and 21 prioritized as the result of research efforts, several of these are currently in the implementation process. At the end of the project a key stakeholder said, “Having been a former consultant, it's hard to find people that really want to get deep. I appreciated the level of understand that the team wanted to take on to drive insights. You had high impact on our 2023 planning.”