Partner Management
Partner management is an incredibly important part of the iGIP area. Most of the effort in Sales in AIESEC is cold calling and customer acquisition. However, experts assure that it is easier to sell something to already existing customers. Thus, here we offer you a simple guideline with the CEPT model for partner management.
Conversation
“Talk to your customers more personally, more often”
In order to properly listen to your customers and improve your services constant communication must always be given.
Here’s how:
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Bi-weekly Check-In
In order to keep the conversation running, the person responsible for the account should at least check-in with the company every 2 weeks, in peak delivery times (e.g. right before the intern arrives or leaves) even once a week.
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Quarterly Service Review
To get in-depth feedback from companies and to get opportunities for your LC to place more interns at the company, you should at least meet with your partner in person every 3 months.
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Annual Strategic Discussions
To truly get the most out of the partnerships with your partners and ensure a safe takeover, annual strategic discussions are majorly important. These should be conducted once a year with the main focus on how your LC can adapt its services to the planned projects and strategy of the partner.
Engagement
“70% of customer decisions are based on emotional factors“
In your order to not only make your customers loyal, but obsessed with AIESEC, educate them on your business – bring them the “Clarity of the Why”. Once our customers understand why AIESEC facilitates Exchange and why we believe it is important to empower leadership in all of our programmes, this opens the opportunity for a deeper relationship between your LC and the customer. They may support you in different ways, recommend you to their partners or even
their own customers.Ways to engage your partners besides in conversations is through invitations to events
like Partner Dinners, LCMs or your Board of Supporters / Advisors (Förderkreis / Kuratorium).
Product and Process Improvement
“How can I make your experience better?”
This is the basic question you should always be asking. Re-check with your partners on a regular basis whether there is any way you could improve your services. Either by changing the amount or variety of candidates for them to choose from, allocating more resources to the partnermanagement, or other ways. This will differ from partner to partner, but it will help you bette runderstand the industry and how you might even improve partnerships with other customers.
Talent Capacity
“Who is going to make this happen?“
If you want to develop loyalty within your customers and you know what actions you can take, the the next step is to put people there to make it happen. Talent Capacity driving customer loyalty can be boiled down to two things: Structrue
and Leadership. Structure meaning you need to have the right people allocated to account
management and you need to understand how much work you need to put into managing and building the relationship with partners.The second thing is leadership. At the end of the day, customer loyalty can be
improved by specific actions and strategies, but overall it’s about a behavior - and that behavior needs to be lead, role modeled, and driven by you.