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Deal Registration Software & Program Best Practices

In any channel partner program,
a strong deal registration process is critical.

Without it, it’s nearly impossible to track which partners drive which deals. Unfortunately, deal registration is a common friction point for channel programs and their partners.

Explore common barriers blocking effective deal registration, best practices to implement, and deal registration capabilities to look for in a PRM software solution. 

If you want to learn more about Allbound’s deal registration capabilities, click here.

Common Barriers to Effective Deal Registration

A few key barriers keep partners from properly registering deals. The top two hurdles are that the deal registration process is too time-consuming and/or challenging. When deal registration becomes an extra job for your partners, they’re less likely to complete it regularly.

Another often overlooked barrier is a lack of reward. Deal registration is one extra task your partners have to complete, and if there’s no benefit for your channel partners to register their deals, they’ll be less likely to remember or bother spending the time.

One final challenge to be aware of is conflicting claims of deal ownership. Without a strong deal registration process and platform, there may be friction between your partners and the internal sales team when multiple stakeholders want credit for a deal.

Channel Deal Registration Best Practices

Following these deal registration best practices will help ensure your process runs smoothly for your internal team and your channel partners. 

Establish Channel Program Objectives First

Before building a strong deal registration process, determine your channel program goals related to partners. For example, what are you hoping to achieve with channel partners? Which types of channel partners do you plan to work with? When will channel partners hand over a deal to your team?

Understanding your objectives is critical to building a deal registration process that aligns with your business needs and rewards partners for the behavior you want from them. 

Decide & Assign Responsibility

If no one knows deal registration is their job, they’ll assume someone else is on it. Make it clear who is responsible for deal registration and ensure they have the proper system access and tools. Since deal registration is crucial to a successful partnership, it should be part of the early stages of onboarding.

You should also clearly define ownership — do only partner-sourced deals count, or do partner-influenced deals count as well? What activities must be completed for a deal to count as partner-sourced? Who gets credit when multiple partners are involved? Answer these questions early to help avoid channel conflict and confusion later on.

Integrate with Existing Systems

The best deal registration practices won’t matter if they don’t integrate with your systems. By leveraging your existing PRM or CRM software, you can ensure all data is housed in one spot. This minimizes the chance of duplicate records and conflict over deal ownership.

If you handle deal registration in the same spot as your marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to monitor influence and measure ROI. Use this information to improve future marketing efforts and optimize where you invest your resources.

Create a Simple Process

Make deal registration as frictionless as possible for everyone involved, but optimized for your partner experience. Consider what their typical process already looks like and explore how deal registration can fit in seamlessly.

Enable Automation

The very best processes happen without you even knowing! Leverage software automation to streamline deal registration further. With the right platform, any time a partner adds a qualified deal activity, the deal will be automatically registered. Your team can review and ensure the deal meets registration requirements. 

Reward Channel Partners

You have to make deal registration worth it for partners. Make it clear to your partners how they benefit from registering deals. Leverage partner tiers and gamification to incentivize deal registration. 

Consider also running time-limited SPIFFs, where partners are incentivized to register as many deals as possible to receive an expanded bonus.

Monitor & Improve

Like any process, you’ll need to monitor the results and adjust accordingly. If you frequently see the same friction spots in your deal registration process, look for ways to remove the complication for your partners.

Meanwhile, if you see too many deals registered before it’s appropriate, consider providing additional training and resources to your partners.

Automate and Scale Deal Registration with Allbound PRM Software

Deal registration software makes your — and your partners’ — life easier. Allbound’s partner sales management capabilities simplify the process by integrating with your existing systems, providing transparency, and driving improved efficiency.

Direct CRM Integration

Allbound PRM integrates directly with your CRM to eradicate confusion and channel conflict with one single source of truth. Anytime a deal is updated in your PRM, the change is mirrored in your CRM and vice versa, eliminating duplicate entries. This automatically prohibits duplicate deals, helping you to minimize conflict.

Enable Improved Sales Efficiency

Deal registration is just one piece of the channel sales puzzle — first, your channel partners must attract prospects. Include your top sales and marketing resources in your PRM to improve the sales cycle — you can even upload specific resources for different sales cycle stages.

Monitor Pipeline & Overall Channel Performance

Allbound PRM can provide email and push notifications when deals are created or updated, keeping your team in the loop with all channel sales activities.

Your partners also enjoy enhanced transparency, as they can monitor deal status from Allbound.

Leverage channel sales reporting to create a bird’s-eye view of your pipeline so you can dig deeper into your program’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Cross-reference partner training, prospect page interactions, and co-marketing campaigns to evaluate the ROI of your efforts.

Supercharge Your Deal Registration Practices with Leading Software Solutions

Deal registration is a critical part of any channel program. Before you can build an effective process, make sure your goals are clearly defined. Keep your partners in mind when building your deal registration process — the less friction the better.

Leveraging deal registration software can make a world of difference when it comes to reducing channel conflict. Discover how Allbound takes the friction out of deal registration.

Ali Spiric
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