Trusted Advisor, but with an Opinion

Many years ago, I was enjoying a heated discussion with a long-time channel partner, regarding their role as a trusted advisor for their clients. They were claiming that in order to truly be a trusted advisor to their customers, they needed to be neutral on the customer's choice of vendor for any particular solution. Their job was the specification of their requirements and then to assist them with the selection process - most of the time, based on a comparison.

I decided to counter, saying that this would be similar to having a good friend arriving in town, who is asking for an opinion of which restaurant to go to for dinner, and for me to acknowledge her dietary requirements and map all the neighbourhood restaurants that meet those needs. However, what this friend really wants, is your advice on which is the best restaurant, based on your experience and overall knowledge. And you want to look good by recommending one that you've visited yourself and had the best experience. One that you know will not let your friend down.

In other words, you're a trusted advisor, but with an opinion! In our industry, this means that you want to provide value to your clients, by not just helping them to define their requirements but by positioning the best vendor that can tackle their business and technology requirements in the short, medium and long-term. And one that you have the right knowledge and experience not only to recommend but to support, deploy and extract business value. That's how you go from trusted advisor to a business partner.

Accredit your knowledge and experience to provide support and deployment, and drive adoption

For the last couple of years, and side by side with its relentless product innovation efforts, Informatica has dramatically grown its portfolio of training content and events, particularly for digital consumption, targeting sales, pre-sales, support and delivery professionals from our partners. That initiative aims at equipping our partners with the ability to go beyond recommendation - to support, deploy and help your clients adopt our solutions and extract the business value that can offer.

Last year alone, our Foundation Series trained over 10,000 professionals globally over a range of newly launched cloud solutions. In addition, we also kicked off a Certification Program that helps to accredit your knowledge in positioning, using and implementing our solutions. These certifications, which are targeting professionals in enterprise cloud data management, constitute also the basis for our new partner Delivery badges. These demonstrate the level of competence with our solutions and the level of partnership with our company (Delivery badges promotes partners to Gold and Platinum levels of partnership).

As these certifications become an industry reference, these partner badges are also an incredible validation for our customers - that they are dealing with highly knowledgeable and highly skilled providers in the enterprise cloud data management space. In some cases, our clients are already requesting that their providers carry such a badge, in order to bid for delivery of projects around Informatica solutions. And for the sales, pre-sales, support and delivery professionals of your company, it's a testament of their ability and competency, one that enriches their individual profiles and secures success to your client's projects.

Next steps

Learn more about Informatica's Partner Program and the new Delivery badges.