Client and business letters
Channel partner thank-you notes
A channel partner is not a customer and should not be thanked like one. They chose to sell your product instead of somebody else’s, usually for a margin they could have earned elsewhere, and the thing worth acknowledging is the choice rather than the revenue.
Written by Autopen Australia · Updated
After a strong year
[FIRST NAME], [NUMBER] deals through [PARTNER NAME] this year, and three of them in a sector we would never have reached on our own. Thank you. You had other products you could have led with.
After one difficult deal they carried
Worth more than the annual note, because it is about a specific thing that went wrong and how they handled it.
[FIRST NAME], the [CLIENT] implementation was ugly in the middle and you absorbed most of that rather than passing it to us. I know what that costs on your side. Thank you.
To a new partner after their first sale
[FIRST NAME], first one through. Thank you for backing us before you had any reason to. Anything you need, ring me rather than the partner desk: [DIRECT LINE].
Where the relationship is winding down
Partners come back. A partner who leaves and is thanked anyway comes back far more often than one who hears nothing.
[FIRST NAME], I gather [PARTNER NAME] is not renewing. Fair enough, and thank you for [NUMBER] years of it. The door is open and there is nothing to undo if it ever makes sense again.
Getting it right
- What to mention. What they actually did, by volume or by a specific deal. Something that recognises they had alternatives. A person to call who is not an account portal.
- What to leave out. League tables and tier language in a thank-you note. "Platinum partner" is a programme artefact and reading it in a handwritten note makes the note feel like it came from the programme.
- How long. 30 to 70 words.
- How personal. Peer to peer. Partners are businesses, and a note that talks down to them from the vendor side is noticed immediately.
Personalising more than a handful
The fields that earn their place here: [FIRST NAME], [PARTNER NAME], [NUMBER], [CLIENT], [DIRECT LINE].
Deal counts pulled from a CRM frequently include deals the partner registered but did not close, and quoting a number a partner knows is inflated makes the whole note read as automated. Use closed-won only, and check the figure against what their own dashboard shows them.
Before any run, read the piece with the longest value in your data, the shortest, and the empty one. If all three read as English the merge is sound. Personalising direct mail at scale covers the rest.
Sending these at volume
A partner programme of any size has a few hundred of these a year, concentrated at the end of a quarter when the partner team is closing the quarter.
Autopen Australia writes each piece individually with a real ballpoint, personalises every piece from your list, written into the sentence rather than dropped into a gap and hand-addresses the envelopes.
Thanking a partner network at the end of a quarter? Talk about quarterly runs
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Writing more of these than you have evenings
Tell us roughly how many and what they say. We will come back with an exact price and a production window.