How a Partner Relationship Management system benefits your business?

As a provider of PRM solutions, we've invested extensive hours in calls and workshops with Partner Managers across diverse stages of company development. While each partnership is distinct, recurring themes often emerge. We've condensed the most prevalent benefits into this comprehensive list:

Scalability

Let’s start by saying you can definitely build partnerships without a PRM/partner management system. Many of the people we’ve talked to are working this way. They either use Excel or their internal CRM solution to manage them. This is quite cost-effective and easy to implement, but comes at a price when it comes to scale.

When you are working with up to a few dozen partners, you can still get away with it. With scale, it becomes difficult to track. Mistakes start piling up, and most of all, it becomes difficult to understand where you actually are with your partnerships. Let's face it; we are only human, and there is no magical way for you to keep 30 different partners in the back of your mind, especially if this is not your only task (which is likely true since you are just building them).

You need to understand that no single partnership is the same. With some, you will have a fixed commission rate; with others, you might be more flexible. With some, you are talking about marketing activities, where you need to keep track of these conversations and action items. With scale, it becomes unbearable, and you start forgetting what you promised them.

A PRM system can help you in the following ways:

1. Help you keep track of all communication/notes/action items
2. Keep all information in one place
3. Keep you informed about the different partner types and their expectations/goals

Automation

Imagine you need to inform some of your partners about a webinar that you are hosting. You first need to select who you want to target. Secondly, you need to send them an email. They might not want to see other partner’s emails, so you either use the BCC field or send each mail individually (by extension possibly hurting your Domain Reputation, which means fewer of your future emails will get delivered). Or you could do it via a partner portal.

Now imagine you want to update your superior on the lead statuses of the partners. You could connect with each one individually and ask them for an update. You could also send them an email and collect their responses (which will take time to respond and break your planned tasks for the next few days/weeks). Or you could do it via a partner portal.

The partner management system can help you to:

1. Streamline your communication
2. Request information from many partners at once
3. Share news, insights, changes without breaking a sweat
4. Keep your pipeline up to date as much as possible

Knowledge Sharing

A partner is not just another company. It is someone who understands what you do, and, in a perfect world, also the benefits your services/product bring. You may work with some partners that know you and can present you to a potential customer in a positive way, but these relations were built over time. It was possible when you are working with 5-10 partners, but at scale, it becomes a full-time job just to keep them informed.

It is also worth mentioning that your product/services can (and will) change over time. In this case, your partners should know this. This is something that might be quite tricky to achieve when you are working without a specialized tool for the job.

Here are a few ways a PRM system can help you:

1. Onboard new partners, inform them of your product, help them sell it better
2. Inform them of changes and make sure they know what these changes mean
3. Help you build a sales force to promote your product

Single Point of Truth

When you consider building a partner network, you might think of it in a simplistic way. "It is just a couple of companies that share leads with us". And that might be the case at the very beginning. But with time, you will start noticing that there is way more information, and it is often highly connected.

Your leads, for example, will have statuses and updates. Many times the same lead can come from many different partners - who should reap the benefits?

You are meeting with the partners on a monthly or quarterly basis. How do you keep track of all the action items that they promised to deliver, or worse: that you promised to deliver to them? What about commissions and payouts? What about the ever-changing Partner Managers - how to keep track of who should be informed, who is still working and who is not? 

A partner management system can help you by:

1. Keeping all the information in a single place
2. Storing the information in an organized way
3. Updating the information automatically when needed
4. Reminding you which elements require your attention

Driving Engagement

Not all partners are engaged in the same way. Some of them will contact you weekly, others barely think about you every quarter, when they are looking at their commitments. While there is value in focusing on the ones that deliver the best result, you

a) need to be able to identify them and

b) can’t forget about the others.

In many cases, if you count the number of leads coming from the top partners (only a handful) and the number of leads from the long-tail partners (unengaged ones), they might be similar.

A good Partner Relationship Management platform will automatically try to engage the partners. Incentivize them to keep logging in, adding leads, and interacting with you. A good partner platform will also suggest which partners are becoming inactive and when to approach them.

Some of the things a channel management system might do to solve these issues:

1. Automatically send reminder emails to the partners
2. Create a report of inactive partners so that you can approach them
3. Engage them in another way (e.g., gamification)
4. Help them see value in the partnership

Data Insights

Partnerships can be very lucrative. We’ve met companies who drive 40% of their revenue from partnerships alone. But are they really?

• Are your partners bringing in more leads than it costs you to hire the Partner Manager that handles them? How many of these deals are closing?
• Maybe some partners deliver bad quality leads that only waste the time of your sales team?
• Which partners are performing better than others?
• Which partners are inactive or were active but somehow fell silent?

There are countless data points that you can/should know about your partners. Typically, this is data that your superior might request from you, but even if he/she doesn’t - wouldn’t you like to know and make informed decisions?

How a channel management platform can help you:

1. Deliver actionable insights on leads, partners, and their performance
2. Compare partner types, tiers, and countries to see which one is bringing in more sales
3. Help you identify areas that you should focus on, to build a truly amazing partnership program

Partner Support

Some of the available platforms also include a support option, where a partner can reach out to you or your technical support to help with a lead, a technical question, or general partnership questions. These can pile up, and you can quite easily miss them in your inbox, so a good solution can be a ticketing system, where not only you know what you already responded to, but also you can keep track of how fast you answer each partner. And then, once you’ve responded, you can share this information with others easily, to help you save time.

How to benefit from a partner solution:

1. Collect requests from partners in a single place to keep track of what’s left unanswered
2. Measure your response times to help build a positive experience
3. Share the answers with all partners, to help build awareness

Professionalization

Let’s face it. In order for anybody to sell your product, you must first build a gigantic amount of trust that your solution is the one that solves the issue. Your product comes first, it should sell itself, but if you give an impression of a small/unorganized company, it can hurt your credibility. 

A Partnership Relationship Management tool can also help you build a listing of all your active partners. Because of this, they will get more exposure & your company looks more professional (they are trusted by others). It can also be a nice incentive to actually become partners with you.

A PRM system can help you by:

1. Making you look professional
2. Showcasing your partners in a public space
3. Avoiding costly mistakes and misunderstandings

We hope these insights will help you build amazing partnerships. Feel free to connect with us to share thoughts/ideas and talk about our solution to these issues.

Let's discuss your partnership needs

and how can Partnerplace help to address them

Let's discuss your partnership needs