BROADCASTS.com

b'Customer relationship management (CRM) has evolved into a multi-billion dollar segment, with good reason. However, the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) category is relatively new, even though channel programs have been around for many decades. Why is that?\\nWell, phone systems for tracking and taking better care of customers were essentially started by the airline industry back in the late Sixties and early Seventies as the volume of ticketing requests and changes began to grow. Next, in the Eighties and Nineties, as computers took over the business environment, contact management software evolved as the better version of a Rolodex.\\nStarting in the mid-Nineties, contact management software started to evolve into the precursor to what we now know as a customer relationship management. This development was driven by companies like SAP and the like, who were focused also on processes like inventory management and financial controls as features of their enterprise resource management software.\\nSalesforce.com took a visionary role in taking on-premise sales management software to the cloud and deservingly became market share leader in this category. This category further evolved to provide a combination of three core functionalities - marketing automation integration, sales process automation and support.\\nHowever, comparatively little time or resources have been devoted by the CRM market leaders to building a purpose-built application that addresses the workflow of channel management. Focused on solving the horizontal problem of Salesforce automation, the bigger players have overlooked the need to address channel marketing automation by development purpose-built applications like\\xa0partner relationship management (PRM).\\nTypical CRM software includes core management and tracking functionality such as leads, contacts, opportunities, tasks and projects, that allow a sales person to develop prospects and track them through to close a sale. Most CRM systems do a good job of sales tracking and post sales account management activities by linking modules like tasks, calendars, quotations and invoicing. There is a plethora of other applications that can be added to extend some of the core CRM functionalities for channel management purposes. However, the main challenge with this approach is to take a horizontal product that works for B2B sales, and make it functional in a very different environment. Channel sales, for a start is a two to three tier process, and it gets even more complex than that.\\nChannel marketing entails a whole different set of requirements for functions including partner recruitment, partner engagement, partner enablement and partner management, that are not addressed by current CRM systems. Almost all CRMs provide excellent functionality for contact management, tracking sales activities, reducing labor needed to send out a quote, close a sale, or grow a current account, but almost none are able to adapt to the dynamic, multi-tenant environment that is a prerequisite for any channel management structure.\\nAlmost all channel management activities require constant recruitment of existing and/or new resellers into a specific set of programs, plus integrated outbound marketing tools that none of the CRM tools offer today. Once a partner has been recruited, they must be properly classified, or profiled and to be clustered into a specific group of vertical or other classifications, but most CRMs today are not flexible enough to complete this profiling activity.\\nAs a further example, it is essential to track training progress and development of that partner\\u2019s competence. While there are standalone learning management systems that could potentially be patched into an existing CRM program, the majority are not flexible enough for this. As a result, CRM software doesn\\u2019t allow channel account managers to determine their partners\\u2019 evolving technical skill level, which is a critical requirement for B2B IT solutions sales....'