Stuff Be Gone

In George Carlin's popular comedy routine "All My Stuff," he reminds us of the excess baggage that we accumulate and cart around from place to place. In his irreverent soliloquy, he illustrates our tendency to hang on to stuff, put it in storage when we accumulate too much, and pack it up and take it with us when we leave our homes. His refrain is that our stuff keeps us comfortable, and without it, we are not at home. For those of you who travel a lot, have survived a family vacation, or recently cleaned the basement, you can relate.

I've called upon Carlin's humor this summer as I embarked on a personal campaign to purge "all my stuff" from our basement and garage. Among the embarrassing detritus that was accumulated by a family of five, I've discovered 14 extension cords, five full cans of WD-40, four gas cans, and enough plastic bags to transport the entire town's groceries. My ability to store this miscellaneous sludge all these years is impressive.

While many of us are challenged by too much stuff in our personal lives, we don't always think about the stuff of our business lives and especially, that which accumulates in our partner programs. And, when it comes to partner programs, three main categories of extraneous stuff deserve attention:

      1) Partners - While you can't be too rich or too thin, you can have too
         many partners. Moreover, many of them may be of the wrong size or type.
         When you recruit initially, every partner is a gem. As your business
         changes, however, what you need from partners may also change.

         An annual clean up of partners for qualifications and fit with your business
         is a best practice undertaken by world-class companies. Do yourself and
         your partners a favor by letting them go if they don't fit. Then turn your
         attention and resources to the partners that do.

      2) Program Elements - Ten pounds of stuff will not fit into an
         eight-pound bag. Once your baseline program is established, it's tempting
         and relatively easy to pile it on. Feature-creep is inevitable without a consistent
         method for evaluating effectiveness. Before you know it, you're offering
         partners a wellspring of stuff without necessarily commensurate value.

         It's better to deliver a select number of high-value program elements well,
         than to overload your program offering with lower-value benefits. For
         instance, partners tend to value technical support over marketing, so
         delivering MDF when partners can't get pre-sales help makes little sense.
         Right size your program to the resources you have and can afford to
         ensure high partner satisfaction.

       3) Program Complexity - We've waxed on about simplicity before, so we'll
          keep it simple: Don't use dynamite when a match will do.

          Even if you're offering the right program elements, they should be easily
          understood and accessible. We've heard partners confess to not
          participating in a vendor's program because they couldn't afford the
          time to figure it out, or jump through the hoops to access benefits.
          Anything that requires more than three simple steps is probably too
          complex.

While unglamorous, cleaning out my stuff from the basement and garage has been satisfying. Not only do I feel lighter, now it's easier to find the really good stuff. When it comes to staying ahead of the curve, may you enjoy the irony in that comment too, as George Carlin surely would!