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Best practices and insider secrets for partner recruitment
Today’s solution providers must swiftly evolve their business models in response to the shifting buyer’s journeys. The dramatic increase in the number of digital touchpoints a prospect has is one of the major shifts in the buying process. A key component of your strategy should be keeping partners better informed, equipped, and motivated to sell your products in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
This requires a robust and reliable channel partner enablement strategy that provides easy access to sales and marketing resources, support, and training that partners need on an ongoing basis.
Marketing enablement is one of the most significant benefits of a solid partner program. But, there is often a gap between what vendors think their partners need and what partners actually will leverage.
Vendors tend to build content that enables their partners to sell. But what partners truly need is marketing support to help them with their customers, the end-user. By and large, end-users don’t care about all the detailed features, benefits, and spec sheets that partners use as training material. They would much rather drill down to the pertinent information on how the solution can help them with their business.
So, how do partners and vendors address this gap?
Let’s start with the benefits of marketing enablement resources.
“Any time a channel partner decides to sell a vendor’s product, there’s some heavy lifting required to bring the offering to market,” says Jacqui Murphy, chief marketing officer, Auvik Networks. “Vendor-provided marketing enablement resources can help get the new product to market as easily and quickly as possible. These contribute significantly to the success of the new offering and are a key component of a solid partner program.”
To start, according to Murphy, vendors can help the channel partner educate their marketing and sales teams about the new offering — its features and benefits, the value it brings to their customer base, how to sell it alongside other offerings, how to properly position it against competitors, its pricing structure, etc.
“Channel partners don’t always have the capacity to develop marketing materials and campaigns for vendor products,” continues Murphy. “Many are grateful to be able to leverage marketing enablement resources provided to them by their vendor partners. Ideally, these resources can be easily tailored by channel partner teams.”
Another benefit of marketing enablement collateral is driving the right message for the right audience.
“Solid partner programs for marketing of any kind are predicated on the value you can deliver to your partners and their partners,” says Marnie Stockman, CEO, Lifecycle Insights. “Using the customization features in marketing tools ensures that you are getting the right message/value to the right people.”
Customization isn’t the only key to successful marketing collateral. Vendors also need to make it simple for partners to sell their products. (Think easily co-brandable materials and playbooks based on region, industry, title, etc.)
“Anything that can be created into one to three simple steps for the channel partners’ sales reps to grasp will help them to sell,” says Kimberly Cesena, senior director, head of global field and channel marketing, Dropbox. “Vendors that have not only marketing enablement tools such as a PRM, configurator, demo program, but also a support process to help partners learn these tools shows the commitment to channel partners.”
Good partner programs are defined by partner engagement and growth. So what are the hurdles when it comes to enablement methods?
Address the Gaps
Sometimes vendors miss the mark when creating marketing enablement content. How does one dissect this challenge, and what do partners need in terms of marketing support to help their customers, the end-user?
“Timing and cost are two of the biggest issues I see,” says Barb Goworowski, COO, JS Group. “The other big issue is that materials have to be customized for the partner community, and that doesn’t happen as often as it should. When you’re talking about the partner community, often you’re talking about different levels of sophistication. A lot of it has to do with size and resourcing – not everyone has the necessary people to work through the operation side of enablement.”
Not all organizations think through the segmentation of their partner base, and how they’re going to enable each segment with the suitable materials, adds Goworowski. Especially when it comes to smaller businesses. Not segmenting your partner base to offer the right amount of support – whether for operations, sales, marketing, or ecosystems – can leave organizations in a lurch.
“You have to read the room,” says Goworowski. “Understanding your partner’s capabilities and then making sure that you’re supplying programs and tools that align with that is vital.”
Partner feedback is critical. There needs to be a regular cadence to ensure partners give input on what they need and how to support them. Setting up advisory councils or specific partner boards ensures regular communication and avenues for feedback.
Having candid conversations with channel partners about their daily operations, their pain points and challenges, and how they currently market and sell their offerings can help inform the development of marketing enablement resources.
Partner enablement training should also be a two-way street. Through online surveys or face-to-face feedback, you can discover how to improve your sales and marketing support efforts and enhance your partner training program to get better results.
Partners have lots of things pulling their attention right now. As a vendor, you need to put thought and empathy into the development of your marketing enablement offerings. As the relationship is getting started, a little research can go a long way to building a long-lasting and lucrative partnership.
Takeaways About Channel Partner Enablement
So, how do you keep your marketing enablement organized between what’s intended for partners and what’s meant for the end-user?
Having dedicated sections within your PRM to house a myriad of marketing materials and having them updated and immediately on-hand whenever partners need them helps immensely.
“If you have a PRM tool that has a content library or content repository, you make it very clear in the navigation paths and different sections,” says Cesena. “For instance, sales/marketing enablement content is intended for partners. These content paths can be categorized under ‘what you need to know before you start selling,’ or sales tools, or sales enablement. A lot of times, you organize the content for the partners’ end-users under ‘campaign in a box’ or ‘sales plays.'”
Usually, these are two separate systems – i.e., the vendor’s marketing automation and CRM system, and then a tailored partner relationship management platform.
“The way to delineate between partners and end-users is through defining account types, e.g., existing partner, prospect partner, end-user customer, and end-user prospect,” adds Angus Robertson, CMO, Chief Outsiders. “The vendor CRM is usually the source of truth, and the two marketing automation systems sync their account and contact data from the CRM.”
When you have dedicated content categories, partner portals are an excellent tool to help channel partners access marketing and sales enablement resources, and these portals can be structured to clearly identify materials for the channel partner vs. materials for the end-user.
But even with a partner portal and vendors offering training on available marketing and sales enablement resources, when and where to use which resources can still be confusing.
“Vendors should think about how they share resources with channel partner teams on an ongoing basis — as these teams will change over time,” says Murphy. “Access to partner portals, and which resources to use, should be intuitive for incoming team members. For example, internal, ‘channel partner only’ resources could have explicit labels stating they are not to be shared with clients. A channel sales team will leverage anything they think will help them sell the vendor’s product. It’s important to share ‘approved’ sales resources; otherwise, they will create their own from the resources they have at their disposal.”
Consistency, efficiency, and agility throughout the pipeline are a must, so what’s your next step?
- Work together. It may sound a bit “hold hands around the campfire,” but this is such an important component. Partners all have different processes that vendors have to figure out – what you’re going to do together, when you’re going to do it, what portals you’re going to use, etc. When you think about a partner trying to market their services, access portals, customize marketing materials, create demand for the different pieces, help the sales team know how to sell it… if you’re a vendor, you must think about how you will fit into what they’re already doing. Tip: Create an advisory council or specific partner board to ensure regular communication and avenues for feedback.
- Boost partner knowledge. Something that partners need to evaluate that vendors need to consider is that not everybody can always be proactive. Supplying your partner community with information that can help them decide how to move forward is critical. Share internal playbooks featuring assets that will educate your partners. Sharing best practices is always the right thing – you get to market faster, you build funnels quicker, and you make everybody money faster. Tip: Ensure your PRM has learning tracks to help guide partner’s knowledge and onboarding.
- Organize your assets to be marketable. When a prospect engages with one of your partners. The partner should know exactly which content is right for that prospect based on industry, geography, and more. These distinctions and specifications are critical to have. Tip: Ensure your content is organized by purpose and audience in your PRM
- 9 Strategies to Avoid & Resolve Channel Conflicts With Partners - February 12, 2023
- Why Your Channel Program Needs Account Mapping Software (and the Best Tools Available) - November 22, 2022
- Advanced Channel Growth Strategies Based On Current Milestones - October 26, 2022
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Ali Spiric
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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.