5 Successful Partner Relationship Management Strategies

Does your company’s go-to-market strategy rely on value added resellers (VARs), technology integrators or other developers/manufacturers that compliment your products?

A cloud-based partner relationship management (PRM) portal can help you to effectively communicate, collaborate, and educate your channel.

We’ve compiled five ways PRM portal software can help generate predictable revenue streams. Learn how to increase channel sales and improve forecast accuracy.

Streamline lead and opportunity management

A PRM platform provides a far more strategic way to track and nurture the pipeline and can replace forecast calls with multiple partners and their respective partner managers.

When deals are registered, every stage of the lead or opportunity is visible – this enables smoother sales operations.

Not only will it ensure adequate inventory or suitable functionality is available, it also lessens the chance of potential channel conflict.

If you distribute sales leads to your channel, PRM technology makes it easier to inform your partners about customer requirements, close/win dependencies and specific pricing offers based on the relationship with manufacturers or developers.

A PRM portal empowers partners throughout the sales cycle - from registering leads to documenting the status of opportunities and ideally, requesting the resources to close the deal.

It simply makes it easier for partners to track activities with the vendor.

Improve decision-making with data

You don’t want to make decisions based on assumptions of what is happening in the marketplace – it can lead to errors in product development, strategic investment and resource management.

A PRM portal gives you access to the data you should seek to make educated decisions:

1. Tracking opportunities from partners can provide you with more accurate sales forecasting.
2. Archived discussions from your partners for timely resolution or follow-up.
3. Real-time reporting that lets you easily see what content and resources are most popular with partners.
4. Performance metrics in customizable dashboards to help your partners understand how they are performing against quotas and goals.
5. Collaboration newsfeeds for in-context, dynamic conversations and thereby, reducing email communications.
6. Idea submissions to capture feedback and inspiration that can shape product marketing and development initiatives.

Partner onboarding and training with secure access

Learning materials such as videos and playbooks for new channel partners are critical for successful onboarding.

A partner management portal makes these resources easily accessible (on a secure platform) and promotes self-taught, well-versed channel partners.

Some common training journeys, when onboarding a new partner, which PRM portal software serves:

• New partner rules of engagement
• organizational training
• product training and delivery certification
• New product sales training
• Pre-sales training
• Implementation
• Support training
• Training for competitive sales, pricing, use of co-marketing resources and opportunity management

By offering certifications and incentives for course completion, you also personalize the learning experience for users - they can pursue education based on their interest and expertise.

Provide a unified business intelligence resource

Offering an unorganized jumble of websites, contacts, forms and other material is a great way to confuse and frustrate your channel.

A much more efficient channel management strategy would be to offer all the above via a secure, cohesive PRM platform which allows for personalization based on roles and partner tiers.

Besides opportunity management, technical documents, sales collateral and training materials, a partner portal can offer:

• A knowledge base for case management and self-service
• News, press releases and other articles through announcements
• Easy document management, with collaborative features (i.e. for contracts and RFP responses)
• Product catalogs and order processing
• Collaborative forum discussions
• Managing promotion of upcoming events partner can attend
• Management of MDF

A partner portal enables your team to easily draw on company data, be more effective with customers and increase productivity.

Prevent partner churn

Often, your partners may have multiple partnerships with different hardware, software or equipment vendors. A partner management portal solution can make a vendor easy to sell for by connecting partners to the resources they need in one place instead of spread over disconnected phone calls, emails and static websites.

A partner can easily access personalized content to confidently represent your company - fostering a positive and mutually beneficial relationship on both ends.

Upgrading your channel program with strategies like a partner portal have quantifiable benefits. A study done by Aberdeen Group, Territory, Training, Technology: Best- in-Class Channel Sales Management, shows:

When enabled with platforms and processes that support channel partner efforts, the channel achieves:

These statistics reflect a simple truth: An investment in a PRM portal will support a healthier channel program with less churn and more revenue.

Learn how a cloud-based PRM portal can deliver measurable results and enhance your channel operations – contact Magentrix for a personalized risk-free consultation and demo.