Look for a list of partners on the website or on the partner page. This should give you a good idea of the size of the program. Another option is to pull from your own professional network: Do you know anyone who is currently a partner with a competing vendor? If so, do they still use spreadsheets to track their data and sales relationships, or has your competitor provided access to a Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platform? The sophistication of partner tools will indicate the vendor’s overall commitment to growth and partner satisfaction.

As Yoda Would Say: A Large Channel Does Not a Successful Program Make

Keep this in mind, a huge partner program doesn’t necessarily mean a successful one. After all, the larger the network, the more a company tends to lose to commissions, seller structures, and other overhead costs. It’s the efficiency of the program that holds the most weight.

We’re all familiar with the Pareto Principle 80/20 rule, which implies that in the distribution of resources, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. This can be loosely applied to the world of channel sales and marketing as well, as it reminds vendors of the importance of efficiency. Not all partners are the same, and those doing most of the legwork deserve more of your time and attention.

Typically, vendors separate their partners into two groups: “managed,” which represents the 20 percent of partners generating most of your sales; and “unmanaged,” which are the partners producing fewer sales and having less of an impact on your revenue lines.

In researching your competitors, it’s going to be tough finding out the precise distribution of managed and unmanaged partners. By drafting a list of their partners, even if incomplete, and then comparing it to your own roster, you can get an idea of how the given program’s efficiency. Use this as a benchmark of what standards you must meet in order to recruit potential partners and build your channel sales program. 

For scaling up to meet the competition, a modern partner portal is going to be the most effective tool at your disposal. It saves time and helps keep all of your partners on the same page—both literally and figuratively. With good PRM software, there’s no need to manually manage or onboard each and every one of your partners. The process can be automated. You’ll also have your processes and sales strategies streamlined under a single roof, thereby ensuring that you get the most out of every partner relationship.

2. Make Sure Your Partner Program Is Up To Par

You’ve identified some competitors and looked closely at their partner program. Hopefully, you’ve learned enough to get an idea of how your own program is different, and what you need to do to scale up and compete for those prized sales partners.

One of the best ways to attract partners is to have a straightforward, seamless user experience. Even from outside your organization, prospective partners are going to see a partner-facing portal as a convenience—a time-saving tool that gives them peace of mind while presenting your organization as qualified and professional. If you’re a scrappy startup, (don’t worry, we’ve all been there), a PRM can also make your partner program look larger and more robust than it may in fact be. Don’t be afraid to present yourself as more developed or farther along than you actually are. That’s what marketing is all about: presenting an image that appeals to your target market, thereby buying time to grow into the business powerhouse you’ve imagined. It also gives you the space needed to attract partners and compete with vendors many times your size.

But a partner portal isn’t just about how you present yourself to prospective channel partners. It’s also a tool for enabling those partners to make sales and strengthen your bottom line. It’s a way to automate the partner lifecycle, from onboarding to training to selling. A PRM establishes a platform from which all new partners can learn and get trained up in whatever products or services you’re selling. They also unify your sales strategy, teaching partners how to effectively sell your product and how to speak to the end-customers’ needs.

Selling is all about identifying a problem and offering a solution. Your partner portal should provide partners with the tools they need to do both. But you have to choose the right system. A good PRM will be able to do the following:

• Create personalized experiences for partners
• Enable co-branding or brand partnerships
• Track and monitor market development funds (MDF)
• Train partners with learning tracks and certifications
• Group partners according to sales performance and capabilities
• Draft and share sales reports
• Integrate current marketing automation into a single platform

 Remember: As much as 80 percent of your partners’ experience is in your organization’s systems and tools. If the user experience derived from those systems is not positive, then it won’t matter how great your product is: no one will want to work with an outdated, obsolete, or frustrating platform. A good partner portal will solve this.

3. Locate The Right Partners

 By now you have a good idea of who your competitors are and how you can go about creating a valuable and worthwhile partner experience. But how do you go about finding and recruiting the right channel partners?

Again, this goes back to putting yourself in the shoes of an ideal partner: Who are they? Where are they? What are they looking for in a vendor? What sales model do they employ? What markets do they have access to? How much autonomy should they be given? Will they incorporate your product into a larger package and sell that? Or does your product need to stand on its own?

 These can be difficult questions to answer. To help, develop what’s called a partner persona—a fictional version of your ideal sales partner. When building one, consider the following criteria:

•  Expertise: How much knowledge of your product or ecosystem is necessary to make lots of sales? How long will it take to train your ideal sales partner?

Is it necessary for them to currently operate in an ecosystem that demands a firm grasp of your product and the solution you’re providing?

• Market: Are you trying to break into a new market; compete within an established one; or create something entirely different? Similarly, you need to think about your markets in a practical sense: What structural or bureaucratic obstacles might exist between your product and your end-customer?
• Sales process: What is the structure and environment of your ideal partner? Do they utilize inside or outside sales reps? Do they have a platform that can accommodate both models?
• Location: Does it matter to you if your ideal partner is nearby? Will potential partners face geographical limitations or advantages?
• Commitment: How much time and effort does the ideal partner need to commit in order to be successful?

Developing a partner persona will not only help you recognize the right candidates, but it will also lay the groundwork for a promotional strategy to engage interested parties. Every successful business has a content marketing strategy, so targeting the right readership within your blogs, white papers, eBooks, and social media is critical. How you curate and promote that content determines how effectively you can reach clients, customers, and sales partners.

 Knowing who to connect with is not the same as knowing where and how to connect: time and place are everything. LinkedIn is a valuable resource, But only if you use it properly. Don’t spam your contacts with mindless form letters and elevator pitches. Tailor your message to each partner or client. For most social media engagements, it’s wise to do the following:

• Be specific.
• Follow your target sales partners
• Like and comment on their content
• When you decide to message them, contact them to discuss something they’ve written
• Engage them rather than pitch them

Don’t rely on LinkedIn alone. You should also follow and read the same blogs that your partners are visiting. Comment on relevant posts—again, not with mindless product pitches, but with smart and engaging commentary. Prove yourself to be the solution provider you know you are. Sometimes, simply contributing to the conversation will draw all the attention you need. That way you present yourself with dignity and confidence, framing your organization as one people want to work with.

Finally, once you’ve made a connection with a potential partner, treat them as you would a potential employee. Be ready to talk about the benefits and perks of working with you. Let them know about the partner onboarding process before an agreement is reached. Tell them about your content library and partner portal. They want to know that they’ll be supported and in an environment of growth and profitability.

Mistakes to Avoid When Recruiting and Developing Partner Relationships

Everyone makes mistakes, but more often than not, the pitfalls are avoidable. Here are five things that often dissuade channel partners from taking on a new vendor:

1. The partner offering is unclear or isn’t incentivized enough. This applies to content as much as communication. Through everything we’ve discussed creating a partner persona and reflecting on the value that you offer, you should have an idea of what a prospective partner seeks. If the way you communicate or present that value is too ambiguous or confusing, prospective partners are going to look elsewhere. Likewise, if the financials don’t line up for them they won’t budge. So get your math right before making a connection.
2. Lack of support. Your partner portal, training platforms, and communication channels need to be immaculate. With all the technology available today, you really have no excuse not to have a portal that provides your partners with everything they need to train, learn, scale-up, increase your brand visibility, and make sales. Make sure you begin the partner relationship with a comprehensive welcome kit.
3. Too many manual processes. Channel marketing can involve a lot of repetitive tasks. If you don’t have a platform that allows partners to automate some processes, your offering is going to start to chew into their time and, eventually, their bottom line. That’s a good way to get dropped as a vendor. Make sure you have an array of automated marketing solutions for email, social media, advertisements, and other initiatives in order to build a scalable partner channel program.
4. Content is disorganized or difficult to find. Many sales partners list this as a major gripe: they have trouble navigating to the right content because the library is too messy and overwhelming. It’s not enough for your content package to be merely comprehensive—it needs to be navigable and efficiently structured as well. 
5. Co-branding isn’t easy to figure out. A lot of sales partners get frustrated with platforms that don’t allow them to easily co-brand their promotional efforts. You need to make sure your offering provides the functionality to collaborate on marketing campaigns with co-branded content.

4. Make Sure Partners Choose You

Keeping partners organized in a Google spreadsheet and emails is likely not the most efficient way to manage your time. But with the right PRM you’ll have a major leg up on the competition as a serious player who understands the needs of channel partners. 

 The writing is on the wall: you need quality systems and tools to be successful in any channel sales initiative. Fortunately, Allbound is here to help.

Think about it in terms of those five pitfalls vendors face when trying to recruit partners:

1. Unclear or low-value offering: A channel program using Allbound will have a clear track laid out in which partners will know exactly what they’re getting, how to register deals, and how to perform any organizational task.
2. Lack of support: Allbound provides a dedicated customer success manager to provide assistance and insights based on your portal, company, and market.
3. Too many manual processes: PRM allows for automation of every part of the partner lifecycle, including marketing automation and delivery.
4. Disorganized content library: There is an unlimited, searchable content library so partners can find exactly what they need, when they need it, where they need it.
5. Co-branding is difficult: Co-branding with Allbound is extremely simple. The assets that can be co-branded are provided and the logos are implemented with simple drag-and-drop tools, so it’s quick and easy. You can also control which partners can and cannot utilize the co-branding feature.

 Allbound grants you the PRM technology to attract and develop quality channel partner relationships. Don’t short-change yourself: As much as you choose your partners, you want them to choose you, too!

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