Forrester research shows 75% of products and services are being marketed and sold through indirect channels today, pointing to an emerging trend that creates a significant need for partner technology. That being said, PRM technology isn’t for everyone and deploying this technology at the right time is critical for the partner program.

Assessing Your Channel Program For PRM 

If you run a channel program, you may be asking yourself whether or not you need a PRM tool. The answer is, it depends.

As the CEO of Allbound, the fastest growing PRM company, you may think I would want everyone to buy PRM. That is not the case. Some companies can greatly benefit from PRM technology, some are not ready for PRM, and a few simply do not need PRM.

In this comprehensive overview we plan to help you quickly assess whether your company is a fit and ready for PRM software or not. We see three basic choices companies make when deciding how to use tools to manage their channel:

1. Assemble some partner resources, then use manual processes to support partners

2. Select and implement a PRM solution

3. Do nothing

All of these options are viable for different programs. They will yield different results, but may be a fit for your company’s situation. Let’s look at your channel program and see what best applies.

Who are Your Partners?

All channel programs should start from the perspective of your current and future partners. To understand this start by asking:

• What are the partner personas that make up your ecosystem?
• How are they segmented and how will you treat them differently?
• What is their partner journey starting with recruitment, through onboarding, and on to being a successful producing partner?
• With KPIs, where do they get visibility into how well they are performing?
• Are they partnered with other vendors you may compete with and how are they supported there?
• Are you selling a technical product or service that will require a certain level of expertise?
• Do partners provide first level support to your customer?

These are important questions. If you don’t have the answers right away, that is fine. We recommend conducting partner surveys or even scheduling 1:1 or group meetings with partners to gain this understanding.

The Partner Journey and Experience

Top sales and marketing consultants will help you understand your buyer personas and their buyer journey. They will also help companies develop competitive differentiators in the experience being delivered to the buyer. Similar to the buying landscape, you should think through your Partner Journey and the experience you provide. A few questions to use as a starting point:

• What is the experience of being recruited into a partnership with you?
• What does onboarding look like?
• How does a channel partner get trained to represent your company’s brand?
• What is the process for them to get material to share with prospects?
• What opportunities do they have to elevate their own brand alongside yours in a co-marketing fashion?
• Where do they register deals and get visibility into the pipeline?
• How will you handle conflict on deals?
• If they provide customer support, how do you help them deliver world-class support?
• With KPI’s, where do they get visibility into how well they are performing?

There are more questions to ask. If you want to assess your company, we have put together this quick assessment which will deliver a report on the areas where you may be doing well or that need improvement.

How Do You Define Success For The Channel Program?

You are probably two pages into an assessment on channel programs because you want to level up your partner program.If you look out 12 months, 18 months, and 24 months from now, what does your channel program look like? We recently conducted an industry survey and found five common goals channel leaders use to define success:

1. Increase revenue from our channel / indirect selling programs

2. Participating partners and engagement growth

3. Decrease in the average time it takes partners to onboard and train before producing results

4. Creation of a a best-in-class, partner-first experience ahead of the competition

5. A combination of the above

With an understanding of what defines success, you’re ready to move on to deciding if (or when) PRM makes sense for your organization.

Let’s look and see…

Deciding if PRM is Right for You and What to Do Next

Let’s bring these concepts together to determine next steps.

Yes, you need PRM.

On top of that, you’re thinking through the partner acquisition strategies, the aspects of the partner journey, and would like to deliver a world class partner program setting your organization apart in this competitive landscape. If you relate to these statements, you would be an ideal candidate to leverage PRM. We have seen our software eliminate manual processes and poor partner experience while being the tool users need to achieve their desired success. We recommend from here you do business case analysis to see what the ROI would be for you.

Maybe…but still unsure.

PRM may or may not be right for you if you have an unclear picture of who you want as partners and how they will work with you. We recommend gathering more information by engaging with industry experts like Gartner to discuss whether automating your partner program is the right strategy for you. You should also look at what your competition is doing and then interview potential partners to see what value they can bring to your product or service.  If you can envision a mutually-beneficial partner journey, you should explore PRM and how technology can support those efforts.

No, PRM will not help you.

If you are interested in indirect channel sales but haven’t done the research or started creating a channel strategy, PRM is not going to create these things for you. We recommend that you keep an eye on your competition or analogues to your industry to see how others incorporate indirect sales motions to accelerate their growth.

For those of you who see PRM as a potential fit, it’s time for us to talk about the information you’ve discovered and the state of your channel partner program. We can help you evaluate PRM technology and ultimately arrive at an informed decision.

I encourage those who are still uncertain to continue your research and scaling your partner program. Allbound, as well as other thought leaders in the space, have several great resources out there for you to utilize.

EMPOWER YOUR PARTNERS.

When your business relies on partners, it’s vital to empower them to sell better and more efficiently. Allbound is a flexible Saas platform that helps any size business recruit, onboard, measure, and accelerate growth through sales and marketing partnerships.

Make every engagement between you and your partners–and between your partners and their prospects–simpler, productive, rewarding and engaging.

Request a demo »

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