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Have your SQLs suddenly dropped? Or, maybe they’ve been stagnant for far too long without signs of growth? Driving sales is essential to running a sustainable, profitable business. Unfortunately, it can be frustrating when the same processes that have always worked suddenly stop showing results.
Whether you’re already seeing signs of decline, you’ve struggled to get off the ground at all, or you’re trying to be proactive about growth, now is the perfect time to audit your B2B sales strategies.
Assess How Past Quarters Performed Against Sales Forecasts
At the beginning of your auditing process, it’s important to establish a baseline for comparison. Take a look at past performance and how it differed from your expectations. Are you frequently seeing a dip in Q4? Have your sales numbers never met expectations? Look for trends in your performance and match them up with the efforts you’ve implemented.
You may begin to see trends in how the time of year or specific sales strategies impact your performance. Similarly, you may find that you’ve been a little too ambitious with forecasting.
Look for takeaways that can be applied forward. For example, if you’re frequently seeing a decline in sales during certain quarters, look at how you can re-focus your efforts on functions like retention during those times. Similarly, if you see that a specific strategy isn’t effective, stop investing effort implementing it, and look for other strategies that are driving sales.
Audit Sales Prospect Quality
There’s often a disconnect between sales and marketing teams in which Marketing feels they’re providing loads of viable prospects that aren’t being followed up on. Meanwhile, Sales feels the leads they’re receiving aren’t ready for outreach. This disconnect indicates it’s time for your teams to sit down and audit the quality of recent prospects. Explore which leads were good fits and closed quickly, compared to the poor-fit leads who Sales didn’t even contact.
For further methods of measuring your lead quality, read Auditing Your B2B Sales Funnel – Recommended Process and Tips. By understanding who converts and how, you can audit your upper-funnel’s success rate of capturing the right individuals.
Work together to define MQLs and SQLs, then build an SLA between your teams. This should define which team provides what. Essentially, Marketing should agree that the leads they hand off meet the qualifications laid out by Sales. Likewise, Sales needs to agree that they’ll follow through on their process to connect with provided leads.
Evaluate Personas
Along the same lines of auditing prospect quality, take a look at your personas (and check out our example SaaS Buyer Personas for guidance). More likely than not, each persona will require different outreach tactics, nurture sequences, follow-up strategies. Similarly, different personas will have differing timelines to close.
Pair qualitative insights with segmented metric performance to further inform your audit. Do some personas reflect prospects that will sign-up for free trials but never convert? Does a select audience fail to respond to your content marketing? Pair such data with the most important question of all, why is this the case? It could be that your sales methods or product fail to address important priorities, or perhaps it’s that the audience is a poor fit. Candid conversations with your sales team (and competitive analysis) could provide crucial context.
Explore which approaches work best for each of your personas and make a plan for your sales and marketing teams to implement these varying strategies effectively.
Not all prospects will be your ideal customers. You may be hesitant to start weeding leads out before moving them down the sales funnel, but you’ll ultimately save your team tons of time and energy, as well as improve your overall win ratio.
Identify Knowledge Gaps In Your Resources and Sales Team
If a large number of prospects that are handed over to your sales team ultimately say no for the same reason, you have a gap in your acquisition content. Your top of funnel marketing content should qualify good-fit prospects by educating them around your product or services. This doesn’t just mean highlighting the best parts of your offering — it also means highlighting the reasons you may not be a good fit for someone.
Similarly, if your sales team is often unsure of the answers to prospect questions, you need to enhance team education. Explore how you can provide additional training to increase your team’s product knowledge as well as provide resources that can help them during sales conversations.
Keep in mind, this step of the auditing process especially pertains to channel sales, as partners won’t be focused on familiarizing themselves exclusively with your products. Make sure you’re making the most of their limited bandwidth with a carefully curated onboarding process. Tools like Allbound help you track training engagement and subsequent quiz results as they relate to lower-funnel activities like deal registrations and generated revenue. Sales data in hand, audit and refine your partner training methods so you promote the most effective and eliminate the worse.
Collect Qualitative Feedback
While the numbers don’t lie, they also don’t tell the entire story. Collecting feedback from your team and customers can help you understand the reasoning behind different sales metrics. One effective strategy is using a call recording tool, like Gong.io to listen back to conversations and create a feedback loop with your direct and indirect sales teams.
You should also conduct closed-lost interviews to explore why prospects said no and where they ended up going instead. Similarly, you can connect with closed-won clients to explore what made them say yes, what their expectations were, and any opportunities for improvement throughout the process.
Identify and Remove Barriers to Productivity
There are many reasons your sales team’s performance may be faltering. From overzealous sales goals to a lack of product resources, take the time to identify and remove barriers to productivity.
If your sales strategies and lead handoff workflows are inconsistent, your sales team will struggle to drive results and will likely waste a lot of time having to strategize each client interaction. Look for opportunities to standardize and bring consistency to your team’s workflow.
An often overlooked barrier to productivity is the lack of motivation from your Direct and Partners sales teams. Is your commission structure lackluster? Would SPIFF campaigns light their rapidly dimming passion? Your B2b sales audit should highlight such questions, if not provide answers. Collect feedback from trusted individuals and consider testing the ROI of a sales competition.
As discussed above, a disconnect between Sales and Marketing can also reduce your team’s productivity. Instead of working on closing a deal, your team may have to waste time in the nurture or education phase that marketing should have handled.
Take Inventory of Your Existing Tools
Your sales team should have access to tools that support their efforts, not make their jobs harder. Take inventory of your existing tools, like your CRM and PRM. Are they working for your team or against your team?
Your CRM should make it easy to track and nurture prospects, while your PRM should support a multiplier effect with your partner ecosystem. These tools should be easy to use and fit naturally within your team’s daily activities. Similarly, they should remove some of the aforementioned barriers to productivity by implementing automation and consistent workflows.
Another important step of the sales auditing process is to reassess your choice in software; what may have been the leading solution five years ago may no longer have the best offering. Another consideration is whether you have the right combination. If you have too many tools that offer overlapping features, you’re overpaying. Similarly, if your sales processes require five tools when one would do, you’re bogging down internal efficiencies.
Drive Exponential Results with Enhanced B2B Sales Processes
It’s a good idea to regularly audit your B2B sales methods, not just when results are faltering. Take the time to evaluate your performance as compared to forecasts. Look for trends across your closed-won and closed-lost accounts. Additionally, work to remove barriers to productivity, including tools that may be doing more harm than good.
Allbound is a Partner Relationship Management tool designed to support your channel partner sales efforts. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date on the latest industry trends, best practices for partnerships, and resources for expanding your channel.
partner management. She has been actively involved in the industry since 2018.
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Ali Spiric
Latest posts by Ali Spiric (see all)
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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.