We did a design research with 15 commercial partners across the world covering large, medium and small partner businesses. We also visited a few sales meetings of the partners with their customers. In addition, we spoke to the regional leaders responsible for sales and partner management across the world. The global playing field was very complex.

 

On one side, there are these advanced economies where customers demand the partners to demonstrate sustainability in every step. On the other hand, in some of the emerging economies, price was the main factor that decided sales and it was getting commoditized. In those economies, there is no incentive for these partners to take additional efforts to deliver sustainability. In addition, partners face big challenges from Amazon and local online players who offer big discounts. The complexity of the problem was enormous.

We designed a solution that harnessed the existing best practices from different regions. Instead of pushing one solution to be adopted by the rest of the world, we decided to pull the solutions from the partners themselves. We designed an online platform that will enable the collection of these practices. A community manager curated the content and gave visibility for the partners in terms of video, blogs and social media marketing support. These are areas where partners have been historically weak and have been struggling to compete with the online players. This incentive nudged them to participate more.

 

With a series of training sessions, webinars, capability building activities and a global assessment, we created a partner community program with three levels. The program has been launched in 12 countries and will be scaled to 60 countries in less than a year.

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