Their financial arm, Dell Financial Services, offered zero-percent interest on servers and storage. They also made available three, six, or nine-month deferred payment schedules to customers. New leasing options were created for laptops, thin clients, and mobile workstations. To establish some income predictability for their partners, target-based programs that were rolled out in February were postponed.

To adapt while also keeping business goals in mind, you must have two separate strategies. Leaders should have one plan for the short term and one for the long term. When creating your channel partner management approach, you may want to pivot from previous strategies in one (or more) of the following ways: 

•  Cancel, postpone, or alter SPIFF or MDF funds

•  Alter joint marketing efforts like conferences and content strategies

•  Manage inventory more conservatively

•  Rework sales targets and compensation plans

•  Equip partners with the necessary technology to work remotely

Don’t overlook the importance of crafting a long-term partner management strategy beyond COVID-19. While it may seem pointless to make plans without any clear indication of when businesses will begin to function normally, it’s still worth it to make projections. Your partner management strategy will inevitably be amended as new developments emerge, but it’s better than having no plan at all. Your long-term plan could include: 

•  Recruiting and hiring of new partners

•  New policies and plans that will mitigate risks of future pandemics or economic downturns

•  Implementing new resources and technology needed to manage partners better remotely

Strategy Tip: Ask yourself: What are the likely circumstances in the future and what’s my plan to address them? Create a few different playbooks for different scenarios that could take place.

Understand how your partners’ businesses are being impacted

Right now, most businesses are thinking about how they can adapt and save their own companies. While this is understandable, make time for a genuine check-in with your partners to see how they’re doing. The priority for CAMs right now should be to thoroughly understand how the current landscape impacts their partner’s businesses. 

Checking in not only enables you to offer support to your partners, but it also allows you to gauge their status and the likelihood of your partnership surviving. A thorough check-in with partners will serve as crucial information for your own forecasting. When meeting with partners, be sure to find out about:

•  Organizational changes and layoffs. Find out the “who-what-where.” Who was laid off? What regions were they in? What were their job functions, and how will it ultimately impact the business?

•  Staffing or resource restraints. Many companies have renewed optimism for the upcoming months and years, leading to a swell of job openings. However, hiring, onboarding, and resource allocation doesn’t happen overnight. Understand your partners current gaps and goals to gauge their limitations and potential. 

•  Who your points of contact are. Will your primary POC within their company remain the same or change? Are introductions needed?

•  What ways their business is shifting. Your partners may be eliminating departments or positions, like service, that could impact their ability to manage customer relationships efficiently. 

•  What their plans are. While no one’s going to have a concrete plan, you still want to check their temperature. The outcomes they predict can tell you a lot about the future of your partnership.

Even if your partners have “successfully” transitioned to remote work, expect productivity to be lowered. Many employees must work from home while also caring for and homeschooling their children. While your channel partners may be grateful to still be working when millions of others are getting laid off, they’re most likely feeling sadness and stress at the same time. 

The uncertainty of this era has created a deep strain on our mental health. As a business leader, it’s essential to keep the human aspects as well as the business goals in mind during this challenging time.

Strategy Tip: Think of incentives to keep your partners engaged while WFH. Are there more learning tracks they could be incentivized to complete?

Due to COVID-19, many of our questions and concerns about our futures and wellbeing remain unanswered. Because of this uncertainty, loss of productivity is a natural byproduct. Add that to the fact that, depending on your industry, the sales process may be more difficult. Keep all of this in mind when learning about your partner’s situation. It goes deeper than business; it’s emotional and psychological as well. 

Get comfortable with video conferencing

For the time being, your partner relationships will be managed remotely. This can be a challenge for newer partnerships or partners that require more hands-on assistance and attention. While phone calls are effective, now is a great time to utilize video conferencing. While it doesn’t replace in-person interaction, it still provides some of the face-to-face benefits that build relationships. You may be asking, “Can’t I just stick with phone calls?” Video calls allow you and your partners to see each other’s faces as well as body language and hand gestures. 

This can even be a great time to strengthen bonds and become more of a familiar face if you weren’t previously relying on video calls. Choose the video conferencing solution that works for you and your team. Companies should opt for the paid versions of video conferencing solutions. The premium version of your video conferencing software will give you more functionalities like integrated scheduling and longer call times. Also, it will allow all employees to use the same program.

Zoom is the most popular video-conferencing option currently. Most video conferencing solutions have features specifically geared to make remote meetings go smoothly. Zoom has features like instant backgrounds that allow you to appear in front of a professional backdrop versus your current makeshift home-office space. It can also smooth out your facial features to brighten your face and decrease unflattering shadows. Companies across the country who are now ordered to work from home are using video conferencing as a way to unite their internal teams. 

Establish a communication rhythm 

You may already have a cadence of communication established with your partners. Regardless of whether you do or not, your cadence may have to change in this new climate of remote work. The goal is to stay top of mind with your partners and assure them you’re not going anywhere. Due to the shift to a remote workspace, increasing your level of communication is more important than ever.

Create a schedule to talk to partners at regular intervals. How often you connect with them should be based on your relationship and your goals. You can choose to hold weekly or bi-weekly check-ins to ensure there is consistency. The goal of planning your outreach ahead of time is to eliminate the chance of dropping the ball and creating harmful lapses in communication.

Another approach is to remove the barriers to partner communication with instant messaging options. Slack is a valuable tool that allows for immediate interaction, as most companies already utilize the software. Consider creating separate Slack channels that allow channel reps to message with CAMs. This opens the lines of communication with your partners and connects you more as team members versus just business partners.

One glance at your LinkedIn feed will reveal sales leaders that are coming up with creative ways to bring their remote employees together. Virtual happy hours and virtual watercooler sessions have been popping up more frequently as quarantine continues. Come up with out-of-the-box ways to connect and boost the morale of your partners. One possible opportunity during this time is to form even more reliable connections with your channel partners. The work you put in now to forge stronger relationships will pay off when the economy and workforce do return to some sense of normalcy.

Strategy Tip: Utilize non-traditional methods of outreach like Sendoso. Make a human connection with your partners by sending them something that relates to their lives and shows them that you care. Ex: a toy for their child, a treat for their dog, or a book that you think your partner would enjoy.

Review contracts and SLA’s

Once you’ve adequately planned and checked in with your partners, get something on the calendar to discuss service level agreements (SLAs) and contracts. Just because there is confusion or uncertainty doesn’t mean that your requirements for doing business are suddenly going to become lax or be forgotten. Your partners are still obligated to maintain a predetermined level of service to keep customers happy and maintain your reputation. 

Be mindful in your approach to this outreach. It’s not a good move to do this too early, as you may come across as uncaring or self-interested. Make sure you’ve gotten the lay of the land and have discovered what’s going on with your partner’s business before you launch into your expectations of them. 

You may find out that your partners are unable to uphold the specific requirements outlined in the beginning of the partnership. That’s okay. The point of the call is to know where you stand so you can make the proper adjustments and preparations in the event that they’re not able to perform. Don’t let interruptions in your business be the reason your customers receive lower levels of service.

Create additional resources for partner support

To boost and maintain partner sales efforts, offer fresh resources. Now is the time to invest in channel management tools and strategies that will help your partners do their jobs virtually. You could provide additional marketing materials, training resources, software, hardware, or sales support. The idea is to enable your partners to sell more effectively during a time when sales cycles may be longer than usual.

Your CRM and partner portal will play a significant role during this time, as being organized becomes even more important. For partners that once went into an office every day, having a live, accessible repository of all necessary information is now imperative. Implement a PRM tool that keeps you and your partners on the same page by having access to all the same information and being able to share documents in real-time. 

Your technology tools should enable the following functions:

•  File collaboration and content sharing apps 

•  Contract and document management (eSignature software)

•  Sales and deal tracking and collaboration (partner relationships management software and Customer Relationship Management software)

While they’re a solution to a short-term problem, they will still be relevant in optimizing the performance of your partnerships for the long term.

How to Manage Partners Remotely – The Bottom Line

Even during uncertain times, it is possible to maintain and even boost your partners’ performance. Total remote management of your channel may not be ideal, but it is possible. By utilizing widely available technologies like video conferencing and PRM systems, you can stay top of mind with your partners. Communication is key now more than ever, and may even have to increase due to lack of in-person methods of building relationships. By setting forth long and short term strategies for managing partnerships, you ensure that needs are met right now and that you also have a plan for the future.

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