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If you use any major SaaS product – like HubSpot, Zoom, Google Workspace – then you’ve most likely experienced tech partnerships and integrations from the customer side.
Scheduling a Zoom meeting from your Google Calendar? That’s an integration. Sharing data between your CRM and sales software, like HubSpot and Salesforce? Also an integration.
These kinds of integration partnerships that smoothly bring together software solutions from different organizations can provide immense value to the end user. Plus, they have the added benefit of not requiring either organization to invest in building the full product themselves.
In short, partner integrations can help tech and SaaS companies scale and grow their businesses by improving the customer experience, increasing retention and reducing costs. But, it’s not without risks – the wrong fit with an integration partner can do more harm than good.
Here’s what you need to know about integrated partners and how to build those relationships successfully.
Tech Partnership Terms To Know
Before we dive too deep into the best ways to build tech partnerships and leverage integrations, here are common terms you need to know.
Technology partnership
A broad category of partnerships in which two or more technology companies – usually SaaS – work together. This is different from a reseller or referral partnership, for instance, because of the level of collaboration.
Integration
The process in which the software systems connect and can share data. Tech partners who build a solution by bringing together different software need to integrate their products. That’s why tech partnerships are also commonly referred to as integration partnerships.
Independent software vendor (ISV)
The term independent software vendor is often used interchangeably with tech partners. These are the partners, or businesses, that integrate functions or features of their software solutions with others in order to offer a more valuable product or enter new markets without having to develop a new product alone.
System Integrator (SI)
A system integrator is a type of channel partner that helps bring together software solutions and offers support to ensure that all the systems work together. In essence, they’re experts in managing and optimizing the process to ensure a complete solution.
SIs can help with:
- Infrastructure integration
Application integration
Consulting
You may also see system integrators classified further by geographic scope and called global system integrators (GSI) or regional system integrators (RSI).
Key Considerations When Choosing Integrated Partners
The first consideration when it comes to tech partners is a fundamental business question: why build this integration? Is there customer demand for the tech stack? What are your big picture goals?
Once the business case is built for the product itself, turn your attention to finding the right fit with the partnership itself. This won’t happen by accident or overnight; building strong tech partnerships takes thoughtful strategy and intention. But it’s well worth the effort.
What to Look For in a Tech Partner
A tech partnership that goes off the rails can cost significant time and resources from both sides, which is why it’s so important to build a strong relationship from the start.
As you think about your ideal partner profile who will fit strategically with your software, consider:
- Do you share overlapping customers? Do you target the same market?
How does this partner increase the value of your product? Is there demand for this integration?
What is their company culture? Is it a fit with yours? What kind of reputation do they have?
How willing are they to collaborate with you?
Do they have previous experience with integration partnerships?
Do they have the internal resources and ability to successfully integrate with you? If not, what kind of support from you will they need?
Can they share any examples of customers who would be early adopters?
Integrated Partners and Security Considerations
Beyond fit, carefully consider your potential integrated partners’ security policies to protect both your customers and yourself.
Ask questions like:
- How often do they perform system audits? And what protocols do they follow?
What security features do they have in place? Identity authentication, firewalls, encryption?
How do they maintain privacy and protect customer data?
What is their protocol if there is a data breach? Do they have insurance?
Depending on the industry, do they have the required certifications? HIPAA, PCI, SOC2, etc.?
Who Will Manage the Integration Long-Term?
It’s also a good idea to discuss the bigger picture plan of who will manage the integration long-term. A successful integration isn’t “one and done”.
There are pros and cons to whichever decision you make about who ultimately manages the project. If you continue to hold the reins, you have more control over the scope of the tech stack and can guide co-marketing efforts.
On the other hand, if you have a lot of integration partners and many projects to manage, it can be beneficial to pass on some of that work. That allows you to free up internal resources and continue growing with more partners, if that is a goal of your partnership program.
Have these conversations upfront and build the long-term plan into your relationship. Clear expectations and a roadmap will help prevent misunderstandings about each party’s roles and responsibilities.
Best Practices For Successful Integration Partnerships
As with all your partnerships, there are several ways you can support your integrated partners to set them up for success over the years to come.
Onboarding and training
The initial touch points of introducing a new tech partner into your ecosystem is a great opportunity to set the right tone and build a basis for ongoing engagement.
In addition to welcoming the partner and ensuring open channels of communication, make sure to provide relevant training resources housed within your PRM system that partners can easily access at any time.
Support co-marketing efforts
You’re not just working together with a tech partner, you’re also selling together. And that means you can tap into the power of co-marketing.
Collaborating on promotional activities can help you reach a broader audience – or even break into new markets with the help of your partner – without the costs or challenges that would usually occur by doing it alone.
Promote your partnership integration through co-branded materials that explain how the collaborative solution is greater than the sum of its parts. Examples include case studies, joint product demo videos, and even designated web pages. Further elevate awareness of your partnership (and individual brands) through mutually beneficial co-marketing activities, such as paid search ads, hosting webinars, and participating in third-party podcasts. Alternatively, you can jointly host a booth at established industry events or host get-togethers of your own to bring together members of the community.
You can also further support co-marketing efforts with market development funds.
Reward and motivate
Celebrate wins together and motivate your integration partners to continue succeeding.
Those rewards can be built into your compensation by partner tier or as one-off incentives like achievement-based bonuses.
Regardless of what type of reward you decide to offer to motivate your partners, the most important question to ask is: What is it that they want? What motivates your integration partner may be different from what you originally thought. Like with all relationships, communication is the first step to success.
Consider categorizing your integration partners by tier based on the scope of their efforts and responsibilities to make sure the rewards match their involvement with you.
Consider Joining Your Tech Partner’s Program
In addition to inviting your integration partners into your ecosystem, you may also want to join their channel program.
Becoming a channel partner yourself brings many of the same benefits you’re familiar with partner programs themselves – like increased revenue growth and expanded brand recognition – but from another angle.
By participating in a top-notch tech organization’s channel program, you are able to better leverage their products and expertise. This can reduce some of the burdens on your team. You get all the benefits of integrating, while also being able to tap into their sales and marketing resources.
After all, if partner integrations benefit both customer bases, both companies would benefit from selling the integration.
Going To Market With Your Tech Partners
As you build these important tech partnerships and create unique integrations, your ability to scale and grow will also increase.
This means the types of partner content you create, the way you onboard participants and how you go to market with them will also evolve.
Learn more about how to do this successfully in our new channel partner go-to-market guide.
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Ali Spiric
Latest posts by Ali Spiric (see all)
- Affiliate or Referral: How to Pick the Perfect Partnership - January 2, 2020
- 5 Ways These Remarkable Channel Leaders are Improving Their Partnerships - December 18, 2019
- eBook–How to Get Your Partners to Step Up to the Plate - November 26, 2019
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
What's one thing that starts and never stops? You might be thinking that the answer is Newton's first law of motion, but you'd be wrong. The answer is much simpler than that: partner recruitment.
Expert panelists Adam Pasch, Co-Founder of Stealth Startup, Ben Wright, CEO of Partner Fuel, Blake Williams, CEO of Ampfactor, and Chris Murray, VP of Partner Ecosystem at Lead Forensics join us to teach you how to recruit powerful partnerships that will take your business to the next level. We're talking about partnerships that will crush your revenue goals.
In this webinar, we'll discuss:
- How to nail a partner pitch
- How to build an IPP
- Why you should use ABM as part of your recruitment strategy