Half Steps Lead to Failure

Starting a New Channel

For sales and marketing leaders that are thinking about starting channels, having a concise management plan is critical. While you create your channel strategy, you may wind up competing for resources within your organization. Your strategy will be a tough sell unless you have your ducks in a row. 

There are the obvious advantages to pursuing channel sales—you’ll be using a fleet of salespeople (who aren’t on your payroll) to sell your product. However, managing channels are far from simple. Correctly forecasting this endeavor is where most companies miss the mark. 

Going into channel sales with a “let’s just seeing what happens” attitude and expecting success is a pipedream. Executives are highly focused on ROI and will want to know specific data points before entertaining the idea: 

1. Company profiles: What type of companies are the best fit for partnerships? Once they become partners, which roles within those companies will you be working with?

•   Gather any evidence you have of existing partnerships or companies who have shown interest in partnering. Feedback or requests from our customers for expanded services would fit with specific companies and make the partnership worth it. Prove synergy.

•   Demonstrate your understanding of what these companies will gain from the partnership. Map out the benefits or motivations for them. Explain how we’d stack up against (or assist) their competing priorities.

•   How many of these companies are there? What’s our strategy to pursue them and create these partnerships?

•   Where (if at all) do these companies overlap with ours? How would our offering improve the customer experience or allow for expansion opportunities?

2. Partner experience: What will it be like to partner with you currently, and in the future at scale? 

•   Illustrate what it will be like for companies to partner with you. Detail your organization’s level of effort and strategy for building strong relationships. Also, include what you’ll require from partners to maintain the partnership.

•   How will you track partner progress and reward them accordingly?

•   How does our partner experience compare to our competition’s partner programs?

•   How will we support them with marketing materials, deal support, etc.?

3. ROI: What’s the cost of this initiative, and what revenue will result from your efforts?

•   Once you’ve gathered enough data from the questions above, you can create a timeframe for recruiting your first few partners. From there, you can test your partner’s journey and adjust as you go.

•   What additional resources might you need to see success from your efforts?

•   How does this ROI plan compare other competing resources in your organization

For more information on concisely presenting this information, check out our Making a Business Case template. 

Scaling an Existing Channel

For companies managing an existing channel program, focus your end of year planning on achieving better results, growing, and strengthening partnerships. The first step in scaling your channel program is to take stock of where you are now. Perform an assessment using a channel audit.

A thorough assessment allows you to see your program’s useful elements and double down on what’s working. Audits allow you to spot bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas to improve. An essential element of assessing your channel program is using a partner scorecard to get a clear picture of their performance. 

 To build a proposal for scaling your channel program, follow these tips: 

•   Define which partners and company types are most successful. 

•   Identify which partners or what types of companies bring in the majority of your revenue. This allows you to easily spot other companies that could be a good fit for your partner program. Within your strongest partners, identify the best to work with and aim to strengthen those relationships while seeking them in other potential partners. 

•   It’s common for companies to know who their best partners are but not necessarily understand why the partnership is successful. If you’re unsure about the relationship’s exact success components, use this QBR template to conduct a business review. 

•   Identify where your target companies hang out (trade shows, industry journals, etc.) and aim to have a presence there. This allows you to expand your network and meet partners who are a match.

•   Get clear on which activities lead to partner success.

•   Do you have an effective training program? Identify which parts of your training you could automate. Using platforms like PRM can automate tasks and allow partners to learn on their own time, which allows for scalability.  

•   How effectively do you and your partners market together? Evaluate the ROI of past marketing initiatives and use the data to create new strategies. Work with the marketing departments on both sides to make useful marketing resources. Ensure that your partners know how to effectively market your product.

•   Research competitors’ tactics to inspire your own channel management plan. Pay close attention to their use of automation technology, regional presence, and the number of program participants they boast. If they recruit prospective partners promising cutting-edge efficiencies and a platform with user-friendly interfaces, plan for an uphill battle when attracting and retaining channel partners of your own.

Tweaking Your Channel Strategy

Companies choose to alter their channel management plan for several reasons. Some identify that a different channel ecosystem is a better fit for their business model or industry. They also identify that the original channel plan did not meet goals and expectations. 

Changing your strategy is necessary for growth—it’s not a sign of failure. Pinpointing what isn’t working and what the solutions are is critical to future success.

Here are the most common areas companies revisit when altering their channel management plans:

•   How accurate was your initial hypothesis on which companies were the best fit? Were you correct about which companies would be most interested in working with you? 

•   Did your incentives turn out to be enough to motivate partners to behave in ways that boosted business?

•   Are the activities and metrics you set forth creating partner success? 

•   Are your competitors offering a more attractive partner program? Perhaps your competitors are easier to work with, provide better incentives, or leverage PRM software superior to your own. 

•   This is a great time to reach out to your network of channel leaders. Ask for advice from those that have already made these tough calls and adapted. Check out the Cloud Software Association and Partnership Leaders to meet peers in your industry. 

Creating a Business Case for Scaling Your Channel 

Creating or scaling a channel program will require the buy-in of other stakeholders in your organization. A business case can be formal or more casual depending on your company. 

Regardless of how you present your case, it’s essential to put in the work to create one. Business cases streamline your request and make it as easy as possible to get the resources necessary for initiatives.

•   Your business case should include timelines. Map out how long it will take to recruit new partners and help existing partners reach your goals. When asking for resources, illustrate how to complete processes faster with additional people or tools. 

•   Timing is critical when it comes to ensuring your teams’ reception of your ideas. Be mindful of other significant initiatives underway at the time you present your business case. For example, if your company is making a considerable investment in new networking infrastructure, it takes away the available budget for your channel sales plan. 

•   Once your plans are underway, don’t forget to track all success metrics and KPIs along the way. Documenting results and long-term ROI allows you to prove your channel sales plan. Logging progress also allows you to properly prepare for future strategies and expand on the business case.

Bottom Line About End of Year Planning for Your Channel

End-of-year channel planning can involve many competing priorities and detract from your goals. Whether you’re just starting a channel program, attempting to scale it, or reworking your existing partnerships, creating a management plan is necessary. Creating a business plan prepares you to present new initiatives and for additional resources. Use Allbound’s free resources on audits and scoring to take stock of where you are in your channel sales journey and make a plan accordingly. 

Want to Learn More About How Automation Helps Scale Your Channel?

Allbound’s partner relationship management (PRM) tool allows you to automate partner training, manage MDFs, co-brand, and gain visibility into what’s working all while integrating with your favorite tools. When your business relies on partners, it’s vital to empower them to sell better and more efficiently. Allbound is a flexible SaaS platform that helps any size business recruit, onboard, measure, and accelerate growth through sales and marketing partnerships.

Make every engagement between you and your partners – and between your partners and their prospects – simpler, productive, rewarding and engaging.

Request a demo »

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. 

Conclusion

Guide to Implementing a Channel Loyalty Program