What our Partners should expect of us in 2017
Like most companies, SAS spends part of the first month of the year finalizing goals and objectives so that teams and individuals can prioritize and focus their activities for the remainder of the year. It’s a necessary practice for companies to stay organized, and it helps leadership plan for what the business can and will deliver.
In my team’s case, the Partner Program Office is focused on you - our Partners - as our primary stakeholders. We wake up each day thinking about what we can do to help Partners drive more return on your investment in SAS, through our responsibilities in Partner Enablement, Operations and Communications. So, for us, our yearly planning process is less about what SAS can expect from us, and more about what our Partners can expect from us.
You deserve a great experience in your relationship with SAS. It’s your right.
With that in mind, here are your Bill of Rights from the SAS Partner Program Office.
Article I: The Right to a Great Onboarding Experience
Whether you are a new reseller who is new to SAS, or a long time SAS partner with new employees needing to get up to speed on SAS, we are committed to providing role-based onboarding programs for your sales, pre-sales and consulting personnel. Look for new assets and quick start paths to make it easy for you to get these folks up to speed and productive as quickly as possible.
Article II: The Right to Flexible Training Options
Education has always been a hallmark of SAS, and our education and training teams provide world class service. In a world with a mobile and decentralized workforce, you need flexible training options for consuming training content. That’s why we’ll be rolling out more online training assets that allow our Partners to gain the experience they need in a virtual environment. Look for more Virtual Learning Experiences from us in 2017.
Article III: The Right to Robust Delivery Enablement Support
In our annual Partner Survey, one of the top three requests from you was for more technical training and support. To that end, this year, we have started making best-practices technical assets available on this blog. These assets, which you can find under “technical enablement” on the blog, are the same assets SAS provides to our internal PSD consultants. We intend to provide new virtual learning options for and rollout additional vehicles for best-practices sharing.
Article IV: The Right to a World Class Demo Center
The Partner Demo Center (PDC) provides a set of preconfigured SAS software images – along with supporting assets such as sample data, demo scripts and videos – that can be customized and saved for future use. Access to the PDC is the most requested benefit that we make available to Partners. Those of you that use the PDC often have noticed the steady improvements we’ve made to your PDC experience – improving the quality of the demos and demo scripts and modernizing the user interface. We will continue to improve that experience in 2017 as well as establish new infrastructure environments in EMEA and AP (we’re piloting a PDC environment in Europe in Q1).
Article V: The Right to Know (and Influence) What We’re Up To
Communication with SAS should be a two-way street. We’re enhancing our communications program to keep you abreast of Partner news, training and resources – via PartnerNet and this blog. In addition, we’re listening closely to your needs, including our Partner surveys and the creation of a Partner Advisory Board.
Article VI: The Right to SAS Credentials That Bring You Business
We’re taking steps throughout the SAS organization to message the value of Partner badges and credentials with our sales force and SAS customers. Throughout the year, you’ll see more stories and posts about Partner Specialization and Competency Badges, credentials and tiers appear in external mediums like press releases and SAS social media, as well as in internal vehicles with our sales force.
Also expect to see changes to the Featured Partners page on sas.com to profile credentials, competency badges and specialization badges of featured partners to help differentiate yourselves in the market.
Article VII: The Right to a Painless Experience
We know that process complexity drives costs for you and is a drain on ROI. We’ll be involving some of you in process audits of all of our partner program facing processes, as we look for ways to improve your experience and make it easier for you to do business with SAS.
As our Partner, these are your Bill of Rights. Hold us to them. And if there are other expectations you have of SAS, please let me know as we are always looking to improve our program and deliver more ROI back to you.
