Put simply, the right partner portal can make it easier for channel partners to sell more, and that means your organization is selling more and hitting larger company goals. And when your organization is selling more and hitting overall company goals, everyone wins.

But selecting and implementing a partner portal isn’t easy. What features do you look for? How do you determine which portal is the best fit for your channel? Finding the right portal can be a lengthy process, so it’s vital that you know what to look for during your search.

In our free checklist, we cover how to identify your ideal partner portal to make your channel program a success.

Introduction

Selecting and implementing a partner portal isn’t the easiest thing to do. However, it’s an important decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly. The partner portal first emerged in the business computing days of yore, alongside install CDs and various iterations of the floppy disk (remember those days?).

These pieces of rudimentary communication software kept vendors in touch with their partners. They made sure that the product was moving. In other words, they did their job—but not much else. This simple technology often required manual work outside the portal, such as swapping information through iteration after iteration of spreadsheets. With software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, this is a recipe for disaster. There’s simply too much going on in a single partner relationship—let alone an entire partner program with tens or hundreds of partners—for anyone to manually keep track of things. 

These days, the channel is more nuanced. And these traditional, outdated portals are not nearly enough to get the job done. Approaching modern channel demands with old tools is like trying to work on a dial-up modem. It may theoretically be possible, but you’re limiting your partners from the onset (and creating unnecessary headaches in the process). To best support your partners, you need to think beyond the traditional partner portal.