The Guide to Motivating Partners During Tough Times

To gauge where you are with partners, examine:

1. Sales numbers: Revenue numbers help you prioritize which partners deserve your investment as it’s a direct reflection of their efforts. This clarity will come in handy when creating motivation strategies  for partners.

2. Commitment level: Although this information will mostly be anecdotal, you can gauge your partners’ commitment. Begin with analyzing how your interactions with partners have been. Are they cooperative? Have they taken the initiative? How have they handled opportunities and deals? Determine whether a partner is active (regularly pursues new business opportunities) or reactive (passively accepts leads you generate for them) as this is critical to categorizing your partnerships.

3. Activity levels: Using Channel Insights, you can analyze the activity levels of your partners. Gather data on opportunities, sales calls, and pipeline. If you don’t currently utilize a PRM, note how many emails and other interactions you’ve had   with your partners recently.

4. ROI: You should track each investment you make in your partners to measure ROI. Track activities like market development funds (MDFs), training completed, and SPIFFs to determine whether partner performance matches the efforts you’re investing.

Partner motivation methods

Once you’ve determined the partners to invest in your ecosystem, it’s time to double down your efforts to engage them. You should meet your partners halfway to build an impactful partnership.

Prioritize the following strategies to boost your partners’ motivation:

1. Generate leads

Business alignment, common goals, and the ability to generate revenue are the foundation of strong partnerships. Handing off sales leads and closing deals together serves as the ultimate testament of your collaboration. Once you establish this aspect of the relationship, all the other motivation tactics will become more effective.

No (smart) partner can dislike a company that hands-off sales leads, fills their calendar with demos, and adds new opportunities to their pipeline. Salespeople thrive off of these activities. Regardless of whether you have a direct sales team or not, ramp up your lead generation efforts. Webinars, marketing campaigns, and gated content are all excellent initiatives to pursue to produce leads.

2. Invest time to the relationship

Just like any relationship, channel partnerships require time and effort to thrive. The most successful sales reps understand how important it is to co-sell with partners and involve them in deals and opportunities.

Spending time together can range from going out on sales calls together, social activities like dinners and outings, or virtual team bonding events. Make your partners understand that you are dedicated to their success. You can only achieve this by investing your time into them.

Time investment also involves staying in close contact and keeping the lines of communication open. Create a friendly dynamic in which you call your partner regularly and make them comfortable enough to call you when they have questions or concerns.

You won’t always have active deals or opportunities to collaborate on, so don’t limit your communication to these subjects. Call your partners and ask what issues they’re running into, what pitches they’ve had success with, or what feedback they’re getting. The goal is to know what your partner is experiencing to improve or manage issues preemptively.

When you’re managing several partner relationships, it can be hard to communicate with each of them—in fact, it can feel like a full-time job. Appointing a channel sales manager can boost your relationships’ quality by making each partner feel prioritized and valued. Using PRM software will free up your channel manager’s time on administrative tasks, allowing them to focus on relationship-building activities.

3. Incentivize partner behavior

Channel partner incentive programs, or SPIFFs, are contests that accelerate sales performance. Although SPIFFs are short-term incentives, they ultimately help achieve long term revenue goals and business growth. However, SPIFFs are an investment, so you should thoughtfully plan and execute them to achieve maximum ROI.

A SPIFF is a time-sensitive incentive program geared toward channel partners to boost sales activities. The main reasons for creating SPIFF programs are to improve performance, push a specific set of products, and engage salespeople.

Identify how you will compensate participating partners. SPIFFs are rewards-based, so your prize choice is critical in creating an effective program. If your participants aren’t excited by your offer, they may not be as motivated to succeed. Cash tends to be a popular SPIFF choice because there aren’t many people that aren’t excited about extra income.

Popular SPIFF rewards options:

1. Prepaid cards: This could be gift cards for popular businesses like Amazon or prepaid credit cards. Like Epson, some companies create branded prepaid credit cards equipped with an online account that continually disperses money to it as the sales reps close deals.

2. Travel: Some companies offer all-expenses-paid trips. Travel rewards are similar to Presidents Club, but for your partners. (Staycations have risen in popularity in 2020.)

3. Merchandise: When it comes to offering products, choose something that most people would appreciate. Laptops, tablets, and smartphones are something from which everyone can benefit.

4. Create Joint Marketing Strategies

Involving one another in your respective marketing strategies can forge strong bonds between partner companies. Joint marketing campaigns allow both teams to become familiar with each others’ product offerings.

In a virtual world, a great way to utilize joint marketing strategies is with MDFs and SPIFFs. When it comes to appointing market development funds (MDFs) and SPIFFs, make sure you engage your partners early on for optimal results. Preparing them for your upcoming promotions is a way to engage them further and set them up for success.

Many organizations make the mistake of launching their channel incentive program and then marketing it as an afterthought. Partners should be informed of a SPIFF program ASAP to prepare for it and have enough time to put in the work. You can use similar marketing tactics you use to promote your products to customers.

1. Tactics for promoting joint marketing opportunities and SPIFFs include:

2. Teasers and hints about your upcoming SPIFF launch

3. Email announcement campaigns

4. Virtual kick-off event or special announcements

5. Mailers and postcard

5. Provide a frictionless business experience

One aspect partners consciously or unconsciously judge is how easy it is to get business done. Making your partner’s jump through hoops to get deals registered or demo a product is a sure way to demotivate them. Partners want to do business with companies that are straightforward and even pleasurable to work with. The following are ways to make it as easy as possible to do business with you:

1. Technology and automation tools: While most companies use customer relationship management (CRM) software, some still haven’t implemented a partner relationship management (PRM) platform. PRM streamlines processes, making you more desirable for them to partner with. The ease of selling your product will help you gain mindshare and lead to repeat business. Automated deal registration and instant access to support materials make the sales process a breeze.

2. Partner recruitment and onboarding: From start to finish, PRM makes doing business with your company easier. Partner portals capture prospective partner’s attention, increasing your programs’ visibility. By proving that you’re up to date on technology, partners won’t dread spreadsheets, email chains, and loads of manual tasks. You’ll have leverage over competitors who may still be using outdated processes. Once committed to your partner program, your PRM will assist you by providing a robust, automated, and consistent onboarding experience for all relevant roles in your partner ecosystem. Onboarding is usually time and resource-intensive. PRM can automate processes like learning track creation, marketing material distribution, and deal registration. This favorable first impression offers a flattering window into how the business partnership will be.

3. Partner enablement solutions: PRM technology is the building block for your go-to-market partner sales strategy. An automated portal allows your registration and onboarding process to feel personal while remaining scalable. Upon registering, your partners will immediately gain access to a customized view of onboarding, training, and sales collateral, making them feel prioritized. PRM solutions make the startup process easy for partners, which sets the tone that you’ll be easy to work with on future deals. The quicker your partners get comfortable, the faster they’re able to produce.

6. Continual training

Like onboarding and enablement, training your partners will be a continuous process. The disadvantage of selling through the channel is that the sales team isn’t in-house. Without being part of your organization, partners don’t receive constant reinforcement. A reliable training process will ensure that your partners are ready to go to market with your product.

Since partners are another “face” of your company, properly training them is vital to your reputation. Develop a stable training process that all incoming partners can use. In the beginning, in-person or live video training is best. Face-to-face interaction builds rapport. Remote training enabled by a PRM is cost-efficient and scalable for long-term partnerships.

PRM increases partner engagement in your training program. Training materials are laid out in an intuitive, easy-to-access format within the portal. You’ll also keep partners up to date with continuous, refreshed training material. You’ll also be able to track their performance. Staying on top of partner performance allows you to reward and further engage them. Partners that are thoroughly trained and knowledgeable have more powerful customer interactions, which results in shorter lead times.

7. Establish a communication cadence

Create a schedule to connect with partners regularly. Base how often you contact them on the relationship and your goals. You can choose to hold weekly or bi-weekly check-ins—remember that consistency is key. The goal of planning your outreach ahead of time is to prevent dropping the ball or creating lapses in communication.

Another approach is to remove the barriers to partner communication with instant messaging options. Slack is a valuable tool that allows for immediate interaction. Most companies already utilize Slack or similar messaging solutions. Consider creating a separate Slack channel that allows channel reps to message with CAMs. This instant access will open the lines of communication with your partners and form stronger connections.

Bottom Line

The best ways to motivate partners are generating leads, spending quality time with them, and working on joint marketing campaigns. Any opportunity to spend quality time with partners will boost morale and generate more enthusiasm. Joint marketing campaigns can keep partners top of mind with one another while drumming up additional sales opportunities. Incentivize partner behavior by creating and promoting SPIFF programs and making it as easy as possible to do business with you. Lastly, ongoing training and communication are critical to staying top of mind with partners.

There’s a Smarter Way to Manage Your Partners

Allbound’s partner relationship management (PRM) tool allows you to automate partner training, manage MDFs, co-brand, and gain visibility into what’s working all while integrating with your favorite tools.

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.

Want to learn more? 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