Partnerships are essential to business growth. Today, Jason Cormier, Director of Ecosystem, is going to give you a sneak peak into how Shippit approaches this crucial aspect of business growth.
Find what works for you: striking the right balance
When it comes to building a partner ecosystem, no matter what kind of growth opportunities you are looking to build out, there are two essential factors to consider when structuring a partner program:
- High reward – how can you maximise the value your partners will get from working with you?
- Low friction – how can you make it easy for partners to work with you?
If you can get these two things right then you’ve laid down solid foundations to grow a healthy partner ecosystem.
The most successful partner ecosystems, like those of Atlassian, Shopify, and Salesforce, excel in both areas. They offer low friction partner programs with a wide range of tools, processes, and support systems making it easy for partners to work with them. And they offer clear paths for partners to maximise the return on their efforts via subscription fees and professional services revenue.
While these programs are considered the gold standard for partner ecosystems, there are many different models for success. Direct revenue is an obvious carrot to dangle to attract partners, but it isn’t the only incentive that partners care about. So it is important for you to identify what your reward structure should be for partners, based on what your organisation can provide. Value can be created in many different ways.
Shippit’s Approach to Partnerships
At Shippit, we’ve gone through the exercise of identifying what our value is that partners will care about. Here’s our strategy, building off the framework above:
- High Reward – We offer partners access to our deep knowledge and understanding of shipping and logistics so they can leverage this expertise and help their customers improve their delivery experience.
- Low Friction – We make it easy for partners to work with us by providing comprehensive tools and resources through our partner program supported by our local team on the ground working side-by-side with partners every step of the way.
Simplifying Logistics, Empowering Partners
This value exchange for Shippit partners works, because we know that logistics and fulfilment can be daunting for retailers and partners alike. In many cases retailers maintain their legacy fulfilment systems and processes well past the point of breaking, yet remain averse to change because the work to streamline and optimise shipping can feel overwhelming. Retailers turn to their trusted partners for advice, but in many cases partners aren’t shipping experts and can’t help. This is where becoming a Shippit partner pays off.
At Shippit we make the complex seem manageable by offering our expertise in logistics to help partners navigate customers’ logistics challenges with ease. We lean in and support our partners so they can provide informed advice on how to optimise the fulfilment processes and help their customers reduce costs and build more trust with end consumers.
We built our Shippit partner program around the core principle that the most valuable thing we can offer our partners is to make them look good!
Putting Customers First, Always
All of this works because we are aligned to our partner goals. Everything we do together as partners revolves around putting customer needs first. When the customer wins, the partner wins. And when the partner wins, that’s how Shippit builds a stronger, healthier partner ecosystem.
So if you are looking to solve hard customer problems for retailers then sign up to become a Shippit partner at www.shippit.com/partners