7 Partner Engagement Best Practices When Setting up a PRM

Table of contents

• Provide personalized content
• Keep content & news up-to-date
• Offer training and support
• Provide incentives and use gamification
• Make the portal easy to use
• Encourage collaboration
• Communicate regularly
• BONUS Tip: Revolutionary Partner Engagement Methods with Magentrix (without logging into the portal)

Are partners not logging in or engaging with your partner portal as much as you'd hoped they would?

Do your partners consider your portal to be “a mess”?

Watch the LIVE event: The State of Partner Engagement and Partner Portals in 2023 & Beyond

Partner engagement starts with you. Partner engagement with your portal starts with a good partner experience. If the experience you're giving your partners is lacking, assess your partner experience strategy first before concluding that nobody wants to engage with your partner portal.

Start by:

• Aligning expectations from day one
• Following up on those expectations with regular cadences
• Having the right PRM vendor. Be sure you're using a PRM software that actually has the capabilities to cater to a good partner experience. Look out for features that allow you to personalize the experience for the partner (read on for more on this)
• Ensuring you set up the portal right from the beginning
• And then keep up with regular maintenance and provide regular updates

Avoid the reputation of having a messy portal, with irrelevant information and resources, that nobody wants to log into.

Follow these best practices to deliver a great partner experience within your partner portal and thereby, increase partner engagement.

1. Provide personalized content

Customizing the content based on the partner's interests and needs can help encourage them to engage more with the platform.

• With Magentrix Engagement Pages, you can tailor-make pages for specific groups of users or individual partners, displaying all the elements and tools they may need for their specific journey.
• Here are some of the ways you can utilize Engagement Pages to increase the likelihood of engagement from your partners:
• Add widgets and shortcut links, such as:
  • Carousel or banners with further relevant information and a call-to-action
  • Training courses assigned to them
  • Deal inbox, registered deals and deal statuses
  • The latest news relevant to them
  • Upcoming events calendar (e.g.  webinars, in-person events)
  • Videos
  • Key contacts list
  • FAQs
  • Playbooks (popular or most recent)
  • Rewards leaderboard, badges and status
    
• For further personalization, use data on partner behavior to suggest relevant content:
  • A good place to start, with determining your partner content needs, is checking on partner KPIs with Magentrix’s Analytics capabilities
  • Create reports and dashboards to track partner activity, such as:
    • Which files they view (e.g. sales enablement docs, training docs, videos, etc.)
    • Training courses completed (analyze and determine whether partners may need more training or support and provide the relevant content)
    • Which parts of the portal they access the most (e.g. if they're always in the Knowledge Base, this could indicate they could benefit from more training, support or personalized content)
    • Number of logins per day/week/month (if you see low or no activity, this could be a sign that they could benefit from personalized content that resonates with their needs, but you'll have to get their feedback on this – either with a Magentrix Survey or a cadence.)

2. Keep content & news up-to-date

Give partners reasons to keep coming back. It's important to keep your PRM portal fresh with new content and resources.

This can help keep partners informed and regular updates can prove to them that the platform is worth their time.

They will learn to expect new information each time they log in.

Here are just a couple of the features that can help you with your content management:

• With Magentrix Document Management, you can store all the files you’ll need to share with partners. Sharing is made easy with:
  • Shareable, public-facing links
  • Collaboration capabilities on files (commenting, liking, mentions)
  • Trackable file views
  • Version control (makes updating content a breeze, no need to re-share the new link)
• With Magentrix’s Events module, you can add your latest in-person events, webinars, or other virtual event registrations

3. Offer training and support

Partners are more likely to engage with your partner program (and your portal) if they are given the tools to learn about the product.

And don't just offer a one-size-fits-all course and call it a day. Take time to come up with comprehensive, intuitive, and personalized training.

Help partners get the most out of your partnership with the proper training.

• Magentrix’s learning management system (LMS) goes above and beyond most PRM providers’ LMS. Use it to:
  • Offer product or technical training courses for your partners
  • Set up learning paths
  • Set up quizzes
  • Offer certification for training completed and have partners stay compliant
    
• Ensure you’re enabling partners to self-serve by accessing support resources within your partner portal. Do this by making use of:
  • FAQs: Offer a list of the most commonly asked questions
  • Help Documentation: Offer a quickly accessible, on-page help resource
  • Knowledge Base: Use the Articles module to create help articles which you can put together and distribute to partners as a self-serve support resource
  • Magentrix Wikis:
    • Set up technical references and guides for partners.
    • Create a wiki as a map to enable partners to easily find the path when they aren't sure where to go

4. Provide incentives and offer gamification

Offering incentives is a highly effective way to encourage partners to engage more (both in your partner program and your PRM).

This could include offering rewards for completing certain tasks or participating in training sessions.

Further to that, gamification can make things even more interesting and engaging by adding game-like elements such as points, badges, and leaderboards.

Boost partner engagement with Magentrix’s Rewards & Redemption feature:

• Points are rewarded to partners for activities completed.
• Partners can earn badges when unlocking the next level with gamification
• Partners can track their progress against others with leaderboards.
• Rewards can be redeemed via either an ecommerce storefront or gift cards

5. Make the PRM easy to use

Ensure that your partner portal is easy to navigate and that partners can easily find what they are looking for.

• Magentrix being a platform as a service (PaaS) offers unrivaled flexibility so you can adjust the platform to your exact requirements.
  • So if you feel the out-of-the-box capabilities don't meet you or your partners' specific needs, you’re able to customize the platform as you see fit.

6. Encourage collaboration

Allow partners to collaborate with each other, share best practices, and provide feedback.

This can help build a sense of community and encourage engagement.

• Share product feedback or other ideas: With Magentrix Idea Exchange, partners can provide their own feedback or vote on others’ submitted ideas
• Collaborate on leads & opportunities: Our social media commenting-style capability, Social Threads, is available on every lead or opportunity record
  • So, if you need to communicate on a particular CRM deal record, you can easily turn it into a collaborative thread and involve other team members or stakeholders in the conversation.
• With Magentrix Social Groups, you can create social media-style groups for members of a partner organization to communicate with each other

7. Communicate regularly

Regular communication is key to keeping partners engaged.

Send newsletters, updates, and alerts to keep partners informed of new content and resources.

• Magentrix Articles allows you to publish news and announcements.
  • After which you can use Magentrix Automation to have an automatic email notification be sent out whenever there’s a new update
• Magentrix Pop-Up Alerts will also allow you to set up in-portal pop-up notifications when a partner logs in, if you need to direct their attention to something in particular
• Use Magentrix’s Email capabilities to alert partners when there’s new training resources, sales enablement materials, marketing collateral to share, technical resources to distribute, etc.

8. BONUS tip: Revolutionary Partner Engagement Methods with Magentrix (without logging into the portal)

Simplify partner engagement with AI-powered, Email-to-Deal-Inbox Deal Registration: Partners can automatically have AI register deals for them in the partner portal, without even logging in.

✨ The process simply involves writing an email with the deal details, and should include the email dealreg@[insertvendorname.com].

✨ Upon sending the email out, the deal instantly becomes registered.

✨ The partner gets a confirmation email once this is done.

Check out the depth of Magentrix PRM's personalization capabilities by getting a demo.

LIVE Event: The discussion from the social posts mentioned here continue on a bigger platform. Watch it here: The State of Partner Engagement and Partner Portals in 2023 & Beyond

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