You’ve made it! Welcome to the last installment of our partnerDRIVEN blog series, spotlight trends in partner engagement and best practices to drive loyalty and performance.
If you’re struggling with partner relationship management (PRM), you’re not alone. Many manufacturers face similar challenges when looking to drive top-line growth. So let’s talk about how technology can synchronize all of the moving parts and ensure that your PRM works for you and your partners.
Why Aren’t Your Partners Using Your PRM Solution?
You’re probably already using some sort of PRM solution or know the manual approach isn’t cutting it anymore. And your partners probably aren’t using it as much as you think they should.
What’s holding them back?
- They’re overwhelmed. Your PRM solution isn’t the only software they use throughout the day. Partners difficult to navigate. Legacy portals aren’t designed with new partners in mind.
- It’s hard to use. Many partner portals are legacy custom-built solutions that are hard to access and have a lot of portals to access, and that can be overwhelming. When they don’t actively engage with your portals, it’s harder to get their attention and their time. Also, most portals aren’t accessible on mobile devices, even though most partners are in the field and depend on their mobile devices to stay connected. And when partners do get logged in, the user experience is less than impressive. Often, the content and application aren’t relevant to them or personalized to their needs.
- It doesn’t give them the right information. With most partner portals, information resides in disparate systems. That means partners don’t have easy access to the right reports and dashboards to help them run their businesses.
So … What Should Your Partners Get from Your PRM Solution?
If you give your partners a better PRM solution, they’ll use it. But what does a better PRM solution look like?
- It’s collaborative. It’s vital to collaborate with your partners through the lead-to-revenue management process. Your solution must incorporate a collaboration engine that brings together both your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and partner management process.
- It’s smart. Your new PRM solution should have business intelligence built into the foundation of the platform. Your partners want the right information. So do you. When all of you have real-time access, you can share that information through dashboards and reports. Better yet, you can collaborate.
- It’s easy. Partners are looking for support to make their day-to-day work easier. You can provide that by automating many of their daily tasks. Your solution must have workflows and rule engines incorporated into the platform to make it easy for your channel manager, marketing and sales teams to automate routine tasks.
- It’s open. Data is the backbone to partner engagement, and getting the right information into the hands of your partners is a key function of your solution. Make sure your PRM solution supports open API to make it easier and smoother to get information to your partners.
Ready to Get Started?
After 20 years of expertise with B2B and manufacturing clients, that’s why we developed partnerDRIVEN.
But what exactly is it? In a nutshell, partnerDRIVEN is:
- A Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution that supports channel marketing and the lead-to-revenue management life cycle – based on 20 years of expertise with B2B and manufacturing.
- Built using native functionality on the Salesforce platform. It brings together Sales Cloud, Community Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Pardot to accelerate partner onboarding, market share analysis, partner marketing, market development funds and partner lead management.
- Designed to meet any needs of organizations with indirect sales channels. Built on industry best practices, it can be configured to support any unique business process. That’s the power of leveraging a cloud platform to facilitate collaboration, accessibility and personalization.
How much could your business grow with better partner relationship management? What impact could partnerDRIVEN have on your top-line growth and partner engagement? Connect with me on LinkedIn. Let’s talk about it.
