Additional Best Practices Your Partner Portal Should Include?
Your portal should include resources for training and onboarding your partners. These should make it easy for your partners to get up and running quickly. It’s a great idea to include quizzes and a gamification system to encourage partner reps to complete training. Your partner portal should also include all marketing materials and sales resources your partners may need.
The portal should include easy access to your internal team. Make sure users can contact you via the portal, submit requests, and find the right person on your team if they require additional support.
In short, your portal should include:
• Training and onboarding resources
• The ability for partners to independently go through training
• Quizzes
• Gamification
• Marketing materials
• A link to your internal team
The Downsides of Designing Your Own Partner Portal
Designing your own partner portal is time-consuming and requires a lot of upkeep to maintain. It often takes months to set up a partner portal internally, followed by more months of testing. Once your portal is developed, you then have to take on the responsibility of training your team and populating the portal. Frequently, it could take over a year to get your team and partners enabled and using the portal.
A homegrown portal could potentially be cheaper to set up than a ready-made solution. However, you need to keep in mind the ongoing cost of upkeep. There are tons of employee hours that go into not just creating the portal, but also maintaining it and contacting experts when issues arise.
When you use a SaaS partner portal solution, you’re able to rely on their support team to help you train your team, solve issues, overcome obstacles, and set up a solution that works best for your ecosystem. So while a PRM may appear more expensive up front, you’ll end up saving in the long run.
In short, the downsides to building your own portal are:
• It may be time-consuming to stand up
• The cost of maintenance
• You may have to hire new employees to keep up with the portal
• You don’t have a support team for unforeseen issues
• Your team may be inexperienced in building a portal
Partner Portal Design Best Practices
Partner portals should make it easy for you to manage and scale your partner program. The best portals are easy to use and navigate, with key features designed to make your partnerships more efficient. Your portal can be a powerful sales tool — make sure it’s branded, simple to navigate, and loaded with helpful resources for your partners.
Allbound ranks #1 in G2Crowd Summer Mid-Market Grid® for partner relationship management. Request a demo to see how Allbound can help you drive engagement, share powerful resources with your partners, and grow your channel.