Drive Your Channel Productivity Globally

Have you thought of using your customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage your partner network? In this video, we explain why that approach is a bad idea that will result in poor functionality and little or no ROI. Partner relationship management has a number of core requirements that today’s CRM systems simply don’t offer. These include modules for partner recruitment, engagement and training, as well as tools for offering campaigns, sales assets, MDF programs, reward and rebates to partners.

The world of partner relationship management is changing rapidly, driven by a number of economic developments, including Covid, the normalization of hybrid work, and jobless growth, but also by a number of related technological innovations. Look for the continued rise in marketplaces, evolving partner ecosystems, a focus on rewarding partner loyalty, an explosion of independent software, and partner-fed versus partner-led activities. This podcast will explore these trends and five addition technology trends that are changing the PRM landscape.

An affiliate is an individual or organization that represents your brand as well as your products or services in the marketplace. Before selecting software for onboarding affiliate partners, there are several key considerations you should keep in mind, including your target audience and the kinds of affiliates you will be recruiting to partner with. In this podcast, we will discuss the five most important factors to consider when selecting affiliate marketing onboarding software.

Onboarding partners into your channel marketing management platform can be difficult. Partners are busy, they lack marketing expertise, they may have dozens of vendors trying to get them engaged, and they lack resources to pursue new activities. Poorly designed tools haven’t helped. In this podcast, we discuss the importance of having the right programs and the right tools for each of your different partner types, so the onboarding process is relevant to partners and proceeds in a logical, step-by-step manner.

Because ecosystem partners are diverse, onboarding them with your channel marketing management platform can be challenging. A systematic approach to onboarding not only increases partner engagement, but also reduces costs. In this podcast, we explore five key steps for onboarding in the context of through-channel marketing automation (TCMA), including: target the right partners, align your programs, get the right tools to the right partners, align incentives and leverage business intelligence and analytics.

Affiliate marketing essentially refers to an activity where a third party – a person or an organization – promotes your brand to their connections or networks or audiences. Affiliate marketing management software allows you to automate the process of recruiting, engaging, enabling and managing such a marketing partner. In this article, we will explore what affiliate marketing management software is and how it works. What is affiliate marketing and how does it work? As we hinted at in the introduction, an affiliate represents your brand. Your brand could be a product or a service or even a person. Celebrities are individuals, but they are also their own brand. The goal of an affiliate marketing partner is to represent the brand and get paid in return for promoting it. This is the basic give-and-take relationship between an affiliate and a brand. Now, let’s talk a bit about what a brand is. When we think about brands, we traditionally think of big names, like Coca Cola, Nike, Samsung or Apple. All of these b

This decade is about the growth of the ecosystem. With rapid changes in technology, continued deglobalization and the redefinition of supply chains, the channel as we know it will transform our economies in terms of both demand and supply. That’s why onboarding of partners on a continuous and regular basis will become a central theme for most organizations, and onboarding is an important area is where partner management software can be a tremendous help. However, before we delve into multiple aspects of partner onboarding software and how it can help accelerate partner onboarding and time to revenue, let me provide some background on partner onboarding. As markets evolve, businesses digitize more and more to reduce operating costs while increasing access. In the process, they tend to de-leverage their direct go-to-market structure and emphasize an indirect model instead. As a result, we are now seeing a proliferation of various types of partners, such as affiliates, agents, consultants, wholesalers, resellers

It is an exciting time to be in the world of partner management. As the worldwide GDP grows and more advanced technology proliferates, go-to-market motions are being rethought constantly. Who would have thought a decade ago that Instagram would be a major influencer platform and companies would invest billions in promoting their brand ambassadors? Today’s partner management (PRM)  software is a part of that economic evolution, and a state-of-the-art PRM platform can enable seamless management of various partner types, including influencers and affiliate partners. In this article, we will explore what affiliate marketing is and how partner management software can help organizations onboard these types of partners. “Affiliate” is a term that has been around for centuries. The word comes from the Latin stem affiliare, meaning "to adopt". From a marketing perspective, affiliate refers to a person or an organization that is associated with your brand and willing to promote that brand to their customer base. In con

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software can help organizations manage commission payments to their partners in a timely and accurate fashion.

More and more companies are marketing and selling through the channel to increase reach and velocity of product distribution. With that said, implementing this sales approach is a very complex undertaking, and it’s easy to get off track. Here are the 5 core partner relationship management best practices to help you scale.  Know Your Partners  Before you can put together a solid partner relationship management framework and strategy, it is essential for you to understand who your partners are, how they make money, how they differ in the marketplace they sell to, and what keeps them awake at night. Without understanding these fundamental drivers, it is almost impossible for an organization to get true engagement from its partner base.   In addition to understanding their business drivers, it is also important for you to figure out how your products fit into their product portfolio. If your solution is the primary product in their portfolio, they will engage accordingly, but if you are just an add-on, y

The concept of a channel has existed since the Stone Age–when one person bartered with another. While technology has evolved rapidly over the past few thousand years, for many companies the state of their channel maturity still resembles antiquated methods that stifle growth. Based on our engagement with thousands of channel partners worldwide and our evaluation of how vendors deploy channel management, we have come up with a basic four-step framework for partner lifecycle management (or activities). We break down this lifecycle into four core areas: partner recruitment, partner engagement, partner enablement, and partner management. As a part of the channel management maturity evaluation, it is essential to understand which phase a company is in when it comes to these four different areas of activities. This serves as a starting point with the idea that the channel will evolve and grow. Phase 1: Laying the Foundation This is the start-up phase of channel development. When you look at the ac

When managing any team, you must have processes in place to support your initiatives and help you streamline tasks more efficiently. This is especially true in the channel management.   Each type of channel’s lifecycle is essentially the same – recruit, onboard, enable, transact, and manage. It’s important that each of these components is considered when mapping out an overall channel strategy. After all, growth depends on the success of distribution partners.   Here, we highlight the 6 C’s of channel management and how you should be applying them.  1. Create The first step of your channel strategy is to know who your target partners are and how you’re going to create programs to support them. Channel programs serve as a foundation – for both the product you’re trying to sell and training. Consistently curating programs and relevant content can keep your partners engaged, and most importantly, informed. Knowing that you’ll have the latest information to aid in their efforts will undoubtedly keep t

The discipline that embodies the principles and tactics of managing channel partners is called partner relationship management (PRM) or channel relationship management.  At the foundation of channel management, you’ll find partners. Partners fuel channel marketing, sales, and service efforts–their success is directly correlated to the overall channel’s success. While finding ways to manage them efficiently can be challenging, it’s a crucial component that can enable your organization to recruit and retain more partners, as well as, increase revenue at a much lower cost of sales and services than a direct sales and service model.    The Partner Journey  The word journey means it has a roadmap–with a beginning and an end. When it comes to partner relationship management the roadmap is all about attaining higher sales velocity and better customer satisfaction at a lower cost of sales and services. The beginning of this journey starts with partner recruitment and it ends with a high performing channel. 

A lot has changed around the world in all aspects of our life over the past 18 months, and that includes how lead management works in a distributed partner network. Before we delve into what has changed, what will change further and how to prepare for it, let me take a moment to describe what channel lead management is: If you are selling through a channel then you have one or more types of partners, such as resellers, value added resellers (VARs), agents, sub-agents, distributors, wholesalers, affiliates and more. Nearly all of these types of partners have an impact on your sales, either directly or indirectly. In general, there are two types of partners: Transacting partners – These are the partners who are actually actively selling your products on their website or through their business services. They may or may not provide additional post-sales customer care or services, but most do today because they can get recurring revenue from a sale. Since transacting partners are selling, they will have need

Salesforce is an amazing company led by its founder and CEO Marc Benioff. What started as a CRM-focused SaaS company has evolved over the past several decades into a business process automation ecosystem. Salesforce’s core strategy is to provide a few core applications around customer relationship management (CRM), service management and marketing, and allow independent service providers to connect to its platform and augment its core capabilities to create a more niche application. Salesforce also provides basic partner relationship management (PRM) capabilities, and in this article we will explore the pluses and minuses of Salesforce PRM. Before we proceed further, let’s take a step back and understand Salesforce’s overall strategy. As I said in the beginning, it started as CRM platform in a SaaS package—an alternative to on-premise software that had to be installed and configured on a company’s physical servers. (Yes, remember those days? Not so long ago, eh?) More recently, Salesforce has followed the

Partner relationship management (PRM) tools have existed for more than a decade right now. Although early in the 2000s there were a few companies trying to build applications to manage a distributor channel, the actual proliferation of PRM software didn’t really happen until about five years ago. The primary focus for PRM tools is automating workflows between a vendor and a partner to make it easy to do business. Most PRM platforms come with a whole bunch of application modules ranging from onboarding, contracts and learning management to asset sharing, deal registration, incentives and more. In this article we will explore the concept of co-branded assets and how co-branding can help vendors streamline distributed sales activities as well as increase sales.  You may be wondering what exactly asset co-branding is. Let me explain - Co-branding allows your channel partner to put their logo next to your logo on specified assets and share those assets with the end-customer. This allows the partner to claim a f

Partner relationship management (PRM) tools are gaining traction across multiple verticals. While PRM tool adoption started predominantly in the technology segment, over the past few years other verticals—including manufacturing, finance, insurance, real estate, franchising and others—have adopted various versions of partner relationship management (PRM) tools. However, despite the rapid growth of this category over the past few years, onboarding partners into a PRM tool remains a major challenge for most companies. In this article, we will explore what you can do to drive adoption of your PRM tools by onboarding your partners. Organizations market and sell through a network of channel partners primarily to generate revenue and provide support to an end-user base that a customer cannot reach directly. Using the channel tends to lower sales and marketing costs at a unit level but increase reach exponentially. Reach is the fundamental reason a company decides to go through channel. There are other reasons, h

In this age of digital and remote work, partner training has moved online via partner relationship management (PRM) tools. Gone are the days when you used to travel for roadshows or have the partners fly into a training center for hands-on instruction. Whether you are dealing with hardware, software or service, a lot can be done online. Yes, certain trainings do require face-to-face engagement to connect the blue wire with the blue socket and the red wire with the red socket, but most training can now be done online. This is where a state-of-the-art PRM tool can make a big difference. Whether you are building a new channel or upgrading the skills of your existing channel, training is the most critical and strategic activity that you can perform. Just as well-trained sales and service staff are crucial to the success of your direct sales operations, a well-trained partner base is essential to your channel success. While it’s true that many companies make training too complex or don’t invest enough in traini

More and more vendors are focused on an indirect sales (channel) model. Beyond the initial stages of fulfilment and support engagement, a major activity for these vendors is lead management. Channel marketing software can be a big help when it comes to lead generation and management. In this article, we will explore a variety of lead generation and management techniques that companies can pursue using channel marketing software. Channel marketing software focuses on three core sets of activities: marketing to partners, marketing through partners and marketing with partners. The latter two activities are focused primarily on lead generation, which typically entails generating demand from a partner’s installed base of customers or getting new prospects into the partner’s and company’s pipeline.  We will explore in more detail the tactics partners can use to drive lead generation from their installed base and net new prospect segments. But before we do that, let’s take a few minutes to consider some tactic

2020’s pandemic changed the world in many ways—especially when it comes to channel marketing. Traditionally, a significant portion of channel marketing activities have focused on face-to-face engagements in the form of events, tradeshows, roadshows, partner training, etc. However, the pandemic lockdowns and social distancing pretty much eliminated most face-to-face events. This led to a rapid evolution of digital marketing in a very short period of time. As part of this trend, the adoption of channel marketing software that offers a variety of remote marketing tools also accelerated. In this article, we will explore how and why the adoption of channel marketing software accelerated due to COVID-19. The world has been on a rapid digitization trend over the past few decades, but 2020 rocket-fueled the adoption of many digital platforms starting with tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other types of collaboration software. Leading channel marketing software platforms have always been at the center of channe