Managing B2B Trading Partners in Steady State
Trading partners have the key to success of any B2B ecosystem by having a direct impact on the ‘partner satisfaction’ index. Enterprises, despite successfully establishing a state of art B2B infrastructure and efficient processes, face difficulty in encouraging trading partners to transact. In such cases, the reason for an inefficient trading partner community goes beyond the premise of people, process and technology aspect.
This calls for an efficient steady state partner management process that incentivizes strategic trading partners as well as managing expectations of the high performing partners. Keeping B2B technology capabilities and the strategic importance of the partners in mind, we propose a trading partner matrix illustrated below:
- Dream Team (Highly Critical, Better Capability) –Sufficient incentive to be provided to partners in this space to transact at maximum capacity.
- Potentials (Highly Critical, Low Capability) – This group should get maximum attention and support to improve their technology capability, and move into ‘Dream Team’ category to benefit from the incentives.
- The Riders (Less Critical, Better Capability) – These partners are high on B2B maturity and need the least attention due to non-critical nature of transactions. Care should be taken that these groups do not move into the ‘laggard’ zone.
- Laggards (Less Critical, Low Capability) – Partners in this category should be encouraged to move to “the riders’ zone.
The ideal steady state should have all trading partners in ‘the riders’ and the ‘dream team’ category.
But, how do we achieve it?
In the proposed matrix structure, “criticality” of trading partners is beyond control as they are governed by organizational directives. We do not expect organizations to enhance the "criticality" of trading partners because of their B2B capabilities.
Hence the focus should be on helping trading partners enhance their “capability”. Some enterprises have proactively adopted the following to ensure that “capability” is not a challenge in transactions:
- SaaS based B2B platform provided by SIs/B2B product vendors
- VAN based services provided by B2B product vendors.
If the above does not work, as a last resort, enterprises can provide appropriate support in terms of SLAs, incentives, availability of tools & accelerators to aid the trading partners.
