Why Qualtrics is overhauling its partner program

After listening to their partners, the new program is set to be launched in July.

After speaking with partners and hearing their feedback, Qualtrics realised their partner program was no longer properly servicing their partners.

In January this year, the experience management platform went back to square one.

Sean Holcombe, chief partner officer at Qualtrics told CRN Australia at X4 in Sydney that he doesn’t believe the company did the best job in investing in their partners.

“To be candid I'm not sure that we've done a very good job at [investing in partners] in the past,” he said.

Brian Stucki, COO at Qualtrics told CRN Australia that their partners said their program was “not market, not standard, hard to understand and frustrating to them”.

“You could feel partners pulling back a little bit because we were making it hard for them, to work with us and be successful with us,” he said.

Stucki noted it wasn’t just the program itself but the sales culture.

"I've got to help our sales organisation understand that we're not just a first party led company, and that there's a lot of value to the seller in bringing in partners early into deals,” he explained.

“When you go do the analysis, what do we find when we bring partners in early, our win rates go up, our sales cycle time goes down, and our deal sizes go up.”

Stucki said the benefits of getting the partners involved are super clear, tangible, concrete, but it's about helping the rep understand that.

“It's not about you're giving up control in a deal, this is going to be a good thing for you; they're going to help you,” he said.

"The other thing that we've learned is that we expand faster and to a greater degree when we get partners attached with our customers.”

What the program was before

Prior to the overhaul, Qualtrics had two different partner programs, a services program and a sales program.

Holcombe explained that the company “owed it” to their partners to be clearer in their program.

“If you're doing a tiering based system on platinum, gold, silver, you should probably have, a singular distinction, because it's a little confusing if you had multiple different distinctions,” he said.

They also used the feedback from their 2024 partner satisfaction program to model the new program.

In 2023, Qualtrics was acquired by private equity firm, Silver Lake, with SAP selling its ownership of the company.

Zoe Nicholson, VP partner sales at Qualtrics noted that the previous partner program had notes of SAP, which also added confusion to partners.

“The old program as well, had a lot of the old SAP influence still in it, since we split off from SAP, there was a lot of all of that legal collection and some of their program was reflected into our program,” she said.

"Now we're completely standalone from the SAP business, revamping this and reshaping it into completely ours is great.”

For the upcoming program, Holcombe highlighted the set of criteria the company wants to ensure they get right.

“How do we align the right behavioural incentives, metrics, investments both ways and opportunities to build better go to market machines together on the back of that. We're looking at this partner program at all those levels, financial incentives and more,” Holcombe said.

During their sales kickoff in January this year, Qualtrics unveiled the major changes to the program to their partners with them welcoming the changes.

“The overwhelming feedback was ‘this is about time’. This feels very partner centric, this feels like you've listened and it feels like you understand what the what the problems are,” Stucki said.

“[The partners] acknowledged that the change was significant and that it would likely take some time for that change to really settle and cure before they would start to see the benefits. And that was to be expected.”

The program should be released globally in July.

For this new program, Stucki said the dream outcome would be appropriately investing in the right set of partners, making them wildly successful in building their businesses and practice areas around Qualtrics.

“There's a flywheel there that should exist, which is, the more we invest in partners, the more they invest in us. We have not done as good a job as we should have with our side of that flywheel,” he explained.

“As we get our act together and as we make more intentional and, frankly, bigger investment in the ecosystem, that the other part of that flywheel kicks in and that that will come back to benefit us in the in the long run.”

Stucki added, “We've got to really do our part in nurturing and building a solid set of partners who are just wildly successful on our platform, and as a result, want to continue to just invest more and more in building out their experience management practice areas.”

Qualtrics has an urgency to get this right, according to Stucki.

“The reset is a reflection of the urgency that we have to get this working the way we know it can work. That was the reason rip the band aid, reset the model, and get the partners behind it,” he ended.