Lana King: Maintaining Partner Trust through Massive Change

A year ago, I interviewed Lana King, VP of Partner Programs, Training and Enablement, on how Mitel is helping partners and their customers adopt the cloud business model through their unique partner managed program. A few months after that interview, Mitel struck a strategic partnership where RingCentral became their exclusive UCaaS partner. In this episode, […]

A year ago, I interviewed Lana King, VP of Partner Programs, Training and Enablement, on how Mitel is helping partners and their customers adopt the cloud business model through their unique partner managed program. A few months after that interview, Mitel struck a strategic partnership where RingCentral became their exclusive UCaaS partner. In this episode, Lana shares how Mitel is maintaining trust with partners through this massive change in their product strategy.

Here are 5 things I learned from Lana about maintaining trust with partners:

A fundamental requirement for trust is full transparency, with your partners, your customers, and your employees.
When going through change in your product strategy or go to market model, communicate those changes clearly, early, and often. You can’t over communicate.
Communication has to be two way. Give your partners, customers and employees an opportunity to communicate and to be heard.
Leverage your partner advisory council and partner events to share your new strategy, the role and value add of your partners, and listen to partner feedback.
Consider changes you need to make to your partner program in light of a strategic shift to reward and incent the behavior and motions you need from your partners.

LINKS & RESOURCES

Follow Lana on LinkedIn
Listen to Lana King: How To Drive Cloud Adoption In The Channel
Learn more about Allbound

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