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Identify the strengths and growth opportunities in your partner program
Best practices and insider secrets for partner recruitment
How to Create Cross-Selling and Upselling Strategies for B2B Customers
We all know it’s far cheaper and easier to upsell an existing B2B customer than to generate new leads, but identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities can be a challenge for partners. To identify those opportunities, you have to meet your clients where they are and intimately know their business needs.
The easiest way to do that? A business review.
Before knowing where to plug in, you have to sit down to talk to your customers and understand their business strategies. The first time you undertake a business review process might be intimidating, but it’s easy when you have a template to follow. Luckily, we’ve got one for you.
B2B Customer Discovery
Hopefully, you’ve laid the groundwork for a more in-depth engagement upfront when you’ve just signed the customer. In your initial meetings, it’s critical to get foundational information.
1. Identify your contacts and get an org chart
Make sure you know the people you’ll be interacting with directly and those who will be influencers on your proposed strategies. Sure, you’ve gotten to know whoever is in charge of tech, but the odds are that finance, operations, sales, and/or marketing will have a say in where tech dollars should be spent.
2. Align client goals with your objectives
You should understand how your customer’s expectations are (or are not) in sync with your capabilities. If you’re an MSP with an SLA for regular data backups, clearly outline (on paper) the type of data you’re backing up, any applicable regulations, cybersecurity insurance requirements, how quickly the customer has to be back up and running after an incident, and so forth. This conversation will lay the groundwork for the KPIs you’ll be measuring in the future.
3. Solicit partnership success stories
What has success with a technology provider looked like in the past? What behaviors would they like you to emulate? Where did a provider fall short, and how would you have mitigated that problem? Understand what success looks like for the customer so you can work toward that in the future.
4. Identify unresolved issues
Don’t just look at the mess that the last tech provider left in their wake that you’ll have to clean up. What other problems can you solve within the customer’s business? Look at unresolved systems, processes, and strategies that touch technology such as CRM migrations, marketing automation platform implementations, or ERP integrations. Here’s your first identified opportunity to upsell.
5. Lay out timelines
It’s important to know when they expect what to be done so that you can consistently measure against that metric as the engagement progresses. If you’re ahead or behind schedule, everyone needs to know. No one likes to be surprised by delays.
6. Lay out KPIs
Here’s an example that won’t work: An MSP takes on a small client who wants to hand over everything tech-related and have you take care of it. While that might sound like a straightforward assignment, it never works out that way. Don’t ever skip nailing down the exact metrics you’ll want to track throughout the engagement.
The Annual Business Review
Business reviews come in two flavors: annual and quarterly. If you execute your customer discovery right, the ABR will flow naturally. And if you do the annual business review right, your quarterly reviews will be short, sweet, and productive. The ABR is where you become intimately familiar with your client’s business, and it should take no less than one hour, two if you can swing it. Here’s what it should accomplish:
1. Lay out business objectives
The only way to deepen a customer relationship is to make sure that you’re right there alongside them as they scale and grow, helping them accomplish their goals. What are their ultimate goals? Where do they want to be in five years? Maybe they eventually want to move into another vertical, for instance. Do you have (or can you gain) expertise in that industry to help them get there?
2. Review goals of the past
Whether this is your first annual review with the client or not, you need to know what’s outstanding from last year that you’ll need to wrap up or what goals have been accomplished that you can check off your list.
3. Set top three business goals for the coming year
Get granular. Is it to gain 30 new logos? Land an enterprise account? Launch a new product or service? Implement new systems? Outlining these in detail will help you keep track of how the client is progressing toward those goals and, once again, where you can plug in to help them get there.
4. Who has what responsibility?
All too often, customers like to pin the blame for a delayed project on the service provider. The only way to keep this from happening is to outline who has to do what to move the effort forward from the beginning. If the goal is to integrate the CRM and a marketing automation platform, but they haven’t hired anyone to manage those platforms, there’s only so much you can do. Outline what needs to happen at each step to get to where you both want to go.
Then, and this is important, have both you and the client physically sign off on the plan. Putting your John Hancocks on the strategy will keep both sides accountable.
The QBR
If you’ve done the annual business review right, and you’re quickly checking in with your clients monthly to get or provide updates, then the QBR should be a breeze. Follow the below template for productive conversations that naturally reveal upselling/cross-selling opportunities.
1. Recap wins and misses
What’s gone well? Where did either you or the client fall short in the strategic goals you outlined in the QBR? What’s behind or ahead of schedule?
2. Talk about rearview-mirror metrics
Take a glance at previous quarters to ensure you’re tracking toward your goals. Did you meet or exceed SLAs? Provide first call resolutions at the help desk? Successfully complete a cloud migration? What objectives have you reached, and which are you still working toward?
3. Discuss open projects
Quick and easy, since you’ve had monthly check-ins. Where are you in the strategic goals you outlined together? Behind or ahead of schedule? Both should be recognized.
4. See if business objectives have changed
Nothing is static in business, including annual goals and strategies. What’s changed since the ABR? You need to know to pinpoint your upsell opportunities.
5. Complete the QBR scorecard
At the close of the ABR, map out the goals you want to hit in the year, and then track them quarterly in a scorecard. Lay out what’s happened each quarter to advance those goals, and give each a score like ABC or red, yellow, green to show at a glance where you are in each initiative. That transparency is something your clients will appreciate.
6. Ask about pain points
Are they satisfied with how quickly you respond to help tickets? Have there been any customer complaints? What can be improved in the relationship?
7. Sign off
Just like the ABR, you and the client should sign off on the QBR to hold everyone accountable. Then close it out and move on.
For additional guidance, utilize our free QBR PPT presentation template.
Takeaways About B2B Cross Selling & Upselling Techniques
There is no way to upsell or cross-sell a customer to the best of your ability if you don’t know how you can plug into their short- and long-term business strategy. You have tons of expertise. Why wouldn’t you want to know where else you can bring it to bear? The ultimate goal of a service provider should be to become a technology consultant, not just “the tech people.” Get to know your customer’s business intimately. Know where they’re going, when they want to be there, and where there are gaps that you can fill. After that, identifying upselling opportunities is easy breezy.
- Business reviews are the best way to keep track of an engagement and ensure the customer is satisfied. It’s hard to upsell a client who’s unhappy with what you’re providing. You can’t deepen a customer relationship if they churn.
- Keep track of your upsell opportunities the same way you’d track a new lead. Register them in the relevant PRMs. Guide them through the pipeline. Know where you need enablement from vendors and what that enablement should be.
- The goal is to make QBRs short and sweet, so invest time up front in the annual business review to lay out goals, KPIs, and strategies.
Additional Reading to Assist With Identifying Upselling Opportunities
- The Ultimate Lead Nurturing Strategies for Partner and Direct Sales – This article will help you prioritize your time on the right leads and execute effective retargeting to improve the health of your sales pipeline.
- Auditing Your B2B Sales Funnel – Recommended Process and Tips – Rarely is a B2B sale made within a single interaction. Use this guide to evaluate the various stages of your sales funnel to identify weak spots and strategies for improvement.
- Deal Registration Software & Program Best Practices – An essential step of any sales program is deal registration. Learn about software features that can help you and your partners execute with ease and gather helpful intelligence along the way.
- Attribution: Making Sure Channel Sales Gets Credit for 2022 Wins – Accurate sales data is essential to your decision-making. Dive deeper into how different attribution models can help paint a fuller picture of how channel partners contribute to your bottom line.
- Advanced Channel Growth Strategies Based On Current Milestones – This article presents a roadmap for how your partner program can grow and suggested the next steps to take based on your current size and reach.
partner management. She has been actively involved in the industry since 2018.
- How Pentera Enabled Partner Training & Certification at Scale with Allbound - January 30, 2023
- Reporting Structure Best Practices For Channel Data Management - January 26, 2023
- Key Software Features that Support Partner Marketing - January 26, 2023
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Ali Spiric
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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.