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several competitors are offering the same product or solution is less likely to invest heavily in marketing for that product/service, because it may be creating support for its competition as well, Kiernan said. That’s not to say the vendor will not seek more than one partner per market, so prospective partners need to aware of the vendor’s intentions for building presence in the market. “In some markets, depending on where your proposition takes your product, you can have many partners,” Kiernan said. “But if you want to be a prominent solution in the market, then you have to manage the number of partners. You want to partner with someone, and you want to be able to create enough business in the market for them. You want to appoint enough partners in the market to meet the market demand, but you need to manage that balance.” Most companies the Tenego Academy works with are starting or growing in the channel. “They are always worried about having too many partners and trying to manage the partners they have, because they are managing their time and they want to do justice with each partner,” Kiernan said. As for the company’s larger clients, they tend to “let everybody sell.” Howev- er, this brings about a challenge that some partners aren’t up for the job. For example, an active partner that sells one product in two years is not really an active one, Kiernan said. That is why most companies with partner programs establish tiered systems created to reward their partners with compensation and different levels of support. Equality in Rewards In terms of compensation, this can be a tricky area when different standards exist throughout the world. “The way we look at it is from a pricing point of view, where the vendor should try to control its pricing in each region,” Kiernan said. “Sometimes that is done with an agreement with its partners in each regional marketplace. So, the vendor is not selling to the partner and letting the partner sell what it wants. The vendor is deciding on the end market price per region and then deciding on the partner ’s margin.” He said that methodology works across developed economies and low-cost economies equally. Another factor in compensation depends on how partners are incen- tivized. “Some are paid a very low basic wage and a high commission. That might affect how the vendor creates incentives for the partners,” Kiernan said. Other factors include whether the product is software or hardware, the vendor’s revenue model, initial license fees, a package model and how it’s paid, first-year revenue that is reduced after that initial year, renewals and variations of all of the factors. o 61 July - August 2021 | CHANNEL V ISION