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Built for professionals at the beginning stages of a channel
Identify the strengths and growth opportunities in your partner program
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Partnership Job Descriptions
Hire for all levels of your partnership team with these ready-to-go templates proven to attract top partnership talent!
After you’ve hired a rockstar to manage your organization’s partnerships, it’s time to look ahead to the future. What goals are you looking to crush with your partner network? What do you need to get there?
Scaling your partner program means investing more in your internal resources and growing your team. What should you consider and evaluate as you create that dream team?
Finding Your Partnership Management MVPs
It’s common for the first person who steps into the partner management role to wear many different hats in the early stages of the program. As it scales, new roles can be created to align with specific objectives.
A robust partnership program should include a mix of individual contributors and leaders connected to overseeing overall company and revenue goals. Partner managers should take the lead in executing projects for each partner, while directors and VPs will oversee strategy and manage teams.
An individual contributor is someone who:
- Is task driven
- Has a set of defined duties
- Is singularly responsible for completing assigned projects
A director, on the other hand, is responsible for
- Greater overall leadership
- Cross-functionality between company departments
- Managing a team of people who complete and carry out deliverables
Finding stellar candidates who fit each of these roles can mean hiring outside the organization for qualified professionals or looking inward to see if a member of the sales, marketing, or customer service team could be a natural fit for partnerships.
Skills like relationship building, excellent communication, campaign management, and conflict resolution are all hallmarks of a partner manager MVP. Consider who has the soft skills needed to create strong ties with partners and proven excellence in executing initiatives, analyzing results, and achieving goals.
The Most Important Roles on a Partner Manager Team
The exact job title for individuals in charge of managing partnerships can vary depending on the organization. Some org charts may include niche roles like Head of Strategic Technology Partnerships or Director of Alliances. These job titles can vary by industry and size of the company and its program.
A partnership program with a solid foundation will have a good mix of individual contributors and managers. Some teams will succeed with two people spearheading the program, while others will have multiple seats that need to be filled.
The essential roles on a partner management team will include:
- Partner Manager: This individual will handle each partner’s daily experience. They’ll be the point of contact and responsible for completing tasks related to partner initiatives.
- Director of Partnerships: The person in this role develops and oversees partnership strategies. They’re responsible for leading a team of partner managers and aligning various departments to accomplish tasks related to the partner program.
- VP of Partnerships: The VP will ensure partner strategies align with overall business goals and objectives. They report metrics and growth plans to the company’s C-level executives.
Growing Your Program
If you’re at the point in your partnership program where you want to gain more partners or generate more leads and deals from these partnerships, ensure your team is equipped to take on these new growth opportunities.
It’s vital to dedicate enough attention, time, direction, and resources to existing partners while spearheading initiatives to bring in new partnerships. To grow your program, you must have all your bases covered, which means appointing managers for existing and upcoming partners.
What an Ideal Partnerships Team Looks Like
Some organizations will have multiple partner directors and vice presidents in charge of smaller departments or niches, such as partner marketing or partner operations. The number of How many team members of the team you decide to recruit depends on how many partners you have, as well as your goals.
After placing your first partner manager into their role, plan to double the team when you’re able and reevaluate quarterly to determine when and if you need to expand. Consider recruiting, hiring, and onboarding timelines as you build your partner team.
The obvious answer to “When should I hire more positions for my partnership team?” is “When your existing partner manager no longer has the capacity to manage all partnerships.”
An additional piece of advice is to expand the team when you’re looking for specific skills to carry out tasks for new or future partners or objectives. Here are a few examples:
- When diversifying partner types: You know what they say; hire for the skills that you don’t have. If your team is seasoned in referral partnerships, but you’re expanding into resellers, then there’s an opportunity to add an all-star to your team to lead that initiative.
- When building relationships with partners in different regions: In the age of remote work, we know how difficult it can be to set a meeting time with someone in another country. If you’re looking to expand to another region, adding a local headcount to your team could be a surefire way to drive success. They will be more well connected in that region, align with partner availability, and understand the local community.
- When a growing number of partners achieve an upper-tier status: Graduating from one partner tier to the next means more white glove service. As more partners move to the highest tier, hiring CAMs for each level may make sense.
Determine if and when there is a need to expand the team, and remember that the timing has to be right. Identify areas where new roles could be created. For example, if you want to invest more of your marketing spend and strategy into partnerships, you could create and fill the role of partner marketing manager. This may mean transitioning a present employee into this role or hiring an outside candidate.
Measuring Program Success
Measuring the success of your partner program is key to evaluating and setting new goals. Set KPIs for your partner program, including average deal size and activation rates. Define revenue targets and track your success and opportunities in this area.
Additionally, measure partner program success by setting individual and team goals for your partner managers and leaders in this department. Not only will this assist in professional development, but it can also increase engagement and help leadership determine areas for improvement.
Understanding program success through KPIs is crucial to propelling the partnerships team forward. When leadership understands that you’re hitting or exceeding your goals, they have a full view of the internal team’s quality of work and understand the value of expanding the number of team members.
Team goal examples:
- Tracking partner attribution
- Number of referrals from partners
- Number of partner support cases
- Building pipeline per quarter
Individual goal examples:
- Accomplishing three revenue-driving projects per quarter
- Leveling up a partner
- Learning new, relevant skills
- Tracking progress and reporting monthly
Budgeting for Program Expansion
There are many factors to consider when planning to cover internal budgeting for headcount, bonuses, and promotions, including the size and maturity of your partner program. Budgeting for partner compensation will also play into your program’s success and scalability.
Identify how much you’re willing to risk for exploratory or experimental channels. Also, consider how much you want to dedicate to your anticipated wins and successes. Collect data to determine which partners are bringing in revenue and which are not—this can help you analyze where your dollars are coming from.
When creating your budget and partner forecast, align with teams across your organization before presenting to executive leadership. Define your assumptions and your level of certainty around each cost to get the buy-in you’re looking for.
Elements to include in your partner program budget:
- Payroll
- Marketing Development Funds
- Partner Enablement
- Automation/Optimization
- Travel Expenses
Coaching Your Team
Supporting your partner management team begins with nurturing their individual strengths and bringing in more hands when needed. In terms of daily workflow, finding an effective PRM can help you roll out initiatives faster and get new hires up to speed by having all partnership program info and resources in one place.
Building your partnership management dream team can be accomplished by investing in your people and growing as needed. This will help your organization engage more partners, drive more pipelines and facilitate more sales.
To learn more about building a partner management dream team check out these top articles:
- Channel Manager Job Description Changes You Need to Make Now: Once you’ve elected to hire a new member of your team, the next step is to create a powerful job description that brings in the right audience. In this blog, we outline how to ensure your job descriptions are top tier.
- Interview Questions for Partner Managers: Choosing the right person to join your team isn’t an easy task. We’ve created an interview question guide and paired it with a candidate evaluation sheet. Happy hiring!
Guide to Partner Relationship Management: The ultimate guide to creating valuable relationships with partners. This eBook will walk you through optimizing the onboarding process, increasing engagement and retention, utilizing partnerships automation, and more.
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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.