Drive Your Channel Productivity Globally

Affiliate marketing software has become an essential tool for businesses looking to leverage independent affiliates to promote their products or services. However, with so many software solutions available, it can be overwhelming for businesses to choose a platform that aligns with their needs and objectives. In this podcast, we share a list of the top affiliate marketing solutions in the marketplace and provide an overview of each product's features, pros, and cons to help businesses evaluate and compare different options.

Partner relationship management and partner ecosystem management are crucial for organizations relying on a distributed partner network to sell their products or services. In this podcast, we look at the historical challenges and the core benefits of partner ecosystem management. The challenges include fragmented technical infrastructure. The benefits include reduced complexity and cost and increased customer satisfaction. Implementing partner relationship and ecosystem management software is essential to building a high-functioning partner ecosystem.

Partner ecosystems enable companies to share resources, reach new customers, and innovate faster. However, to fully reap the benefits of a partner ecosystem, companies must empower their partners by building solid relationships, nurturing loyalty, and using automation to improve partner performance. In this video, we discuss how to build strong relationships with partners, develop long-term relationships with partners via loyalty programs, and fine-tune partner performance with data analytics and artificial intelligence.

Successful organizations prioritize partner productivity as a key performance indicator. This requires a strong focus on encompassing crucial activities like training and certification and providing sales and marketing tools. In this podcast, we will explain the significance of partner enablement and explore how state-of-the-art digital infrastructure, specifically a partner relationship management (PRM) SaaS application, plays a pivotal role in driving productivity and growth.

In today's business world, companies increasingly rely on partners – such as affiliates, influencers, and resellers – to reach their end customers through indirect channels. This podcast explores the crucial role that partner recruitment and onboarding play in expanding business opportunities and increasing market reach. We also examine the benefits of advanced software solutions that unify partner relationship management and ecosystem management activities, including reduced complexity and costs, accelerated time to market, and integration with third-party systems like CRMs.

Partner ecosystems are networks of businesses, resellers, and/or influencers who work together to promote and sell your products or services. Building a solid partner ecosystem can help you expand the reach of your business, increase brand awareness, and generate more revenue. This podcast discusses the three crucial components of building a partner ecosystem – partner recruitment, partner enablement, and partner management – and explains how an agency can help you with the entire process.

Investing in partner portal software is a strategic move and an essential step toward maintaining competitiveness in today's dynamic business environment. By harnessing the power of this digital infrastructure, brands and organizations can unlock the full potential of their partner network, leading to more tremendous success and growth. This podcast explores the many benefits of using partner portal software to create a 24/7 digital infrastructure for managing channel partners, driving brand awareness, increasing sales, and operating more profitably.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already transforming partner ecosystems in several ways. Businesses that leverage this technology can increase customer satisfaction, drive channel sales growth and improve their bottom line. AI is helping businesses optimize the supply chain, enable personalized customer experiences, automate sales and marketing processes, optimize price strategies, and more. In this podcast, we briefly look at each of these business practices in the context of partner management and explore how AI is improving them.

ZINFI Technologies' podcast series delves into channel management maturity, emphasizing the need for companies to evolve from antiquated methods that hinder growth. They present a four-step framework for partner lifecycle management: recruitment, engagement, enablement, and management. Understanding the maturity phase in each area is crucial for channel management evaluation. The podcast highlights the importance of laying a solid foundation and gradually optimizing the channel. ZINFI Technologies offers customizable programs to empower vendors, emphasizing the significance of scaling methodically and leveraging partner relationship management automation for streamlined processes and global scalability.

Deal registration programs are commonly employed by companies to incentivize and reward their sales partners for bringing in new business opportunities. However, despite their good intentions, these programs often fail to deliver the desired outcomes. In this video, we explore 10 of most common reasons programs fall short, including lack of clear guidelines, complex registration processes, inadequate incentives and rewards, limited partner enablement, and internal competition and channel conflict, among other reasons.

Traditionally focused on banking and warehousing, now embraces a platform-centric approach in the wake of emerging subscription-based models and major hyperscaler platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, and Google Cloud. This transformation has revolutionized the technology industry, enabling more integrated and efficient delivery of software and services to end customers. This podcast explores the ongoing metamorphosis of technology distribution and its profound impact on the technology sector.

Affiliate marketing is playing an increasingly important role in partner ecosystems, and businesses are discovering they need a dedicated tool to manage the complexity of these relationships. In this podcast, we discuss a number of critical areas of collaboration between businesses and affiliate marketers, including marketplaces, onboarding, personalization, promotion, performance, payment, and analytics. An affiliate marketing tool should have robust features to manage these activities to ensure effective collaboration between businesses and their affiliate partners.

What is channel management and why does it matter? In this podcast, we go back to fundamentals by looking at various meanings of the word “channel” and then offering our own formal definition of channel management. We then provide a quick overview of the primary activities or stages of channel management, and consider the degree to which these activities must be localized when an organization goes beyond the start-up phase and operates its channel program on a global scale.

Have you ever wondered why most partners don't use market development funds? Our research shows as much as 60% of market development funds are not used each quarter. In this podcast, we look at a number of reasons for this phenomenon, including partners' short-term focus, lack of digital marketing expertise, insufficient resources and vendors' failure to provide tools and marketing concierge services. We also discuss four key steps vendors can take to drive usage rates up.

What are the most important factors in effective partner relationship management? Over the years, we have identified seven Ps that are most crucial to success: product, profitability, placement, programs, promotions, profile and performance. In this podcast, we discuss each of these factors in detail so you have a logical and sequential foundation for your channel programs and can make sure you are addressing the key drivers for engaged partners and sustained revenues.

Channel management activities tend to vary considerably from one country or region to another. Have you ever wondered why? In this podcast, we take a detailed look at variations in channel management activity in a global context. There are several reasons for these variations, including different channel structures, specific solutions, regional or national culture, and visibility or forecasting capabilities. We also look at the ways in which channel activities are similar regardless of region.

Through channel marketing automation (TCMA) is about enabling channel partners to generate leads using marketing assets and a set of marketing tools provided by a vendor or company. This podcast discusses core TCMA functions, including dynamically managing content, assigning groups and users different levels of access, managing partner profiles, setting up lead generation tools, managing leads and lead distribution, integrating leads with a CRM system, managing market development funds (MDF), and using analytic tools to generate actionable insights.

Onboarding partners in a channel ecosystem can be complex. Onboarding new partners includes activities like contract signing, business planning and training. But one should also have the structure in place for onboarding existing partners. That's because they are likely to have new products, programs and promotion launches almost every quarter. This podcast discusses onboarding of both kinds of partners in comprehensive detail. It also explains why PRM software is indispensable for managing onboarding process.

While success of a channel program depends on factors like end user value proposition, partner business proposition and overall market growth opportunity, it takes an integrated partner relationship management (PRM) framework to realize the true revenue potential of any organization sellings through the channel. This podcast takes you through the entire framework, from the partner portal and partner recruitment to training, engagement, performance management, multi-partner demand generation, deal registration and many more.

There are plenty of mistakes vendors can make across the channel as they pursue a partner relationship management strategy, but this podcast focuses on the five most common ones: overdistribution, overpromising and underdelivering, complex incentive programs, condoning unethical behavior and insufficient channel infrastructure investment. We recommend you keep these mistakes top of mind and make sure that both existing employee channel employees and newly hired employees go through an orientation program to understand these how to avoid them.

What are the core capabilities that any best-of-breed partner relationship management (PRM) platform must have? In this podcast, we discuss five key phases of the partner management lifecycle that a robust PRM platform can bring together to help your partner program succeed: partner recruitment, partner onboarding, partner training, partner marketing and partner incentives management. Focusing on these five phases in an integrated and unified way will ensure your program is structured, and has clear policies and programs.

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 brands represent a group of products, and some also offer services. Some brands, like Disney or Niagara Falls or the San Francisco Zoo are called hybrid brands – a combination of products and services, but essentially an “experience.” When you take a Viking Cruise or board a United Airlines jet you are not actually buying a product that you can own, but rather you are paying for an experience. People can be brands, too. Perhaps the most obvious example is Michael Jordan. Remember Air Jordans? Nike made millions from selling a simple shoe, merely by associating the shoe with a famous name. In this example there are two brands at play – Michael Jordan the athlete and Nike the shoe company. In this particular case, even though Michael Jordan is himself a brand, he is also an affiliate insofar as he is promoting the Jordan-branded shoes sold by Nike. I could keep going with various examples, but I think you get the point. In today's world, there is are many brand types, ranging from a simple product like an iPhone or a combination of products and services like Disney to a micro-brand like a local boy band—you name it. Every one of the brand examples I have mentioned so far are promoted by someone. If a marketing agency is promoting a brand directly, that is called direct marketing. However, if a person or another company is promoting a brand, the promoter is called a brand ambassador or a spokesperson or an affiliate. Whatever the case, when a brand gets promoted by a third party, someone does it and money exchanges hands. Affiliate marketing management is, essentially, the oversight of that process. Now that we have discussed what affiliate marketing is, we should talk a little about affiliate marketing management software. This category of software is relatively new, even though affiliate marketing has existed for a while. Historically, most affiliate marketing management software has been offered by small, specialized software companies. However, with the rise of the channel and the evolution of partner-driven marketing and selling, affiliate marketing is now being recognized as a more mainstream software category, and organizations like ZINFI have begun to develop affiliate marketing management software as part of a more comprehensive package of channel management tools. What is affiliate marketing management software and how does it work? I have written on this topic before, so I won't go into a lot of detail about the various capabilities of affiliate marketing  management software, but here are its core functions: Affiliate Recruitment – One of the very first steps in developing an affiliate marketing program is to identify a set of partners who are able and willing to promote your brand. These partners can range from individual influencers to companies or agencies. You need to make a list of these target individuals or organizations and present them with a business partnership propositio...

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, brokers, retailers, etailers, franchises, system integrators and more – there are too many to name. However, all do essentially the same thing: they represent a brand to a buyer. Sometimes these third parties focus exclusively on generating brand awareness, but in other cases they carry inventory and resell a product, and sometimes they also provide services beyond the sale. When you have a thriving partner network, it is highly likely that you will have a mix of various partner types. Therefore, as you design programs and processes and invest in people to manage your indirect go-to-market model, it is important that you have the right technology infrastructure – namely, partner management software – to automate these workflows in a deliberate and structured way. Partner onboarding applies to both existing partners and new partners. Why? Because you are marketing and selling solutions that are constantly changing; even long-time partners will need to complete training or recertification processes or territory realignment from time to time to continue to sell effectively. Now when it comes to new partners, of course you need to recruit them, train them and put them through structured onboarding programs, much like you do with your new employees, but there may be a lot of differences between your new and existing partner programs. Without a solid partner management software infrastructure it is very difficult to rapidly redesign, redeploy and globally manage an infrastructure that can accommodate these differences. Typically, a partner onboarding process goes through the following steps, which your partner management software should be able to flow through seamlessly: Partner Recruitment: This is where you conduct outbound and inbound marketing activities to drive awareness with your existing or potential new partners about your offers, programs and business proposition. Partner Registration: Once the promotional phase is over, partners move into the next phase of signing up on your partner portal – your first digital hello. Partner Signup: Once the registration process, powered by your partner management software, is complete, you may want your partner to apply for certain programs, products or other offerings. Once approved, they are “signed up” to market and/or sell and/or service your target buyers. Partner Training: After sign-up, training them on your partner portal is critical. Your partner management software will need to have a learning management system and guide partners through certifications training. Partner Enablement: If you have recruited affiliate partners, you will need to provide them with assets and tools to promote your brand across the web or off the web. Partner Referrals/Deals: Once your partners start marketing, they will generate leads and deals for you. You need a way to keep track of those activities. This is a key area where partner management software can auto...

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 consumer marketing, affiliates have traditionally been celebrities, but over the past several years we have seen the rise of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter influencers. Every country has their influencers, but the specific social media platforms that are most widely used by influencers tend to vary by country or region. Influencers can have a huge follower base and, depending on their specific focus and the size of their audience, may provide enormous value to brands by reaching a loyal base in a much more targeted way than traditional mass marketing is able to do. Today, there is partner management software in the marketplace that focuses exclusively on consumer affiliate marketing and management. When it comes to businesses, affiliates tend to be individuals who are consultants or experts in a specific domain; technology bloggers are great examples of that. However, the majority of affiliates tend to be smaller organizations or individuals who consult with and/or support their client base in various aspects of a solution, rather than carrying a product to resell. The primary difference between a B2B affiliate and a reseller is that the latter not only promotes a brand and finds a customer, but also actually completes the transaction. Affiliates, on the other hand, tend focus on promoting a brand and finding prospect buyers rather than completing a transaction. However, in many cases a partner may be both – an affiliate as well as a transacting partner. There are a handful of companies today providing partner management software that can manage both affiliates and transacting partners. ZINFI is a leader in both areas. Given this context, if you are thinking about automating your onboarding workflows, you should take some time to think through what you need from your partner management software. To make your onboarding highly personalized and adaptable, here are the capabilities you'll need from your partner management software: Groups and Profiles – You must be able to create access rights to your partner portal based on whether the partner is an affiliate, a reseller or both. Your groups and profiles capabilities will need to address partners' specialization, which countries they are coming from, their medallion status or their status in a point-based system. Unless you have partner management software that allows you to manage groups and profiles in a highly granular way, you will not be able to adequately manage a mixed channel environment with both resellers and affiliates. Programs – We have noted in other articles that onboarding programs may vary greatly based on who you are onboarding and how you are onboarding. If you are onboarding an existing partner into a new program, then you have one set of workflows, which may be shorter and focused, but if you are onboarding a new partner into the company, then your onboarding program needs to be quite comprehensive.

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, your approach to managing the relationship will have to be different. For example, if your partner sells burgers, and you provide French-fries, then you are essentially providing an add-on. However, if you sell beef patties then you provide something that's core to the partner primary solution, i.e., burgers. Any partner relationship management strategy needs to focus on this strategic versus contextual offer.  Understand the Mathematics of Reach  Sometimes it is tempting to go for the widest distribution possible by signing up as many partners or resellers as you can. However, this approach brings challenges like over-distribution, channel conflict, and potential lawsuits. So, your partner relationship management strategy needs to center around profitable growth, i.e., what's the minimum number of resellers that would give you the maximum reach.  Needless to say, it poses the risk of creating a lot of unproductive and unhappy partners. Therefore, it's very important to understand in detail how you are going to distribute your products to end buyers and calculate how many partners you need to hit your revenue growth goals. You would be surprised how few companies sit down and do this math.  Calculate Training and Incentives Requirements  Just like any new relationship, onboarding new partners can be quite exciting in the beginning. Eventually, however, companies realize that it actually takes more to train an indirect sales force than it does to train your own employees. The reason for this is very simple:   Learning about your products is the primary focus of a direct sales force, but partners typically are learning about and selling products from multiple vendors.This makes it difficult for them to invest the time in learning about yet another product, especially if the product is constantly changing due to new capabilities, new versions and so on.   The fact is, partners tend to spend more time selling existing or mature products more than new products. This is a major insight that many companies overlook at first, often realizing it only after they have failed to reach the sales velocity of new products they had hoped for. Your partner relationship management approach needs to focus on understanding partners sales mix and velocity and how you can help them accelerate revenue with minimum changes.  Manage the Loyalty of Partners   It is important for you to understand that a partner's primary loyalty is to their customer base and their employees. No matter how great your products and services are, if your activity in any way undermines a partner's relationship with their customers, you risk losing them.   So, while you must put your partners in the middle of your service and support infrastructure, you absolutely need to make sure their end customers are treated with a white glove approach. This is essential in building a reputation with your partner base.  

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 activities at this level, it covers the following: Partner Recruitment The company has some basic partner recruitment capabilities in place by running tradeshows, webinars, and call-out campaigns. Recruitment is ad hoc, and not really focused around partner profiling or competency development, but more opportunistic. Partner Engagement The company knows how to provide a basic infrastructure. In many cases the following are homegrown: Partner portal- Tends to be patched together using either open source software, SharePoint or some other web development tools. However, the portal is monolithic, not localized and cannot offer personalized content. With that said, at this stage the basic content exchange capabilities are in place. Some companies in this phase deploy a basic level of partner relationship management automation. Partner onboarding- Signing contracts, training partners on how to sell and putting business plans together are the core steps in this phase, but most of these activities are done manually and there are no systems in place to track the progress of partner engagement. Partner communication- A weekly or monthly newsletter goes out to partners, but communication is not broadly aligned with strategic initiatives and intent. Most content is highly tactical, and not necessarily controlled and aligned with broader corporate initiative. Very rarely at this stage do we see deployment of partner relationship management automation. Partner Enablement The company provides a basic level of marketing and sales tools. Marketing and sales enablement- Price lists, product data sheets, marketing templates are available for partners to use. However, content is not mobile-friendly and not easy to search, tag and find at this level. Partner training- A basic partner certification and training mechanism is in place, but there is no structured learning management system (LMS) to digitally train, track and certify partners across multiple countries and languages. Partner Management The company has a loosely defined partner incentive structure in place, primarily using market development funds. Incentives are available on an ad hoc basis, but no structured quarterly programs are in place, nor is there any competency alignment. Phase 2: Refining the Structure to Scale Companies entering this phase have a significant portion of their revenue (perhaps more than a few hundred million dollars) coming from the channel, and the channel is a strategic piece. Also, we see more prevalent deployment of automation to streamline multiple areas and workflows globally. Partner Recruitment Partner recruitment is a strategic initiative–structured in a few countries, but ad hoc in others. Some partner profiling analysis is done to understand what territories need pruning, and where new partners needed to be added.

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 them coming back. Consider frequently including assets like web pages, documents, and videos.   Utilizing a platform to easily update and house these documents makes the process of educating partners even easier. ZINFI, for example, boasts a content library module in its partner portal platform that enables vendors to upload and update any collateral as needed.   2. Communicate Communication is two-fold in channel management. You need to have both a communication strategy for new partner recruitment and existing partners.   Recruitment Communication   To penetrate a market of new resellers, you'll likely have to rely on social advertising, online events, trade shows, etc. There should be a concerted effort to target verticals that will market your product directly to those most likely to become partners.   You will need to know who you want to bring on as your reseller, and what would entice them to partner up with you. Your messaging needs to focus on what business value you bring to them, and how you will help them win in the marketplace.  Communication with Existing Partners   When you launch a product when you acquire a company, when you roll out an incentive program, when you launch a training program, you have to have a clear set of communication plans tied to those activities, initiatives, and programs.   It may seem overwhelming to have communications in place for each, individual initiative. But this is crucial to ensuring partners have the information they need to sell. Many channel management teams make it easy by utilizing a partner marketing automation platform that streamlines the process for you. Is it a social campaign? An advertising campaign? A trade show campaign? A partner marketing automation platform can enable you to create dedicated campaigns for each initiative and does the communicating for you.   3. Connect You should be constantly keeping your partners informed. They need to know what's new, what's changing, what must get done, just like the way you communicate to employees on a regular basis for a management infrastructure–what the company goals are, what the quarterly objectives are, etc. Consider connecting on a regular forum–whether it's an online event or regular email communications. You can also invest in a channel management platform, like ZINFI, that enables you to connect through mobile alerts and pop-ups so you have multiple touchpoints with partners. 4. Cooperate Cooperation means working with partners to create a plan so that they can enter a market segment they may not be competent in. These are large partners that you'll want to cater to as  smaller partners may not produce the results to make the time commitment worth it to build entry into new segments. Remember, the point is that it needs to tie back to your overall channel strategy. In the end, the entire goal of your channel management investment is to sell faster and at lower costs...

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.  The truth is it really never ends, because channel is a living and breathing entity. It's always changing. So, yes you start with a roadmap and you execute, but there are constant changes, detours, and optimization that you have to do with the new focus.   A successful and growing organization is always introducing new products, acquiring new partners, realigning their groups and incentives, etc., to achieve higher level of performances. So, while you don't want to make changes every ninety days, you certainly don't want to stick with a stale channel program year after year either.  That's why the notion of a partner journey revolves around a framework, but it's highly dynamic–not like a Disney roller coaster ride, but more like a seasoned traveler that ventures through dozens of countries with a pre-determine budget to attain certain specific goals. In this case those goals are to make more revenue at a lower cost with a higher customer satisfaction rate and very little business risks or (legal) exposures.  With this said, there are few things that are constant. For a channel focused organization, partners are always going to be a critical component to any business strategy, whether it's a vendor just starting out or an organization that has been established for years. After all, the productivity of the partners determines the success of the channel. This is where a well-tuned partner relationship management (PRM) software or system can truly help an organization to realize its channel strategy and business goals.  With this in mind, let's go through an overall partner journey with a vendor organization–starting with partner recruitment, training, enablement, sales and ongoing relationship management.  Partner Recruitment   This is the first step in a partner journey–joining a vendor organization or partner recruitment. You can't expect to scale without adding new channel partners to your organization. There must be an ongoing and proactive effort to build relationships with potential channel partner organizations that can sell and support a vendor's solution. This includes both outreach and onboarding processes.  A well-designed partner relationship management (PRM) platform should allow you to do this well.  Rather than targeting any available partner, outreach efforts should be built around a strategy–one that seeks out channel partners who are likely to perform. But recruiting is only half the battle. Once you've signed on the dotted line it's time to give them all the resources and knowledge they need to begin actively selling as soon as possible.   Partner Training  The goal here is to ensure partners' functional teams are properly trained on how to market, sell, deploy and support a specific solution. This means more than just a two-day conference in a hotel.   To properly give new partners the tools they need to sell you need to take a more holistic and ongoing approach.

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 to have access to your lead management system.Non-transacting partners – These are the partners who “refer” or a “send” a prospect to your company via your web site or some sort of a lead management system. These partners tend to be called affiliates, but some of them may also simply be pure service partners. They don't necessarily sell your products, but they nevertheless serve your customer base. Mortgage services companies are great examples of this. Now, both types of partners will have some form of engagement with a lead management system, and in some cases they will also engage with a deal registration management system. (We will not discuss deal registration here; you can find many articles on deal registration on our website.) During the pandemic, as the world coiled back to a quarantine mode, face-to-face engagement has pretty much disappeared or has been curtailed substantially for business transactions. There is no longer a reliable way to generate leads from a “lunch and learn” or from a local fair or some sort of an event. All events have moved online, and therefore generation of leads has also moved online. As a major provider of lead management software, we at ZINFI have seen a rapid rise in demand for the lead management modules we and other software developers provide. As we get closer to a post-pandemic world, we are very likely to see the evolution of a hybrid world. Physical interactions will not disappear. Humans are tribal in nature and require social face-to-face engagement. We can expect physical events to come back, but they will rely on many of the digital tools we are currently using. It's sort of like this: Instead of having your dinner delivered by Uber Eats, you place the order online but go pick it up yourself. The app will still be there in your life. A similar dynamic will emerge in lead management, where much activity will take place online, but there will still be some space for in-person interaction. This is great news, because traditionally it has been hard to get channel partners to adopt new software and automate their processes. This fundamental shift towards the adoption of lead management software will ultimately make the channel more efficient and effective. Leads are like fish out of water— if you or your partners are not moving quickly, most of these leads will die. Time is of the essence, and lead management can make lead processing super-fast and accurate. Finally, once you have an online lead management system in place and you move away from Excel or email- or phone call-based manual tracking, you can monitor all activities online and spend your time focused on driving programs that increase your leads and ROI. This is a whole new world. While the last 18 months have been horrible for most, the world of lead management will get substantially better. That's another silver lining to look forward to as we gradually get back to normal.

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 lead of software platform providers like Microsoft in offering customers a development environment called Force.com, with its own software built on that. In much the same way Microsoft provides Windows as an operating environment, but then also sells Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Salesforce provides a solid CRM platform and allows third-party providers to build and run applications on its Force.com platform and connect to its core applications. In fact, ZINFI's own PRM application connects to Salesforce CRM as well as Salesforce PRM. Now, over the past decade or so has Salesforce dabbled in the area of partner relationship management. At one point in time, it had a dedicated product, but according to industry analysts achieved only lackluster sales, and therefore decided to roll that into the Salesforce Community Cloud business line. Salesforce PRM today is essentially an extension of Salesforce Community Cloud, rather than a purpose-built PRM platform. Salesforce PRM has unique strengths and weaknesses, and if you are considering investing in it you should understand what they are. There are basically three core positive areas for Salesforce PRM. They are focused on a) extending your direct selling motion to the channel via Salesforce PRM, b) minimizing or eliminating any integration work for another application if you are a Salesforce CRM house already, and c) giving you powerful tools to build custom workflows for your channel applications, in much the same way you can build workflows for direct sales automation activities.  Let's take a moment and explore these three areas in a bit more detail: Extending Direct Selling – If your organization has chosen Salesforce CRM for sales and/or marketing automation and you are looking to provide some basic capabilities for sharing information with your channel partners, then Salesforce PRM is certainly worth a look. Using Salesforce PRM community capabilities, you can build some basic collaboration capabilities and share content with your channel partners. This allows your direct sales team or inside sales team to easily collaborate with partners using a few basic communication tools.Eliminating Integration Work – If your organization is already using Salesforce CRM, then turning on the PRM capabilities is quite simple. Even though Salesforce PRM is not a purpose-built application and may require you to do a lot of configuration and customization work, in the end you can eliminate any integration requirements. While ZINFI's PRM platform—along with other third-party purpose-built PRM platforms—comes with easy-to-connect PRM to SFDC connectors, in the end some organizations simply don't want to manage another application. If you are in that boat, Salesforce PRM is a reasonable option for you to consider.Powerful Workflow Tools – even though it comes with very limited PRM capabilities,

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 formal association with your brand and gives them an opportunity to ride on the halo of your logos. However, vendors who enable co-branding need to make sure their brand and logos are protected and don't get distorted— whether intentionally or not—when assets are shared. It's critical for vendors to maintain control over their branding and be able to enforce co-branding guidelines. Vendors recruit channel partners for one primary reason: to sell the vendor's products and services. For the relationship to work, the vendor needs to help the partner learn to sell the vendor's product and services. In order to succeed in that mission, sales reps from the partner organization need to have access to a set of sales tools and sales materials or “slicks.” Traditionally, the vendor provides these through their partner portal, assuming they have one. However, in most companies where the channel organization is in its early stages of formation and doesn't have a PRM tool, the channel team ends up sharing these documents via Dropbox or other file-sharing tools. This makes the experience pretty cumbersome, because the partner has to go through a flat file structure to figure out what's what. Also, this reliance on file-sharing sites makes it easy for partners to make mistakes when they select an asset, co-brand it and share it with their end-customers. This is exactly where a co-branded asset module or application becomes very useful. Most PRM tools or platforms today include some sort of a co-branding capability. If you're evaluating a PRM tool with co-branded asset capabilities, make sure the core features are capable of addressing your needs as well as your partners' needs. You should consider: Types of assets: When you're evaluating a PRM tool, make its co-branding capabilities are world class and can accommodate multiple types of assets, such HTML, HTML5, PDFs and other common document types.Asset preview: Your partners should not only be able to co-brand assets with different types of logos and insignias but should also be able to preview assets easily before they download them for offline use. They should also be able to share these documents, if required, directly from the system.Co-branding of assets: Co-branding should be easy. Partners should be able to select a set of assets you have provided to them and quickly add customized content in specified areas, based on their edit and access rights. You should be able to configure access and editing rights so, for example, your Gold partners are allowed to modify more areas than your Approved partners and add their own content.Print quality: Assuming your partners send out printed materials to their customers, you will need the ability to provide high-resolution print quality assets to your partners for their co-branding activities. Unlike ZINFI, most PRM vendors in the market today are not able to do that.Analytics: Finally,

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, however. By default, products and services that have to be bundled with other products rely solely on a partner network.  Depending on whether you are selling a product that can be used on its own, like a computer, or are selling an application that runs on a server or is dependent on another primary instance of software, the nature of your go-to-market strategy will vary. Your PRM tool needs to be able to address this selling motion in a highly focused way. To keep things simple, in this discussion we will not address the different approaches required for different products, but instead focus on a broad set of principles you should consider when you are trying to drive adoption of your PRM tool via partner onboarding. There are basic five principles a company needs to consider to think through partner onboarding. Onboarding is not just a one-time event. It is more of a process that needs to proceed through a phased definition, development, execution and improvement cycle to be a true value-added activity. The channel evolves on a continuous basis, and as a result your onboarding program should be continuously bringing partners onboard to your PRM tool in a structured and logical fashion. Here are the five most important principles to consider when you are thinking about onboarding your partners into your PRM tool: Business value: For your partners to log into your partner relationship management (PRM) tool, the tool itself has to offer a specific set of business values. If you are only sharing news and updates, it is not a compelling offer. However, if you are providing market development funds (MDF), sales and marketing tools, or leads, then your business value to your partners will go up by multiples. Therefore, it is very important to start with the basics of channel development when you are launching a partner portal using a PRM software tool. You need to initially provide training, sales and marketing tools, and eventually provide leads and incentives such as MDF and co-op funds. Ease of use: Your partner portal powered by a PRM software tool needs to be easy to use. Partners are incredibly busy and typically handling multiple priorities at once. If your partner portal is a patched-up solution made up of open source software or a variety of distinct tools like SharePoint and Dropbox, then ease of use will be minimal. Your partners will have to jump through hoops and log into and out of these tools using multiple passwords to find the right information and content. On the other hand, if you deploy a state-of-the-art Unified Channel Management platform that has a seamless interface, and if your partners can easily move from one area to another within a single interface, then utilization will go up substantially. We see this in our customer base all the time. When customers transition from an environment of hodge-podge tools to ZINFI's PRM tool, partner adoption goes up exponentially.

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 training programs, we have repeatedly seen companies achieve substantial ROI with a structured, consistent, high-quality training program, whether partners are being trained in demand generation, marketing, selling or servicing a customer base. To manage an effective training program in a digital world you need a state-of-the art PRM tool that can help you align your programs to your process so your people can efficiently and cost-effectively deliver programs locally and globally. Let's go through the five critical success factors for an effective partner training program. While these are not the only factors that you need to consider, they are the most significant drivers for most organizations trying to train a large group of people in a methodical fashion. Learning management system (LMS) – One of the core requirements for digital training is a PRM tool that has a state-of-the-art LMS. Your LMS should be able to provide tracks, courses and certifications. It should also be SCORM-compliant and be able to serve customized content based on various partner groups and profiles. The ability to personalize content to specific audiences is essential. Be sure that the PRM tool that you pick is flexible and configurable enough to address this aspect of your partner training needs. Face-to-face trainings – In addition to providing online training and an LMS, your PRM tool should be able to provide you with a robust offline training and event management platform. Unless you are selling software and can do the entire training online, you will have to consider at least some face-to-face training. This is essential for hardware or other goods. In the areas of retail and hospitality especially, live in-person face training will play a critical role in your success. Your PRM tool should be able to integrate online digital and offline physical training in a seamless way. Aligned incentives – Any kind of training will entail expenses. A fully trained partner base can drive more sales and lower service costs, but let's not forget that training involves time (which you pay for) and resources. Because of that, whether a partner organization is going through online or offline training across multiple functions or vendors are offering training to partners, both the channel organization and the partner organizations must have appropriate incentives to benefit from meaningful, integrated training and reap the results from it. That's why our PRM tool needs to be able to help you set up and track various incentives programs, and link them back to specific training events and programs. Lead distribution & management – One of the best ways to incentive partners is to give them leads once they are certified with specific product categories. Nothing excites more partners to make more money than the prospect of converting the knowledge they receive in training programs into real dollars. Your PRM tool needs to be able to link your training ...

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 tactics channel marketing software should be used for based on average selling price, solution complexity and market segments. Small business (100 employees or fewer): Small businesses purchases tend to be owner- or CEO-driven. Assuming average revenue is around $100,000 to $150,000 per employee, the revenues for these organizations range from about $1 to $15 million. Companies of this size tend to engage in less structured buying as opposed to on-demand or needs-based buying. Many small businesses also tend buy based on relationships. Selling into these segments means staying connected. Standard tactical tools offered by channel marketing software platforms—like social, syndication and email platform—tend to be quite effective. SMB market segment (100–500 employees): As a company grows and revenue starts to fall into the $10 to $100 million range, processes evolve. Most purchases in this segment fall into two categories: scheduled maintenance or strategic investments. Most transactional purchases in this segment are driven by price and quality, while strategic investments tend to rely on overall solution complexity. Partners selling transactional products tend to do poorly in this segment, because most companies buy directly based on pre-agreed pricing for things that they need–whether it's gloves for hospital staff, coffee for morning breaks or paper for printing. Strategic purchases, on the other hand, are driven by partner competencies, so event-based channel marketing software tools facilitating activities like webinars and road shows tend to come in handy here. Mid-market (500–2,500 employees): Revenues for these companies are in the $100 to $500 million range. Most purchases are planned and reserves are maintained. Very rarely do these companies seek new vendors in mature categories and purchase. However, in emerging industry segments, new vendors—and therefore new resellers—can participate in  a request for proposal (RFP) process and thereby get a foot in the door. Channel marketing software in this category can help build reach through continuous marketing via social media and syndication of thought leadership content, followed by tactical campaigns for opt-in email, microsites and events. Online advertising on LinkedIn and Google AdWords can also drive traffic from this segment in a focused way. LinkedIn campaigns tend to fare better with narrowcasting, while Google AdWords tend to work well with broadcasting campaigns. Large enterprise (2,500–10,000 employees): Many of these companies grow through acquisitions, because the kind of organic growth that companies like Google, Facebook, Tesla and others have achieved is hard to come by. During acquisitions, companies actually reduce the number of vendors they work with and tend to target their preferred vendor list for transfer of purchases. This is a classic installed base marketing scenario, and regular newsletters, webinar-driven education,

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 channel collaboration, because you can use them to seamlessly digitize workflow and content sharing across various groups of partners and channel stakeholders. Remote collaboration in the channel has been always focused on driving partner ease of use and lowering friction across various parts of the channel value chain. With the advent of integrated partner relationship management (PRM) tools and through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) tools, channel marketing software has focused on all aspects of remote marketing, including “market to,” “market through” and “market with” activities. Let's discuss these activities in a bit more detail and explore how channel marketing software can help: “Market to” – Traditionally, marketing to partners or prospecting for partners put a premium on advertising and events where a vendor promoted its wares as well as its programs. If prospective partners had interest, they would call into the vendor channel support line and sign up for a program to see if they qualified. This required a kind of mass marketing approach; narrowcasting was not available. However, with today's leading channel marketing software tools, a vendor can laser-target a set of potential partners directly (via newsletters and other vehicles) or narrowcast via various social networks and channel content sites. This engagement can be fully digital, and traffic from those sites and sources can be driven to a central site where a vendor can run webinars (live or on-demand), showcase various customer and partner success stories, and have very specific calls to action to sign up for programs. These tools were around in the pre-pandemic world, but COVID-19 pushed marketers back home and made these tools a central part of outbound marketing. Needless to say, as we exit the pandemic constraints and start mixing again in face-to-face events, digital will continue to dominate and channel marketing software will be able to provide a seamless, integrated platform to channel marketers for both digital and physical activities. Based on customer usage data and ROI, we can also confidently forecast that digital ROI will always outpace the ROI of physical events, although the latter will probably still be necessary to maximize reach. The pandemic won't stop physical events forever, but we have now shifted decisively to a digital space and we will all be trying to optimize activities around it. “Market through” – When a vendor grows, and its channel partner ecosystem grows, it tends to focus on partner-led demand generation activities. In early stages of growth, most vendors drive awareness of their products and solutions to the end-buyers themselves, but as the brand and category awareness increase, vendors tend to focus more on their partner base as a major source of new lead generation and business. This is where channel marketing software can significantly augment a vendor's lead generation effort by providing partners wit...

Organizations selling through the channel always worry about one primary thing: driving more sales at a lower cost. The entire purpose of a channel organization is to extend reach to every part of a market where the product or service has value, ideally piggy-backing on other organizations that already have invested in generating demand and capturing it through their sales and delivery teams. A major focus for any partner relationship management (PRM) program is a unified lead management capability for generating leads and distributing them to partners—but also for allowing partners to generate leads and close deals on their own. In this article, we will explore how partner relationship management automation can help organizations generate more leads at a lower cost and then manage the lifecycle to attain a higher sales closure rate. The primary purpose of lead generation and management is to identify prospects who have a pain point that a specific product or service can fulfill. Entire armies of marketing personnel and libraries of marketing content are optimized to find and educate prospective buyers who may be interested in a company's solution. This has become a combination of art and science in direct marketing, but when it comes to generating leads through a partner network, it requires more tools and more attention. This is where partner relationship management (PRM) software comes in. It helps vendor organizations manage the complexity of distributing content to their partner base, training them properly and managing them to close the leads that are provided to them. There are two primary ways this can be done: Vendor-Led Lead Management – This is when a vendor organization does all the heavy lifting of driving awareness and interest from a target audience, and then distributes the resulting leads to the partner base for closure. This is accomplished in a couple of ways: Open Accounts (Shark Tanks) – In this lead distribution system, a lead is given to all qualified partners, and whoever reaches out to the prospect first ends up owning that opportunity. While this may appear relatively simple, the nature of this distribution method tends to vary—not only across organizations, but even within a single organization based on product type, certification requirements, the nature of the promotions and many other factors. However, a state-of-the-art partner relationship management (PRM) platform should be able to handle any of these scenarios in an artful way. Named Accounts – In this scenario, a specific lead from an end-user company is given to a specific account. This could be based on contracts that the organization has with a specific partner, or it could be based on a special program, the nature of the product, partner qualifications or territory in an under-distributed environment. At times, end users may also request a specific partner for an opportunity and the organization may make that exception. Again, a state-of-the-art partner relationship management (PRM) platform should be able to automate these lead selection and assignment workflows based on partner critieria in a seamless way. Partner-Led Lead Management – When a partner is able to generate end-user demand and leverage a vendor's product or service as part of their core offering to the end-customer, it generally makes sense for the partner to lead the process. Here, too, I should mention a couple of common scenarios: Standalone Offer – When a partner is primarily selling a service centered around a specific product—say, insurance, retail, hospitality or technology—where the product is the core offering and a partner's services only augment the core product, for the most part the partner can leverage marketing content and tools from the vendor to sell its product or service. In order to enable its partner base, the vendor would need to look for a partner relationship management platform that either connects to through-channel marketing automati...

Over the past 40 years the world has been speeding up the pace of digital adoption. While it may seem like Amazon was founded yesterday, it was actually founded in 1994—about 25 years ago. Microsoft was founded a couple of decades earlier than Amazon, in 1975, and Oracle was founded in 1977. About a decade earlier than Microsoft, Intel was founded in 1968. I think you get the point: The advent of digital goes back about 30 to 40 years—roughly half the span of an average human life—but the pace of change keeps getting faster, most recently with the explosion of cloud-based applications and solutions (hardware and software working together). This is also true of technology that addresses partner relationship management (PRM).  As we adopt more and more digital tools in our lives—at work, home and school, and while travelling away from home—silently but surely we are rebuilding how we work, live, learn and enjoy our leisure. Partner relationship management (PRM) software is no different. Partner management has existed since commerce existed in pre-historic times, but over the past few decades, with the adoption of digital tools and digitization of commerce, more and more companies have focused on automating their channel management and partner relationship management activities. In this article we will explore how we can manage the partner base remotely and globally using state-of-the art partner relationship management tools. Here are the core activities we need to engage in to build and manage a channel remotely: Partner Profiling – Once an organization figures out who to recruit, the goal is to target, engage and educate prospective partners for recruitment. Gone are the days of hanging around in trade shows and randomly throwing out business cards hoping partners will sign up, or aimlessly running banner ads on channel magazines. Today, the tools are much more precise and they are all digital, even though physical trade shows, recruitment roadshows and similar events can certainly augment the digital presence on the ground.To run an effective partner recruitment program, an organization needs to have profiles of the kinds of partners that they want to recruit. Target profiles can be created by researching existing partners' firmographic profiles and/or establishing capabilities the organization needs a potential partner organization to have—characteristics like certifications, regional coverage, go-to-market sales models and so on. Once this target profile has been created—a process we call partner profiling—then the recruitment journey can begin. Partner Recruitment – With the specific target in mind, an organization now will have to target prospective partner audiences via various digital tools, such as social marketing tools (LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, Twitter, etc.), online advertising of various kinds and outbound newsletter placement tied to subscription lists. Outbound emailing is becoming more difficult because of emerging privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, but opt-in lists for digital publications are still good vehicles for extending reach to a potential target audience. Once a prospective partner has expressed interest into a company's partner program, then engaging with those partners with compelling digital content via a partner relationship management platform is critical. This is where a partner portal comes in really handy. Any state-of-the-art PRM platform will provide a full-featured partner portal where users can create a zone for prospective partners to learn and educate themselves on the company's offerings wherever they are working from.If a prospective partner is interested, they may apply and go through a simple or a comprehensive review process to be registered as an authorized partner to sell the organization's products. In case of captive distribution, this could be a franchise model where a partner has to pay to play, but in other cases—e.g., agents,

It has been almost two decades since customer relationship management (CRM) applications began to be adopted as a powerful way to automate sales processes. Meanwhile, we have also seen marketing automation grow rapidly over the past 10 years or so to augment the CRM process experience for direct sales teams. However, the rise of partner relationship management (PRM) SaaS applications like ZINFI's has demonstrated where an application like Salesforce often falls short. While the development of a Salesforce-like CRM applications that can be customer-configured to address many partner relationship management requirements has been a big step forward, companies still need to invest substantially to customize these solutions successfully. The fact that CRM systems also lack built-in applications essential for PRM means they fall short of  providing true Unified Channel Management (UCM). This is why connecting an existing CRM infrastructure like Salesforce to a PRM infrastructure like ZINFI's makes a lot of sense. In this article, we will explore the core common points of connection between a CRM and PRM. When you think about sales automation, the first thing that comes to your mind is the word “revenue.” Yes, sales is all about generating revenue by closing deals from the leads that marketing generates. That's pretty much what a CRM does. CRM takes a bunch of leads that the marketing automation system feeds it, and then allows the sales team to nurture those leads in a systematic way through various sales stages like discovery, qualification, demo, trial, review, agreement, purchase, renewal and support. Sales managers can run various reports across their sales representatives and determine who is most effective, what is working and what needs changing. Automation also allows the elimination of repetitive tasks such as sending out a reminder to a prospect or offering sales collaterals or coming up with automated pricing. There are multiple use cases that a Salesfsorce-like CRM system can address, and its functionality can be extended by using a large number of applications available in Salesforce AppExchange. Some of the standalone applications that plug into Salesforce address other aspect of sales and marketing needs, including rewards, incentives and analytics. This is where ZINFI's partner relationship management (PRM) comes in. ZINFI is an AppExchange-approved PRM application provider. While Salesforce also lists a few other PRM applications, unlike those other applications ZINFI's PRM features an architecture and user interface that closely follows the logic of a CRM system. This allows a seamless flow of data flow back and forth between a Salesforce-like CRM and ZINFI's PRM.  Let's explore three core connection points in more detail here: Lead Management – As I began this article, I mentioned the primary purpose of a CRM system is to generate revenue by systematically managing the entire sales process from lead to close. The automation of this process is the focus of lead management in a CRM. Now, using a CRM for lead management works great for a direct sales team, but the moment you try to do lead management for channel sales using a CRM, things can quickly get quite complicated and expensive. This is where a purpose-built PRM like ZINFI's platform can help tremendously by seamlessly connecting to a Salesforce-like CRM system. The integration allows the direct sales team to use the CRM as they always do, while the indirect channel sales and partners can use ZINFI's PRM for lead managementDeal Registration – One unique use case for channel sales is protecting an opportunity for a specific partner. We have written multiple articles on deal registration, so I won't get in the details of it here. Let me just point out that the entire focus of deal registration is to eliminate channel conflict and allow a specific partner to pursue an opportunity from lead to close. Unlike CRMs,

In the early 2000s we saw the rise of multiple CRM solutions. Most of them were on-premise, but some were cloud-based, even though at that time “cloud” was not the buzz word it is now. Over the past couple of decades, Salesforce stayed focused as a cloud CRM provider, and evolved into a massive SaaS ecosystem featuring a variety of business applications. Over the years, others like Microsoft and SAP followed suit, either through organic (built in-house) or inorganic (acquired) offerings. Some of these direct sales automation tools—for example, SAP—also introduced a bare-bones application for partner relationship management (PRM). Eventually, Oracle and Salesforce did as well, but none of these PRM applications could fully address automation requirements for the entire partner lifecycle.  Now, while this was going on in the market space, HubSpot came into existence about a decade ago as an alternative platform for marketing automation, and over the past five years has evolved into a complete marketing and sales automation platform. HubSpot's superior ease of use and its much-needed native integrations between marketing and sales have allowed it to capture a significant portion of the SMB and mid-market customer base. Many of these SMB and mid-market organizations are now looking for a full-featured PRM application. In this article, we will focus on how you can integrate your HubSpot with your partner relationship management application to create a seamless business process automation platform. In this age of working remotely—but also for the business folks on the go—sales operations move at the speed of digital. The days of keeping tabs on a sales pipeline in an Excel spreadsheet and updating those cells one at a time to create a report are gone. Today, customer relationship management (CRM) applications are table stakes for sales organizations. The scope of CRM has expanded into marketing (pre-sales) and services (post-sales). The goal of this category now is to provide a wholistic view of a buyer from engagement (prospect) to close (customer) to renewal (advocate). While there are many patchworks of tools that are available in the marketplace to slap onto a CRM platform, it requires significant process and interdisciplinary knowledge, integration of resources and, of course, additional money for different app subscriptions to extend a CRM like Salesforce into a multi-app business environment. This is why HubSpot is thriving as a single integrated platform that provides marketing and sales automation in an end-to-end fashion. I would not be surprised if their next offering is in the service management space—it simply makes sense. Partner relationship management (PRM) platforms today have a similar scope—a complete end-to-end management of the partner lifecycle. ZINFI's PRM platform not only focuses on providing a bare-bones partner portal for organizations that are starting up their channel program, but also enables highly advanced and complex channel organizations to deploy a wide range of programs and workflows. Large, complex Fortune 1000 enterprises not only need sophisticated workflow capabilities, but also content personalization and program deployment across various sales and language territories around the world. A state-of-the-art PRM like ZINFI's solution is able to handle simple yet complex deployments using a configurable and modular architecture. However, the scope of a PRM or a CRM remain quite separate, as both are purpose-built. We have written other articles on why PRMs are different from CRMs, and won't get into those details here; however, there is a set of natural points of intersection between CRMs and PRMs. We will now explore how to integrate HubSpot CRM with a PRM that is similar to the state-of-the-art solution that ZINFI provides. If we consider for a moment the core elements that are common between PRM and CRM systems, we realize that both address one simple thing—how to generate more ...

If you manage a distributed network of partners and they are more than just a fulfillment arm for you, then chances are you have considered through-channel marketing automation (TCMA). In this article we will explore one of the core tactics of TCMA—email marketing—and how it can be used as a part of your overall TCMA strategy. While email marketing has been around for a while, it’s not always used effectively. Refining your email marketing tactics can enable your channel partners to generate leads in a low-cost, highly effective fashion. First, let’s briefly discuss what email marketing is and how TCMA-based email marketing tactics may differ from your direct email marketing efforts. We all know that email marketing was very likely the first digital marketing tool that marketers used, starting in the early 2000s. While we suffered through a plague of spam emails during much of that period—and even today a few of those spam emails get through the spam filters—it’s important to emphasize effective email marketing is NOT spam. Email marketing today relies heavily on obtaining end-users’ or target consumers’ email addresses through some sort of an opt-in mechanism, as opposed to various nefarious harvesting mechanisms that spammers use to collect or spoof email addresses. Once a proper prospect or buyer has signed up to receive emails from a provider, then and only then  can a marketer use that medium to reach out in an appropriate way. This kind general leverages some kind of a marketing automation tool that relies on text-based or HTML-based email templates. In most cases, these templates are highly customized to convey a set of news, messages and/or offers that is likely to attract the interest of the targeted audiences. Now, when it comes to email marketing tools for TCMA-related activities, it is important to have several critical features that are not necessarily relevant for direct email marketing tactics. These TCMA-specific capabilities include: Template setup: In the case of direct email marketing, you set up templates predominantly for your own use or for a set of peers to use. However, in case of TCMA email marketing, you set up a master template that can be used by your channel partners, and you may decide to set up multiple templates for multiple partners and allow them to customize or not. Approval routing: This is a critical feature in TCMA. This is used in cases where you may want your partners to send you their changes before allowing them to use a modified version of your master template. The primary purpose of approval routing is to maintain control over your message and brand positioning Co-branding: If you are requesting that your partners use your email templates, they will very likely want to add their logos and contact information, and some may also want to add customized content to augment your offer in order to, for instance, showcase their own expertise around your solutions. Multi-touch: Drip marketing began to appear in the mid 2000s. This  is a tactic where—based on the action a targeted consumer of your email—you may send a second or third follow-up email or “touch.” This tactic has evolved rapidly since those early days and is often an important part of integrated campaigns deploying a range of tactics. Drip marketing is a particularly effective tactic for through-channel marketing automation. Click metrics: One of the most important features in email marketing for TCMA is the ability to track who opened and clicked through emails. When you are running multi-touch email campaigns, it is often very useful to track the success of your follow-on tactics and so you can identify the most effective messaging and offers and focus on that. In addition to these core five areas, other features that tend to be important in a through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) email marketing tool include things like multi-tenant capabilities, copying, editing, reviewing, tagging and searching.

In today’s business environment, every organization is asking its channel management team to do more with fewer resources. This is a common challenge for any channel organization. It’s not enough just to get busy—the key is to figure out how to drive partner recruitment, enablement, management and sales growth in a focused way. This is where partner relationship management  (PRM) software can help significantly. In this article, we will explore some of the core activities that PRM software can help automate. Before we take a deep dive into the specific activities that PRM software can automate, let’s discuss briefly how the activities tend to vary by company size. Focused channel (100 – 500 partners) – Companies in this category tend to sell through the channel independent of their own size. In our customer base at ZINFI, we have multibillion-dollar organizations that have only a couple of hundred partners, but we also have much smaller customers who have a few thousand partners. In a focused channel where there is a relatively small number of partners, the level of engagement and focus by the vendor organization is generally high. We will discuss later how PRM software can automate the core activities for a focused channel. Scaled channel (500 – 2,500 partners) – In this category, the higher total number of channel partners is generally a function of two main factors: a low-price product with a high reach that allows partners to build service revenue, or moderately complex solutions with a medium and focused reach that require specialized global delivery and support. There are always hybrids, of course, but for the sake of simplicity it makes sense to define a scaled channel in terms of these two primary scenarios. PRM software typically automates more activities in a scaled channel than in a focused channel. Broad channel (1,000s of partners) ­– This category describes the channel for organizations with many products that are highly horizontal and broadly distributed. Prominent examples would include organizations like Microsoft, Google and Dropbox where usage of their products is quite horizontal. Certain household product companies are also good examples , although their products tend to get distributed through broadliners —e., large retail chains in developed countries, as well as lots of “mom and pop” stores in emerging countries. Overall, broad channels have higher levels of complexity and more demanding automation requirements than most focused or scaled channels. However, the right PRM software can significantly streamline and automate broad channel activities. The key to operating successfully in a focused or scaled or broad channel is understanding how your distribution strategy will ultimately support the growth ambitions of the company. For an organization with a niche product that has a relatively narrow focus, too many partners can create an over-distribution problem and make the product more difficult to sell. Therefore, before any PRM software can effectively automate and optimize channel activities, the organization’s channel strategy has to be closely aligned with the nature of its channel. The critical factor in moving from a focused channel to a scaled channel and eventually to a broad distribution network is to have highly streamlined programs and an automation tool—namely, PRM software—that can effectively automate more activities as the organization’s business evolves. We know that automating a channel can be sequential: You start small and then build on your successes. This rule is most applicable to fast-growing companies. However, if your organization has already been around for a while and is already selling through a channel—focused, scaled or broad—you absolutely have the same opportunities to optimize effectiveness through automation by selecting the right set of tools. Let’s review briefly what you can do for each of the three main channel types—focused,

If your company (or even country) is under a travel ban due to an epidemic like the coronavirus outbreak—or perhaps because of budget restrictions—and you have to cancel your road shows to train and enable your partners, don’t despair. There are multiple ways to enable your partners remotely without meeting face-to-face by leveraging partner relationship management (PRM) software. In this article, I will explore how you can deploy a set of pragmatic PRM channel automation tools to enable your partners in a few easy step. There are essentially two types of enablement involving collaboration with channel partners using PRM software: tactical and strategic. Let’s briefly address both. Tactical enablement: Tactical enablement includes activities like pushing a promotion through the channel, rolling out sales incentives for partner sales reps to sign up for and execute on, or creating programs to train partners on new product launches. Within 4–6 weeks you can easily deploy a partner relationship management (PRM) platform with built-in tools that allow you to effectively collaborate with your partners remotely on these and other tactical initiatives. We will discuss these tools in a bit more detail later on. Strategic enablement: This is about driving systematic improvements like sales reach and lead generation from greenfield opportunities as well as building technical or solution competencies for certain strategic product or services rollouts. These activities can also be performed using PRM software, but to do so effectively you will need to carefully consider your overall channel programs, policies, promotions and key performance management metrics. An appropriate PRM platform will allow you to set up advanced training by product categories and other criteria, but if you lack an overall integrated strategy, much of this work will turn out to be tactical, rather than strategic, enablement. With this as a framework, it’s time to consider some of the PRM software tools that can be used for both strategic and tactical enablement. These tools can address a broad range of activities related to partner life cycle management, including partner recruitment, partner onboarding, partner enablement, demand generation and partner management. In each of these areas, we can apply  both tactical and strategic approaches by using various PRM tools. Now we’re ready to consider some of the PRM software tools that can help us with each of these activities and allow us to collaborate remotely: Partner recruitment – In this age of digital content and media—especially when partners may be working from home, from the office or another location—they are very likely connected to their mobile and other computing devices. “Marketing to” the partner is a core activity, and PRM modules created specifically for social marketing, email, Google AdWords, microsites, events (online live and on demand) all enable core tactics that can be deployed for both tactical and strategic engagement. Partner onboarding – Onboarding a newly recruited partner with a step-by-step onboarding process is critical, and this is where PRM automation can help a lot. Your PRM software should allow you to quickly set up various partner onboarding programs and establish tracks within those programs to move the partner automatically from one stage to another. Laborious process steps like contract signing, business planning and more can be highly automated. Partner enablement – One of the most common facets of partner enablement is partner training, which, if it cannot be done face-to-face, can easily be carried out using SCORM-compliant learning management systems (LMSs). When you are selecting a PRM tool, make sure the LMS module is SCORM-compliant so you can easily and build effective step-by-step training courses. Demand generation – Partner enablement also includes demand generation, which should include a set of integrated tools and campaign content that partner...

If you suddenly find yourself relying on Zoom, Teams, Outlook and Excel to manage your channel in a world that has suddenly shut down completely, you are not alone. This article explores how you can get started on a remote management strategy for your channel partner network that suddenly needs more support faster as some deals appear to be on the verge of evaporating. My goal here is to help you set priorities for virtual collaboration so that you can be ready to respond in a fast-changing world. Much in the world today is outside your control, but you can quickly take control of your channel management approach by following a few sequential steps. Before we begin, let’s just reflect for a moment on the intrinsic challenges that were already a part of channel management even before the pandemic damaged our economy and took away thousands of lives. We are all beginning to realize that, while managing a direct sales force is tough, managing an indirect sales force—what we all call a channel—is even tougher in times like these. This is due to the fact that resellers, agents, and other types of partners set their priorities primarily around cash flows, customers, competencies (employees) and competitors. So, while a vendor brand may be an integral part of their overall revenue plan, in the end there is always a broader (and more personalized) set of business objectives that drive any partner business. This is where the main conflict lies. If, as I am suggesting, a partner business is not centered predominantly on a specific brand—that is, if the partner can exist without a specific product or switch it out with a different one—then brand loyalty is almost non-existent. (I realize this may not entirely be the case for captive brands or franchises, but the challenges of managing a franchise are more complex than those for a multi-product resale business or an outlet.) But whether we are talking about a captive or multi-brand channel partner, channel management is a lot more complex world than direct sales. So what can you do in times like this when resources are scarce and will possibly shrink more over the next 12–18 months—and when we are forced stay home and put channel events, trainings and various other activities on hold? First things first – We all need to prioritize ruthlessly to remain profitable because the world is highly leveraged today. Burning more cash and hoping to get there is certainly not a prudent strategy with so much uncertainty in the air. Yes, some companies like Zoom, which was in a position to scale its data center’s capacity as its user load exploded, have thrived, but their investments scaled with their direct sales demand. When it comes to a channel business, it is crucial at times like this to focus on the producers versus the non-producers in your partner base. To do that effectively, you will need a partner profile management capability that is dynamic and gives you a dashboard that will instantly tell you which partners are winning, why and how you can make more partners win. Second – We need to focus on selling and eliminating deal losses as fast as possible. This can only happen when you have a focused set of partners who care about your brand and are willing to learn and compete aggressively in the marketplace for every deal that is within their reach. To do that you have to make sure there is no channel conflict, and that means you must protect every deal that partners bring in and have trust in your support network. Finally – Make sure your reward structure is crystal clear, and then put your money where your mouth is. Stay away from complicated training, enablement and incentive programs. The entire focus for the incentive program should be on motivating partners to sell more to make more. As a partner once told me, “Loyalty can always be purchased.” So, follow the money, provide a path to make it easy for partners to make money, and align all the incentives so there is absol...

The word “channel” indicates a passageway through which something flows. Channel management is a discipline in management science in which a vendor organization or “brand” creates, captures and fulfils market demand via another set of organizations who act as channel partners and ecosystem players for the subject vendor.  In this podcast, we will expand on this basic view of channel management and attempt to explain in more detail how it functions in real-life scenarios.

The word “channel” indicates a passageway through which something flows. Channel management is a discipline in management science in which a vendor organization or “brand” creates, captures and fulfils market demand via another set of organizations who act as channel partners and ecosystem players for the subject vendor.  These channel partners act as a kind of mechanism that enables the orderly “flow” or distribution of products and services for the vendor to the end customer. In this article, we will expand on this basic view of channel management and attempt to explain in more detail how it functions in real-life scenarios. Any for-profit organization—and even some non-profits—that depend on providing products and services to customers in order to survive require two core functions: sales and support. In today's world, most organizations that sell products and services also require a marketing function. The entire goal of a commercial organization, in fact, is to find buyers, make them aware of the vendor's products and services, provide those products and services for a fee, and then, as a part of this transaction, make a reasonable profit. Now, we all know profit is a function of revenue minus cost. If the cost to acquire, deliver and serve exceed the revenue the company generates, then it becomes unprofitable to serve a specific group of customers. This is where a “channel” organization and channel management come into play by enabling cost-effective sales and support for vendors on a larger scale than is possible through direct selling alone. The primary purpose of a vendor's channel organization is to build relationships with a set of other organizations that can resell and support the vendor's products and services. The core feature of this relationship between the vendor and the partner organization is their mutual interest in increased profitability. For the relationship to succeed, the vendor organization should be able to reach, acquire and serve a large number of end customers at a relatively low cost compared to selling directly, and the partner organization should be able to increase profitable revenue by providing the vendor's products and services, along with the other products and services the partner sells. With this as a backdrop, we can now see that channel management basically entails five core phases, as outlined below: Partner recruitment – The focus of this phase is to reach out to and build relationships with potential organizations that are able to sell and support a vendor's solution. Partner training – The focus of this phase to ensure partners' functional teams are properly trained on how to market, sell, deploy and support a specific solution Partner enablement – This phase focuses on making sure the partner marketing, sales and technical personnel have the right tools to do their job. Partner sales – The entire focus of this phase is to drive increased sales via partner organizations via new accounts and partners' existing customers. Partner management – This phase focuses on introducing effective performance enhancement incentives and programs tied to training, certification, sales improvements, quota attainment, etc. Channel management is a discipline all its own, but it also tends to build up all other cross-functional areas of an organization, such as marketing, sales, operations, finance and legal. In the case of a channel organization, the traditional direct functional disciplines must undergo adaptations to fit a specific channel requirement, as follows: Channel marketing – This functional group focuses on driving awareness in the partner base to recruit and enable partners with new programs and initiatives. This group also takes content from the direct marketing team and adapts that content for partner use in end-user lead generation. Channel sales – The focus for this functional group is to train and help a partner close a new transition or grow an existing acco...