Gain visibility into partner actions and engagement with Allbound’s PRM platform.
Gain visibility into partner actions and engagement with Allbound’s PRM platform.
Built for professionals at the beginning stages of a channel
Identify the strengths and growth opportunities in your partner program
Best practices and insider secrets for partner recruitment
Your how-to guide on expanding your channel without growing pains
A key to channel success is motivating partners to sell for your business
They key to building pipeline for channel partners
Gain visibility into partner actions and engagement with Allbound's PRM platform.
“Allbound inspired and excited the team with what they could do with a partner portal”, said Nick Whitehead, Chief Marketing Officer at Serko. “We didn’t see any other solutions that could achieve the same outcomes so effectively.”
The global Covid 19 pandemic has changed the face of workforces across the world, with many businesses now opting for fully remote or ‘hybrid’ workplaces.
“Allbound provides Cambium, and in turn, our partners, a one-stop-shop for our partners’ needs.”
-Karyn Pastorino, Director – Global Channel Marketing at Cambium
“Allbound’s analytics have allowed us to closely monitor which partners are consuming content and completing the training and onboarding we create.”
“Our previous PRM tool made it challenging for partners to join our ecosystem. With Allbound, we can approve or deny partner access with one click.”
“With Allbound we’re not only able to categorize our partners, but we can also focus on their onboarding experience, as well as equipping them with the resources they need throughout their partner life cycle.”
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Chief Channel Officer, JS Group
VP of Marketing, Allbound
As 2022 draws to a close, there are seemingly endless projects to complete and loose ends to wrap up, resulting in a busy Q4.
With so many competing priorities, it’s important to set your partners up for success in the new year.
This can be achieved in part by prioritizing an updated channel partner portal that includes the right tools and resources they’ll need to close out the year strong.
Taking a look at your existing partner portals and identifying areas that could be cleaned up or improved will then set your partner relationships up for success in 2023.
As you wrap up end-of-year campaigns, you’re likely already viewing metrics and gathering data on your partner program. Perhaps you’re currently preparing to present these numbers to key stakeholders concerned with measuring KPI and assessing the ROI of each partnership.
While your organization’s revenue-related goals need to measure partner sales numbers, there’s much more you can dig into to provide a clearer picture of overall channel performance.
Perform a channel audit to assess where you’re currently at so you can start making improvements.
A channel audit not only provides insight into how your program is currently performing, it will also help you make strategic decisions and improvements for the year (or years) to come.
One key piece that should be included in your channel audit is partner engagement.
How well each partner engages with your content, training exercises, quizzes, onboarding and other vital resources will provide insight into how engaged they are and how successful the partnership is overall.
So, where do partner portals come into play?
All the aforementioned resources are housed in the portal. Consider whether or not your portal empowers your partners to take the desired action, accomplish shared goals and engage with your organization.
If you discover in your audit that engagement with playbooks, training certifications or movement through each milestone is low, it’s likely time to revisit your portal.
Remember: The portal is one piece of the puzzle in your partner program.
However, it can offer a tremendous amount of insight into which partners might need motivation or extra attention in the coming year.
If you’re looking to drive engagement and create a better experience for partners, putting a bit of elbow grease into your portal can make a big difference.
Here are a few key questions to ask yourself:
As you answer the questions related to each element of your portal, really put yourself in your partner’s shoes.
If you run into roadblocks, or you identify areas that are clunky, difficult to navigate or otherwise don’t perform or look the way you initially wanted them to, it’s time to do some cleaning to make your portal spotless.
Communicate with your teammates to assign clean-up projects to the appropriate individuals. Keep channel partner experience (PX) in mind and automate processes within your portal to make each action even more streamlined and simplified.
As you audit your portal and begin planning for improvements, it’s important to gain outside perspectives on what’s working and what could change.
The first step is to talk to partners to see if they have specific updates they’d like to see on their portal.
Some improvements may not necessarily be feasible, while others may take a while to accomplish. Setting clear expectations and establishing timelines with partners makes your portal readiness projects much smoother.
Next, take a look at the metrics and usage rates on various materials and resources in the portal.
If usage is low, for example, this could indicate that a piece of content or resource may be difficult to find, tricky to access or complicated to use.
It could also point to instructions or naming conventions that are less than engaging.
Viewing data, coupled with partner conversations, will give you the right insight to inform your improvement plan moving forward.
Now, ask yourself: Is my portal fun? Do partners actually want to use the portal?
Gamification is a great feature to incorporate into the overall channel PX to boost engagement and get partners returning to the hub you’ve designed.
If you’re not already, you can assign points to partners for completing certain actions, which doubles as an easy way to improve your portal for next year.
Lastly, work with your Implementation Specialists and Customer Success Managers to lend their expertise so you can design the best possible partner portal starting now.
Putting together a timeline will help save your sanity and keep communication transparent with your channel partners.
While making any and every improvement to your portal by end-of-year is a dream scenario, it’s often not realistic for all organizations in a busy Q4.
The following steps can help your team put together a roadmap for your portal improvement projects.
Break the audit portion and actual updates into two separate tasks so you have time to assess your channel audit results and assign improvement projects to appropriate parties.
From playbooks to co-marketing content and market development funds, a partner portal is the one-stop shop that helps keep partner relationships managed and successful. Take a look at the following resources to get your portal in tip-top shape for next year.
Partner Portal Best Practices and Design Checklist - Discover the key features and essential design elements to incorporate into your portal.
Automate, Scale, Integrate – PRM System Criteria - Strong partner relationships and an engaging channel experience lead to long-term success. Learn how to leverage your partner portal to build a stronger program.
7 Elements of a Successful Partner Engagement Plan - Reflect on the success of partner engagement and gain actionable insights by reviewing our strategic partnership engagement framework.
When building technology stacks, Sales and Marketing actively avoid tools with capabilities that heavily overlap in order to limit spending. This leads to a very common question: can I use my existing CRM platform to manage channel partners?
The short answer? It’s not recommended to rely upon your CRM for partner relationship management (PRM). This is because it’s not equipped with specialized features that speak directly to channel partners’ needs, such as content co-branding, onboarding, and automated content curation based on group types. The lack of comprehensive yet targeted PRM functionality will force you to rely upon multiple tools in addition to your CRM, complicating processes and erecting barriers to scalable operations.
Contrastingly, a PRM is a centralized hub intended solely to help companies enable partners through a variety of features and automations triggered by user actions and customizable settings. What’s more, PRMs are increasingly essential to staying ahead of the curve, as Forrester predicts the PRM market will grow to $679M by 2023 across all industries.
Still on the fence? Consider that PRM technology is relatively new and specifically designed to address CRMs’ insufficient abilities to service partners.
In this article, we’ll help you understand key differences between CRMs vs. PRMs and how to best integrate the two platforms.
Partner relationship management software provides businesses with tools to track reseller and referral sales while also giving partners support, resources, and a portal to communicate with your business. The power of PRM comes from a personalized portal for partners where they can access documents, marketing content, market development funds (MDF), opportunities, and track deals.
PRM is considered the 3rd evolution of SaaS tools, the first being CRM and then marketing automation. When the market started changing, PRM stepped up to fill in the gaps.
PRM software provides businesses with tools to track reseller and referral sales while also giving partners support, resources, and a portal in which to communicate with your business. When comparing it against CRM, PRM technology’s power can best be summarized by three points:
Another advantage of utilizing a specialized PRM is that it shows your partners that you invest in their success. You’re willing to spend to accommodate their needs rather than asking them to fit their square bodies into your CRM’s round hole.
Case in point, Serko, a technology solutions provider in the travel and expenses industry, uses Allbound to support their partners who manage over 6,000 customers globally. Channel sales managers at Serko were able to showcase a world-class partner program and portal in which each partner was provided with the right sales and marketing content for their needs. Serko now has 100% partner adoption, which you can read about here.
Your company’s CRM is not intended for managing your partner ecosystem. However, there are CRM capabilities that are indispensable to Sales and Customer Service that a PRM simply cannot provide.
Remember, CRM is an acronym for customer relationship management, meaning that it helps businesses track prospective and existing customers within a single system of record, regardless of whether they came from Direct or Indirect. Advantages of a CRM (in conjunction with a PRM) include:
In short, your CRM is essential to keeping all the won leads your PRM helped generate. Additionally, it grants long-term insights into the quality of partners’ leads. For example, if a particular partner group consistently generates customers with high abandonment rates, this could indicate that they’re pursuing the wrong audiences or are setting false expectations, both which modified training practices can fix.
Your PRM and CRM should share real-time data with one another through integration. This will grant you:
Allbound’s PRM technology has standard integrations with a number of CRM solutions, such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, SugarCRM, and Hubspot. We also can do custom integrations in order to accommodate new customers’ existing technology stacks. In order to have the process go as smoothly as possible, designated integration specialists will sync up our PRM with your choice of CRM (as well as with other technologies). The end result is seamless interactions between the two software with minimal maintenance required.
Because of the rapidly accelerating interest in channel partners, the Sales world is abuzz about PRM technology. It’s only natural that some related software companies would want to capitalize on this interest by laying claim to the PRM title, even if their products don’t quite meet the definitions.
Remember, a true PRM acts as a centralized hub for partner management and sales prospect interactions. Read Automate, Scale, Integrate – PRM System Criteria for a fuller understanding of what features to expect, and remember that a tool that offers only a fraction cannot call itself a real PRM solution.
The market has already started moving to a comprehensive partner management approach. In fact, 65% of high-tech companies have already adopted PRM tools that deliver a significant amount of company revenue. Companies that continue to manage partners in traditional ways via CRM or spreadsheets are not only missing out on new end customer sales, but also valuable insight from the data provided by channel partners. Consider creating a great partner experience to see big returns on your bottom line.
To learn more about choosing a PRM that fulfills your program’s needs, we recommend reading Partner Portal Best Practices and Design Checklist.
Channel partners are your company’s selling allies, an extension of your sales team. PRM tools give you the functionality to support a variety of partners and their end customers.
PRM tools automatically gather and analyze performance data and metrics, with a clear focus on revenue and activity metrics. Rewarding your most profitable partners with MDFs for hitting revenue targets, or training completions, ensures that you see ROI from your investment.
The revenue metrics for partner programs are unique to the indirect sales model, which is why PRM tools have extensive features to track leads and revenue including:
• Partner portal software for easy communication and data exchange
• Access to relevant parts of the customer database
• Dashboards for tracking leads, deal progression, deal registration, and sales KPIs
• Data about which partners perform well and which individuals fail to generate or convert leads
• Integrations with contract, scheduling, expense, and content tools
Overseeing a partner program has traditionally involved complex spreadsheets and manual correspondence for every deal, which required switching between a CRM and other tools to fill in the gaps. This is a huge competitive disadvantage and makes it almost impossible to correlate partner activity and training to closed business. That’s why PRMs provide partner management specific features like:
• Business intelligence, automation, and template-based workflows
• Visibility on the impact of 3rd parties on reaching new buyers
• Partner segmentation for targeted experiences
• Partner channel avoidance through clear registration processes and pipeline integrations
• Planning, recruitment, onboarding, enablement, co-selling and co-marketing, and incentives
• Overview that channel managers can use to track how well training and content is performing in relation to deal registrations
For a complete view of your entire revenue org, both indirect and direct, integrate your PRM with your CRM tool. Look for a PRM vendor that helps you get your integrations in order.
Allbound let’s users bring their existing sales tools with them into the partner management process. You can pass information between your PRM and CRM to create a consolidated pipeline that is your single source of truth and stays relevant with real time updates on deal registrations. Syncing your data also avoids duplicate deal registrations, making partner conflict resolution much simpler.
The market has already started moving to a comprehensive partner management approach. In fact, 65% of high tech companies have already adopted PRM tools that deliver a significant amount of company revenue. Companies that continue to manage partners in traditional ways via CRM or spreadsheets are not only missing out on new end customer sales, but also valuable insight from the data provided by channel partners. Consider creating a great partner experience to see big returns on your bottom line.
Content Library
Co-Branding
Market Development Funds(MDF)
Content Management Tool
Partner Prospect Pages
Gamification
Deal Registration
Commissions Dashboard
Co/Labs
Lead Distribution
Integrations
Partner Business Plans
Partner Locator
Learning Tracks
Playbooks
Channel Insights
Partner Journey Automation
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