What Is a Best-of-Breed Partner Relationship Management Platform?
A best-of-breed partner relationship management platform should address the management of the partner lifecycle in a highly efficient and effective way. The five core elements are partner recruitment, partner onboarding, partner training, partner marketing and partner incentives management. In addition to addressing these five core elements individually, a best-of-breed partner relationship management platform should also be able to unify the lifecycle management across these five core stages. Let’s take a look at these core elements and see how they fit together. Partner Recruitment - I’ll begin with partner recruitment. In this phase, a company needs to be able to upload a list of prospective partners collected from various sources or set up a search and social campaign to drive traffic, via both inbound and outbound methods, to a destination microsite. On this microsite, the company needs to articulate in a very clear way why a potential channel partner should consider joining the company’s program. As a part of this process, the company may also hire outsourced telemarketing or event marketing, or an inside sales team may be engaged to reach out to the targeted list of partners and engage in dialogue to get them excited about various aspects of the company’s partner program. This process of recruitment can last anywhere between a couple of months and several years, depending on the company’s overall channel strategy. Often, large organizations end up acquiring smaller entities, which creates the need to re-recruit existing partners for new product categories. Here’s the bottom line: A partner relationship management platform should be able to provide an integrated set of outreach components—e.g., microsite, events—that inbound and outbound marketing teams can use to engage and excite potential partners and motivate them to join the partner program. Partner Onboarding - Once a set of partners have signed up for an existing channel program, the next step is to provide a high-quality experience to the partner base related to partner onboarding. During this phase, partners will need to sign a contract with the company based on the products and categories they will carry. They will also very likely have to put together a business plan, depending on what type of partner they are and the goals they are pursuing. The next step would be to make sure they can track their progress as they move through onboarding and initial training stages. The vendor who has recruited the partners should also be able to track the status of partners at various stages. Automating all of these onboarding steps is critical to providing a high-quality experience from the very beginning as partners begin to engage with the vendor. A state-of-the-art partner relationship management platform should address this need clearly and comprehensively. Partner Training - The third core element of the partner lifecycle is partner training. This applies both to new partners and existing partners. Very likely, a company with a robust channel program is constantly introducing new programs, new products, new offers and new pricing strategies. Accordingly, channel partners need to be continuously trained on various aspects of the changes a company is making to its channel program. This is where a learning management system (LMS) can play a huge role. A best-of-breed partner relationship management platform should provide modules for course creation, course management, learning path management and certification management. Training is a very important aspect of partner relationship management. A highly trained partner also tends to be a highly satisfied and successful partner. Therefore, it is critical to be able to create various training programs on a regular basis. It’s also critical to use other integrated marketing tools like search, social, events, microsites and so on to promote training programs and keep partners engaged in various aspects of traini...