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Business growth in one form or another tops any list of 2023 goals for organizations. As 2022 draws to a close, now is the time to start thinking about the groundwork needed to achieve those objectives in the new year. And that means leaning into your partner channel
As your business grows, so too should your partner program. Scaling existing channels results in more leads and expanded audience reach, bolstering other efforts across the organization, and helps secure long-term support for the internal partner channel team. A win for all!
Growing current partnerships requires careful planning, aligning all involved parties and integrating with your PRM to track and measure progress at each step. Here are some helpful, effective steps for scaling your existing channels next year.
Align Your Internal Teams
Above all, sustainable growth throughout your partner ecosystem requires internal alignment among your organization. Success doesn’t happen in silos
Support from C-suite leaders is imperative to securing the resources and funding needed to scale a team. Whether that’s hiring additional partner channel staff in the new year or further investing in channel sales technology that will allow the team to scale over the long-term, having advocates for channel sales at the leadership level is key.
Use data and metrics to get executive alignment. Heading into a new year – with the renewed budget that a new quarter brings – is one of the best times to showcase the impact channel sales had on organizational goals over the previous year.
Ensuring proper attribution of leads and conversions to channel sales helps your team get credit where credit is due, for one. Channel sales data and metrics that track the customer journey are also important for creating your 2023 strategy and getting buy-in from leadership.
Cross-Departmental Collaboration
Alignment doesn’t stop at the executive level.
Work across departments — from product to marketing, sales, IT, finance, and operations — to determine what resources you have available to direct toward the growth of your partners and program. Target audiences, messaging, content utilization, and data tracking aren’t limited to a single team. Cross-departmental collaboration means more hands on deck and paves the path toward achieving common goals.
As you identify which existing channels are ready to scale, for instance, see if there are any gaps in your partner management team. Are there any roles that need to be filled to accommodate forthcoming growth? Staffing needs should reflect your strategic business goals and can be a good opportunity to better align departments.
As you open new positions, consider how the role could act as a bridge between teams. As an example, partner marketing, partner account management, and partner development positions all lend themselves well to supporting channel partners while also working closely with sales representatives or marketing associates.
Create and Communicate Goals with Existing Partners
As you start planning out your 2023 goals and plans to scale, make sure your existing partners are kept in the loop.
‘Increasing revenue,’ ‘breaking into new markets,’ or ‘gaining wider brand recognition’ may be the ultimate aim this year, but it’s vital to communicate specifics with your partners.
- Create SMART goals, such as the exact number of prospects or customers you’re aiming for in a specific timeframe, to keep everyone accountable and on track.
- Ensure your goals are aligned, so partners know what exactly they’re striving to accomplish and when – and how it benefits them. Successful partnerships are a give and take where both parties come out ahead.
- Make sure partners know about the rewards and incentives you offer to achieve those goals. That could be anything from a SPIFF program with monetary rewards to Market Development Funds (MDFs) that provide dollars for trade shows, ads, and other marketing activities.
- Track progress towards these goals by having a solid reporting system in place early on. Use your PRM to keep track of metrics and KPIs aligned with these goals so everyone is on the same page right from the start.
Equip Partners with the Tools They Need
Your PRM isn’t just for tracking goals, of course. It’s a powerful tool to equip your partners with everything they need to best market your business.
As you head into the new year, make sure the material and content you’re providing your partners is still relevant and timely.
- Conduct an end-of-year portal audit that looks at your portal and identifies areas that need to be cleaned up. Does your co-branded content need to be refreshed? Do your existing training materials include all updates from the past year?
- Take some time for (virtual) face-to-face meetings with your partner’s sales reps and customer-facing team members to get their feedback and learn if there are any areas where they need more support. This will help ensure they’re effectively communicating the value of your offerings over the coming year.
- Think also about the information your partners need to sell successfully. Provide data relevant to your partner’s target audience, including your organization’s sales wins and challenges, customer demographics, and how well your company is meeting its goals
Measure Success with your PRM Software
While you’re reviewing your partner portal, dig into success metrics as well. Knowing exactly what’s working and which areas need improvement are foundational to tweaking your channel strategy for the new year. Use your PRM to set and analyze checkpoints and adjust strategy and goals as needed.
Metrics to gauge success often center around revenue, profitability and opportunity (such as number of leads, lead value and closed versus generated leads). Running reports on these areas and using the data as a benchmark is a must. But don’t forget to also dig into what’s working on the partner side. Are your partners engaging with your content? Are they logging into your portal and completing training? Which partners are driving the most opportunities?
As you scale your channel sales, make sure you’re taking full advantage of all the features your PRM offers.
When you set partnership tiers, for example, utilize automation to move partners up to the next level as they complete milestones. Use partner journey automation for trigger-based notifications based on specific actions to nudge your partners along the right path.
Using your PRM effectively will engage partners, help incentivize customers and give you an overview of how your channels are scaling throughout the coming year.
Smashing 2023 Channel Growth Goals
For more insight into growing your channel sales program, incentivizing partners and tracking success in 2023, check out the following resources.
- Automate, Scale, Integrate – PRM System Criteria – Strong partner relationships and an engaging channel experience lead to long-term success. Learn how to leverage your partner portal to build a stronger program.
- Advanced Channel Growth Strategies Based On Current Milestones – From first recruiting and enabling partners to taking your partner program global, discover which advanced channel growth strategies you should develop at each maturity stage.
- Adding Partner Types to Your Channel Sales Program – How do you figure out who else you need in your partnership community and how do you bring them into the fold? Here’s how to start adding different types of partners and the next steps as you scale.
- 16 Partner Program KPIs to Measure Channel Performance – These KPIs can guide you to successfully managing the complex web of partner relationships that make up a channel program as well as measure your return on investment.
partner management. She has been actively involved in the industry since 2018.
- Live Podcast Recording: How a partner-first approach will transform your revenue generation - March 27, 2023
- Shortening the Sales Cycle By Prioritizing Partnerships - March 21, 2023
- How to Utilize Partners in All Aspects of Your Organization - March 1, 2023
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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.