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Built for professionals at the beginning stages of a channel
Identify the strengths and growth opportunities in your partner program
Best practices and insider secrets for partner recruitment
Whether you’re entering a career in partnerships for the first time, are curious about partner jobs in general or are ready to advance to a new level as a partner leader, gathering advice from pros in the space is invaluable.
We got to hear from some of the leading channel experts on our podcast, who shared their insights and experiences as partnership professionals. We’ve compiled four key takeaways to help those vying for a career in partnerships set themselves up for success.
4 Key Takeaways About Partnership Career Progression
There is no one-size-fits-all journey into partnerships
Though the world of partnerships is expanding and growing, careers in partnerships are still not as widely broadcast as other professional roles and opportunities. There’s no college degree in partner management, for example, so most leaders who end up in this space get there through diverse, even unconventional paths.
Will Taylor, Head of Partnerships at PartnerHacker, shared on episode 21 that he studied psychology in hopes of becoming a therapist.
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But I fell into doing sales… as, you know, a lot of people do, and either they have a psych degree or they just don’t know where they’re going to go in their career.
Taylor said he enjoyed the human interaction aspect of sales, but after becoming laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic, he shifted gears and came across a partner enablement job.
“Now the piece that was intriguing about that was that I love enablement. I love empowering others to take action and, of course, become successful through that action,” he said. “So, technically this partner piece was really just an interesting, additional thing that I didn’t know much about, but it sounded pretty cool.”
A background in sales is common for professionals who end up in partnership positions, but others might have experience in customer service, marketing or even more creative roles.
The common thread is the ability to connect and form relationships with other human beings, which is what partnerships are all about.
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When I was doing a bit of due diligence before I moved into the role, I did a lot of messaging on LinkedIn where I saw people moving from sales to partnerships,” he said. “I was like, ‘Hey, can we have a chat? I’d love to hear about your journey.’ Which I definitely recommend, by the way.
Advancing up the ladder starts with self-reflection
Partner managers who want to move up in their careers to director or VP level should already be doing the jobs to which they aspire. This is the advice Ben Bassett, Senior Manager of Channel and Alliances at Paystand, recommends on episode 24.
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My strategy starts with a common refrain that we so often hear. I see it on LinkedIn, and I did I hear some trainings: ‘You start doing the job before you have the job.’ That’s a great platitude,
A key piece of this is reflecting on the work you’re currently doing and what you want to accomplish next. Bassett suggests asking yourself, ‘Are my activities effective? Are they generating the results that I need to? Is it [benefiting my] clients and my company?’
Understanding how your role relates to the business can be tricky for a lot of people. Completing a self-QBR can help you pin down all that you’ve accomplished, which you can use as leverage as you work to advance to the next level.
Bassett said when he was reflecting on his role, he considered the goals he had as an individual and for the company at large. He then thought about whom he needed to connect with—from sales to finance to the product team—to accomplish these goals.
“Seeing how I could be a central hub and spoke out from there to the other departments, that’s what the trick was for me,” he said.
Be prepared to progress—even if the timing isn’t right right now
Getting promoted from an individual contributor to senior-level in the partnerships space can happen fast, but only if there is a business need and the timing is right.
Partner managers can carve out the perfect career path, prove themselves time and time again and have data to back up their success, but if the organization isn’t ready, a bit of patience is required.
In the meantime, equipping yourself with results and stellar performance, rather than feeling discouraged and stepping back, will give you a major advantage.
Kyle Schroeder, VP of Global Partnerships at Movable Ink, said on episode 23 that he prefers to hire from within and looks for individuals who are already demonstrating the skills needed to fit a more senior role—even if hiring isn’t happening right now.
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The ability to understand the role of first hand [sic] before you move into a more senior level role just goes a long way in your ramp time and your ability to, if you’re going to be a people manager, lead that team underneath you
Schroeder said he pushes his team to document and track their successes so when the organization is ready to hire for their “dream role,” they have the tools they need to back up their qualifications.
“Looking at what you are setting out to do on a quarterly basis and how is that impacting the business, and then taking those things, packaging up the results and starting to share those and circulate those around with your manager, with your peers, so that they can understand what you’ve been working on and the impact you’ve had… all of those things really set the stage to have that conversation about moving up in the organization to a role with greater responsibility,” he said.
Gain Even More Insights from Partnership Pros
From career advice to building out a partner program from scratch, tapping into the expertise of leaders and mentors in the space is not only recommended—it’s encouraged by partnership professionals.
Hear from the pros themselves on The Partner Channel Podcast, where we highlight experts’ experiences, wins and challenges in the partnership space.
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Ali Spiric
Latest posts by Ali Spiric (see all)
- Affiliate or Referral: How to Pick the Perfect Partnership - January 2, 2020
- 5 Ways These Remarkable Channel Leaders are Improving Their Partnerships - December 18, 2019
- eBook–How to Get Your Partners to Step Up to the Plate - November 26, 2019
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.