How to Develop a Partner Program

One of our CPA partners has referred us more than 20 deals. And the cool thing about this partnership is that it's all started from a cold call. That's right, I cold called him, I reached out to him, I got a relationship formed, and now years later, he's referred us more than 20 deals. He's our accountant, we've referred them a bunch of deals, and the partnership continues to thrive to not only help our firm, but help his firm ultimately help the customer because there's a more unified support experience when our two teams come together to help serve them and create a better experience for the end user who is the client, which is the only thing that matters in this relationship. Welcome back to another episode of Payroll. And today I'm going to walk you through how to develop a partner program. I'm going to share some of the key things to think about when you're developing the program, and I'm going to give you some bonus tips at the end how to go ahead and get started if you're new to a partner program. And I'm going to give you some great tips that you can you can use to expand and grow your partner program if this is not new to you. Welcome to Payrollin', the show where you will learn how to operate and grow your payroll business from the most dynamic minds in the business. If your company offers payroll services, this is the podcast for you. And now here's your host, Matt Vadie. Let's go. So in our world, we think about partner programs in 4 ways. We, and we use a simple philosophy for the first 3 to define them to the people that are entering into the partner programs. It's who's selling to the potential client and who's serving the potential client. So we have 3 tiers, the referral, reseller, and white label tiers. And then we do acquisitions and mergers as sort of the 4th tier, which who's selling and who's serving gets a little more obvious there, right? So in the referral relationship, this is a relationship where somebody needs a trusted partner that they can refer business to if they need payroll and HR support. So this is what you'd have with a lot of your CPAs, accountants in our industry. They're kind of the bread and butter here, but it could be anyone. And it's very obvious here, we sell, we serve. And sometimes folks will take a commission. We have a commission program, a revenue share program that they can opt into. Other times they simply want to make sure that their clients are being well taken care of. They'll refer them to us because they trust us, they have other clients with us. And then we'll, you know, we'll do our best to give them a gift card or whatever they're able to accept. Sometimes folks have what they call revenue fidelity. They're not interested in taking any money on behalf of referring a client to you. So referral program, we also have tiers for compensation in there to incentivize people to grow it if they do opt in. So it goes 12, 15, and I think 20% of the top tier depending on the number of clients you refer. And if you simply Google Guru referral program, you'll find our signup page and our agreement there. All right. Next up is reseller, or some might call this an affiliate program. And a reseller is somebody who really wants to offer payroll services as part of their product mix, but maybe doesn't want to do any of the support or backend of that. So this is, again, if we're looking at who sells and who serves, they're going to sell the deal and we serve the deal. So we'll even co-brand with them during the sales process. We'll provide them with sales training. We built out a sales training course that we provide to our reseller partners. We have an onboarding cadence that we bring them through to train them, and then we help their team to sell our products and services, and then we serve them. So, and as you think about this, as they're climbing up the value tier here, you know, the commissions are a little bit smaller for referral, they get a little bit bigger for a reseller, and then in the next one, you know, the revenue share or however they want to bill it gets wider, and that's in the white label model. So in the white label model, this is when somebody really wants payroll to be part of their offering. It's how almost all of us operate in this space, right? Like we're all licensing somebody's software and then we're providing service on top of it. That's how we operate this model. It's very good for accountants that want to grow to a couple hundred clients, you know, less than 1,000 clients. They're not— it's an important revenue stream to them, but it's not something where they're trying to grow to 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 clients and they need to get a big enterprise system like a Kronos or an iSolved., but it is a great fit for the CPA who has 50 clients on QuickBooks that they need a better solution for, and maybe they want to start offering some HR services. And so the, this is they sell, they serve, and then we provide tier 2 support to them. So that's level 3 of our partner program. And then mergers and acquisitions, obviously this is more of a situation where we would acquire either their book of business or their entire company. And sometimes we'll keep the leadership team on too, if it makes sense for everybody involved. But also, you know, really what we're looking for here, and we do try to keep all the teammates when we're evaluating these to make sure that we can find a home for not just the clients, but the people involved as well, because we want to keep business continuity. And let's face it, it's hard to find great people. So if we can bring on some awesome people as part of an acquisition, that is dope. All right. So those are the types of programs we run. Now, who are the types of partners that could potentially opt into these programs? Well, I already mentioned CPAs and accountants are big in our industry in the payroll and HR space. And it makes sense, right? They'd be big for a lot of industries because they have intimate access to a customer or a potential small business that you may be working with. You know, this is something where we've seen our space continue to evolve here. Paychex was probably the one who did the did the best job early on of really infiltrating accountants and CPAs, putting together a model where they could stay in front of them consistently time and time again to make sure that they knew and remembered them whenever they had potential partners for the payroll bureau. Next up would be brokers. And I think of this, you know, you could say 401 folks, but you know what, I've honestly found that while they may occasionally refer something, they're never going to be too interested in getting too deep because they, I mean, they do just fine. If you may, I might have got into the wrong line of work. 401 folks seem to do better. But really, when we think about brokers here, we think about healthcare because they're getting pressure from their competition are starting to offer payroll and HR services. They're also getting pressure from folks like us that are a PEO, and then they can't compete because it's a comprehensive offering and they're only bringing one slice of the pie. So brokers are a great partner here and one that's been fruitful for us. Next up, a couple more that are a little less obvious, but we've seen bear tremendous fruit over time. Fractional CFOs have been a huge one. Obviously a fractional CFO doesn't have 1,000 clients, but a fractional CFO is a great in to a handful of clients. And if you can get into some of these companies that are fractional CFO, almost franchisees, like I think CFO Now is one, there's a handful of them, then you can start to work your way through the partner channel and provide value to not only those CFOs, give them some consistency across how they see information or across who they're working with, and then also provide value to the customer. And I think as I kind of hit pause here, this is the most important thing to think about as you're getting started. And I'm going to get to the getting started process here in a second, but how can I provide value to the partner? You have to lead with value. I talked about the cold call reaching out to a CPA earlier. Well, I reached out to him with a message that said, hey, look, we're going to make it easier for you to serve your clients because we're going to get you direct access access to the information you need when you need it. You're not going to have to sit on hold with a call center. You're not going to have to worry about jumping through a bunch of hoops to get information. And we're also local to you. So we're going to provide you with some value in that we're going to refer you back businesses that make sense for you as well. And for them, it made a ton of sense because they are smart and they target a handful of verticals. So when we think about which potential clients to bring to them, it's really, really simple. All right, so fractional CFO is a good one. And then finally, bankers. This is a— this for me has almost been like a forgotten one. Back when I was in corporate, we used to target bankers all the time. When we were smaller, I started targeting them a little bit. They— their compliance needs and concerns and security checks got me, you know, we weren't quite cutting the mustard with all that stuff when we were smaller. So now that we've grown, we're going back to bankers, and they're a tremendous asset and Look, these bankers are incentivized to sell their ancillary products. You want to try to become one of their ancillary products, which you can do that by entering through Treasury. That's your sort of place in the door. But ultimately, their, their commercial bankers are incentivized to sell multiple products beyond their core products. And you want— the goal is to get yours to be a part of that mix. That's kind of the mecca when it comes to partnering with a bank. And your local regional banks and credit unions are fantastic partners when you're looking for bank partners. All right, so we've talked about the types of programs, the types of partners. Let's think about how to optimize and how to get started with offering a partner program. So first of all, sit down and plan it out. Have a clear vision. What do you hope to, um, get out of this for your firm? How are you going to provide value to the people you're partnering with? And we'll talk in a moment about picking a vertical and a stack of folks to go after, but you want to make sure again that you can deliver And there's no reason to go super wide. There's no reason to focus on all 4 of those things unless you have a clear vertical you're targeting. Next up, you have to make sure you have time or resources committed. So if you think about again, ADP's got CPA-centric reps in every single territory they're in. That means you're up against people where the CPA-centric is coming by their office almost weekly. And I'll talk in a minute about, you know, you might— CPAs will lie to you and tell you that's annoying. And they're not lying in that it's annoying, but they're lying when they say it doesn't work because it does work. It's a proven model and something that we can model on our own smaller scales as well. But finally, you need to make sure you're not only providing resources to the partner in terms of, you know, white label. Like for us, we developed, like I said, it's a simple landing page. I hate to even call it a portal. We started building out this big portal and then we realized all we need was a link to like 10 assets, you know, flyers, videos, things that they can easily customize. And we just put them into Canva. And then we share the Canva link that they can easily edit. Almost everybody's using Canva nowadays, but most importantly, give them a support channel where they can get easy access to you. Like one, we've created a Slack channel just for them because there's so much velocity of deals. They're, they're a reseller that sells deals every single month. And so we have a Slack channel for their sales reps to ask questions. We have, you know, just easy communication about clients as they're coming through implementations. Give them a direct line if they're going to be a great partner. All right, so if I was gonna get started offering a partner program today, here's how I would approach it. First, I would pick a vertical and stack around it. So you've heard me talk recently about how we target a lot of nonprofits, we partner with a lot of nonprofits. Well, I would pick that vertical and then find 2 or 3 partners from each of the potential partner networks above. So CPAs, brokers, fractional CFOs that serve nonprofits. That way you can cut through the noise, you can have the most impactful partnerships, and they will be thinking about you. I think recently we've had a lot of inbound inquiries from PEO brokers, and the thing I tell them is like, look, don't worry about us for anything else except for when you have a nonprofit, then bring us to the table. That helps us to stand out inside of the book of the 15, 20 PEOs that they represent. We are right there when they think about, oh, when do we call them? Nonprofits. That's it. And we will get more by picking a lane than we would have if we would have just given them generic criteria. Oh, anybody in South Carolina? Anybody over here? Pick a vertical and then stack your partners around it. Next up, make some lists so you can stay in touch with them frequently. So it's very easy to take your existing emails that you're sending out, whether it's a newsletter, whether it's a, you know, a weekly recap, whatever it is, and just customize the language of fit for your partner. So we will take our primary newsletter and then we'll make a clone of it inside of our email marketing system. We'll just change the language a little bit. Instead of like, you know, here's something you can do to grow your business, here's something you can provide to your clients so they can grow their business. It's simple twists of phrase to help us to get it again in front of the right audience and stay top of mind, which is the final thing that I want to hit on. I have a CPA here, local, great friend of mine. He tells me all the time about how that, oh, that ADP coming around with the cookies every week and constantly in our office. All it is is annoying. Yeah, well, I've talked to a bunch of deals they've referred to ADP from that firm because of those annoying cookies and being in the office all the time. So do what you can to stay top of mind. I'm not saying you have to go in and annoy people in their office, but those emails, those direct phone outreaches, those, you know, sending referrals, sending value adds, those are how you stay top of mind. I hope this was helpful in you developing your own partner program. If you'd like to add anything, please send me a message. I'd love to expand on it in another episode. Thank you so much for tuning in to Payroll. And if you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to rate us 5 stars on your player of choice. And I appreciate you tuning in and have an awesome day.