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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
Working with channel partners isn’t dissimilar to selling to prospective customers. For example, you must work through a lifecycle from first meeting a partner through signing a contract to work together. Throughout the channel partner lifecycle, it’s essential to have resources available to educate and nurture your partners to the next stage.
This eBook will dig into each stage of the lifecycle to explore management strategies and processes for each stage, including how you can use automation to improve your systems.
Signing Partners
It can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to sign partners. However, it’s vital to evaluate and qualify your partners before signing them. While you may feel the more the merrier (which is generally true when it comes to ecosystems), it’s important to optimize your team’s time and resources to produce greater success during later stages of the channel partner lifecycle.
It’s essential to develop an ideal partner profile (IPP). This is similar to B2B buyer personas, except instead of being your target buyer, these are your target partners. By defining your IPP, you’ll be able to refine the partners you reach out to, increasing your likelihood of success. This is a great first step for qualifying your partners. Your IPP should include your target partner’s:
- Industry and market segment
- Organization size and maturity
- Pain points or gaps you can solve
- Unique value that supports your pain points or product gaps
Determining your IPP will be more difficult to do when you’re first building out an ecosystem of channel partners. However, once you’ve onboarded partners and know who you work with best, it will be easier to begin screening for certain qualities and refining your partner recruitment plan.
You can use your PRM to house promotional documents and contracts and solicit signatures on official onboarding documents. This will make it easier to reference later and automate the sending and receiving of contracts.
Onboarding Partners
The onboarding stage is one of the most critical phases of your channel partner lifecycle. Depending on the complexity of your technology, the channel partner onboarding process can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months. During this time, it’s important to get all relevant stakeholders involved. The more you’re speaking directly with the individuals you’ll be partnering with, the better off you’ll be in the long run.
Onboarding isn’t all about product demonstrations and “meet the team” webinars (although they’re both important!). A big part of this stage of the lifecycle is training your partners on using your PRM.
Your PRM should house all the relevant resources your partner could ever need, making it easy for them to get a refresher or access tools when the need arises. Spend time in the PRM with your partner, showing them where different resources are and how to use different tools available to them.
Your PRM can also help guide your partners through the onboarding process, eliminating manual work for your team. For example, you can enable access to more advanced learnings with a guided pop-up after they pass the quiz associated with the first multi-step training process.
While strategic automation is an invaluable asset to every channel account manager, it shouldn’t be an excuse to eliminate human connection, entirely. At this early stage of the channel partner life cycle, building relationships with newer recruits should be a top priority. When possible, hold regular meetings with the partner in which managers can collect feedback, address any sources of confusion, and brainstorm potential collaborations.
Enabling Partners
Enabling partners goes hand-in-hand with onboarding. This stage is where you’re empowering your partners to help you achieve your goals with knowledge and resources. Having a full library of resources is great, but it’s important to add to your partner’s toolkit over time. It can be helpful to talk to your partners and understand their pain points in order to explore additional resources you can share. Additionally, be sure to create segmented training based on partner type, tier, and geography to ensure they’re only receiving training that is relevant to them.
Similarly, consider opportunities to connect your partners with one another. Partners who have worked with you for a while will share great insights with partners who are newer to your ecosystem.
You should have a pre-determined set of resources or training your partners need to go through to be considered “activated.” At this stage, your partners should be familiar with your technology, unique value proposition, and target audience, as well as comfortable navigating your PRM.
Measuring Partner Activity
After your partners are onboarded and activated, you need to track engagement and the results of your partnership. When measuring your partner activity, you’ll likely want to assess different metrics depending on where they are in the channel lifecycle.
For partners recently onboarded, consider tracking:
- Resources viewed
- Training completed
- Time spent in your PRM
Once partners are activated, you should track:
- Meetings set
- Deals influenced
- Total revenue generated
Your PRM can be incredibly helpful for tracking this activity and creating ready-made reports for your team and to share with partners. When monitoring data broadly, it’s a good idea to segment your partners by type and lifecycle to get the most impactful insights.
For additional insights, read The Best Metrics to Measure Partner Performance and Engagement.
Re-engaging Partners
A partner can sometimes go dark after a few months despite your best efforts. Even still, there are times when you’re in regular contact with your partner, but there aren’t any new deals coming through. This may signal it’s time to re-engage your partner. There are a few different strategies you can implement to do so.
Collaborate on a Co-marketing Campaign
Consider working together on a new campaign. This could be a joint email blast, webinar, eBook download, or another campaign that allows you to work together, combine the power of your resources, and connect with each other’s audiences.
Re-connect on Goals
Over time, you may have lost sight of each other’s goals. Take time to sit down with your partner and revisit each of your goals. Remember, this conversation should be about how you can help them achieve their goals. Ideally, if it’s a good-fit partnership, achieving their goals will lend well to achieving yours too.
Utilize Your PRM
Allbound’s PRM has a feature called Partner Journey Automation, which can be set to alert a Channel Account Manager when a partner hasn’t logged into the system in a set amount of time, registered a deal, or completed training. This tool can also send emails to the partner themselves, making re-engaging partners significantly less manual.
SPIFF Campaigns to Spur Sales
Even loyal partners later in the lifecycle may need an extra incentive every now and then. Reignite excitement while achieving sales goals by activating a SPIFF program in which partners can participate in short-lived sales competitions.
Divesting from a Partnership
Ideally, you sort bad-fit partners out before you get in too deep with them. However, there are some situations where a partnership doesn’t end up working out, even if they initially met all of your requirements and your team did everything right during the relationship.
If you find yourself connecting with your partner for bi-weekly check-ins and discussing the same opportunities that haven’t gone anywhere for months, it may be time to divest from a partnership.
This doesn’t mean you’re closing the door on the relationship. Still, if your team has done all they can to re-engage partners and support them with relevant resources, it’s not beneficial to continue spending time on a partnership that isn’t yielding any results.
Create a plan for your account manager to scale down engagement with that partner, without going completely dark. This is where automation and your PRM can be especially helpful. For example, instead of continuing to engage bi-weekly for check-ins, you can instead set up a cadence of emails to share resources and check in with your partner every few months.
It can take up to a year to realize a partner is a bad fit. However, don’t think of this time as wasted — every partnership you engage in is a new opportunity to learn more about your ecosystem and potential customers.
Strategically Manage Each Stage of the Channel Partner Lifecycle
Qualification and training are incredibly important when you’re in the first stages of the channel partner lifecycle. Start by establishing your IPP and then seek out partners based on how well they match. From there, use your PRM to begin training and onboarding.
Once your partners are activated and onboarded, be sure to measure their engagement and success metrics. If partners become unresponsive or stop driving results, consider implementing a re-engagement campaign to reignite the relationship. If a lack of engagement continues over time, you may need to divest from a bad-fit partnership so you can more effectively use your resources elsewhere.
Allbound makes it easy to manage channel partners at each stage. With automation capabilities, a content library, and more engagement tools. Get started with a free demo to see just how much Allbound can support your channel.
partner management. She has been actively involved in the industry since 2018.
- How Pentera Enabled Partner Training & Certification at Scale with Allbound - January 30, 2023
- Reporting Structure Best Practices For Channel Data Management - January 26, 2023
- Key Software Features that Support Partner Marketing - January 26, 2023
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Ali Spiric
Latest posts by Ali Spiric (see all)
- Affiliate or Referral: How to Pick the Perfect Partnership - January 2, 2020
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- eBook–How to Get Your Partners to Step Up to the Plate - November 26, 2019
A Boost to Channel Programs: Allbound’s $43 Million Growth Equity Investment from Invictus Growth Partners
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.
What is PRM?
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.
What do PRMs offer in comparison to CRMs?
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:
- It centralizes most functions and content within a partner-friendly interface - Content is housed in a library with a search bar. Features like market development funds (MDF) requests, deal registration, and prospect pages are all within a single platform. This allows both partners and your management team to be more organized, as well as to identify relationships between different portal activities and subsequent conversions.
- It grants partners controlled freedom - Partners can engage with training and quizzes when most convenient, co-brand select materials as needed, and find quick solutions using the portal’s search function. This results in partners having the autonomy necessary to be productive and achieve success on a mass scale.
- It utilizes automation to improve the partner experience - The portal micromanages partners on your behalf based on commands you set up prior to deployment. This means that you can gate some features and content from defined partner groups and map out content recommendations based on users’ past responses.
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.
It’s not “PRM vs. CRM”, as you will need both
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.
The Value Your CRM Brings to Your Partner Program
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:
- The ability for Customer Service to pull client information to better serve their needs
- Customer base data for easier analysis, enabling companies to create and test retention strategies
- The option to schedule emails to customers through the CRM and collect related open-rate data
- Comprehensive pipeline views and sales forecasting, achieved by pulling data from both your CRM and PRM into a single view
- Customer segmentation for intelligent automation and more in-depth analysis
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.
How and Why to Integrate Your PRM and CRM
Your PRM and CRM should share real-time data with one another through integration. This will grant you:
- The ability to block duplicate deals across both platforms - when Direct Sales and a partner both lay claim to a lead, the results are messy. Avoid channel conflict by enlisting data-sharing between your PRM and CRM so both platforms will immediately notify users that the deal already exists within the sales ecosystem.
- A fuller understanding of your pipeline and sales forecasting - Your PRM and CRM should generate reports that give you an overview of today’s (and future) performance. However, why look at two separate reports when you can dive deeper into one?
- For data comparisons between direct and indirect sales performance - By enabling your CRM to pull data directly from your PRM, you can do side-by-side comparisons of how different audiences react to various strategies. This enables you to create better-informed hypotheses and have the sales channels learn from one another.
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.
What About CRMs That Say They Offer PRM Capabilities?
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 Bottom Line About CRM vs. PRM
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.
How does PRM work within a complex partner ecosystem?
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.
PRM and tracking revenue
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
What are the benefits of PRM?
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
Integrating your partner tool with your CRM
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.