Tips & Guides — 30 May 2023
A Partner Relationship Management Guide
According to a Forrester report, 75% of all world trade has flown indirectly in 2020. Much of this trade is done via channel partners—from resellers, managed service providers, affiliates, and more. Considering this information, in today’s globalized economy, where collaboration and partnerships are crucial, companies need to find efficient ways to manage their increasingly complex yet lucrative partner relationships to stay competitive.
Partner relationship management (PRM) allows businesses to do so. It’s a strategy designed to streamline operations, increase sales, achieve goals, and grow your business. PRM marketing strategy right is critical to engaging your partners and keeping them invested in your program, so they’ll feel empowered to sell more of your products and services.
Despite that, with the business and marketing environment continuing to change so rapidly, this is easier said than done.
In this comprehensive guide, we are exploring the specifics of PRM software, its benefits, and how it can help strengthen your general marketing strategy and make it more efficient.
Partner Relationship Management (PRM) combines strategies and software solutions businesses use to communicate with channel partners. PRM software refers to software solutions designed to help enterprises manage and optimize their relationships with their channel partners, distributors, resellers, and other business partners. At first glance, PRM software looks similar to Customer Relationship Management (CRPM) platforms, but they differ.
A CRM technology solution usually falls short of what channel managers (and partners) need to successfully get products or services to their end users. A CRM tool primarily concerns a company’s customer relationship, while a PRM platform manages its relationships with indirect sales teams.
Managing partners is a complex, multi-faceted process. PRM software usually offers a great deal of customization so that companies can configure and align their systems to the structure of their partner program.
A PRM solution is software that’s either downloadable or web-based. It is hosted centrally and often delivered in the form of SaaS or Software-as-a-Service, so users pay for the software on an ongoing subscription basis.
Some users refer to PRM software as a channel management or automation solution. It generally comprises a combination of best practices, templates, and workflows to manage and automate business processes and relationships between businesses and their partners.
Although PRM software may differ between vendors depending on the distribution channel they’re targeting, they generally consist of the following:
Partner management portal
Successful partnership marketing is only possible when partners are engaged with a program. A partner management portal can help companies build stronger relationships with partners and increase the odds of PRM success.
A partner portal allows affiliates to self-serve their marketing efforts and access the necessary resources, tools, training, and collaboration features.
The main benefits partner portals offer for their affiliates are:
Unification of information
A PRM should provide a dynamic environment that optimizes distributor and reseller performance in a unified platform that delivers real-time support and insights. A PRM should engage digital experiences right across the entire partner lifecycle.
A PRM solution through its partner management portal is the perfect place to provide partners with the right marketing collateral and offers. It’s also a place where partners can find learning resources and keep knowledge bases, templates, playbooks, and online courses so that partners can access them easily from one place.
A unified PRM platform helps partners build better forecasts through better collaboration, providing channels with a place to co-create account plans and track KPIs.
Simplified communication
A PRM solution should provide various communication opportunities, including a ticketing system allowing affiliates to seek support.
Affiliates should be able to ask questions in a support section and see a list of tickets and statuses. Using a PRM strategy, you could encourage communication and discussions, increasing loyalty and engagement and improving sales results.
Analytics
Businesses need to make decisions based on data, so a PRM platform should be able to help you track and monitor your channel partners’ performance. Metrics to focus on include:
As well as tracking partners’ performance, you should also be able to evaluate if your software is bringing you the desired results.
For example, you could measure the number of user logins to your partner portal. More logins could indicate that users need help accessing the portal. A high number of logins and bounce rate might mean users are leaving without finding what they need.
You can also measure how many partners are participating in training regarding the number of partners interacting with courses and how this impacts their sales results.
When selecting a PRM, look for one with a customizable dashboard so you can create your layers of statistics and fine-tune your reports to your specific requirements. For example, you can see monthly performance statistics or earnings by affiliate managers or advertisers. Whatever you want to measure, your PRM should allow you to do so.
Why should you incorporate PRM in your marketing strategy?
Managing multiple channel partner relationships as a route to market might be complex and challenging, especially when PRM marketers have to manually oversee partner rebates and figure out performance data criteria manually on spreadsheets.
It’s complicated to carry out these repetitive tasks without errors creeping in and even more difficult considering how often channel targets and measurements change. Not to mention the disruption caused by the emergence of new channel types and partner programs.
In today’s competitive business environment, partnership relationship management solutions offer marketers a practical way to facilitate all aspects of managing partner relationships. It’s an essential marketing tool that helps companies keep ahead of the competition with the ability to react to new market segments, gain new customers, and boost revenues.
A PRM helps collaborate with numerous businesses easily, with a strategy that shares resources, making it cost-effective for small businesses needing more staff.
Various industries have successfully incorporated PRM into their marketing strategies and benefited immensely.
Technology Industry
The Technology sector, including software and hardware companies, often operates through channel sales and relies on partnerships for product distribution. PRM solutions help manage and support partner networks, streamline deal registration and lead management, and provide real-time visibility into sales performance, enabling companies to scale their business and maximize revenue.
Manufacturing
Another industry that has immensely benefited from PRM is Manufacturing. Using PRM solutions enables manufacturers to onboard effectively and train their partners, including distributors, dealers, and resellers, provides them with product information and marketing materials, and collaborates on joint marketing campaigns. By doing this, the results include improved partner engagement, enhanced sales effectiveness, and increased market penetration.
Telecommunications
Telecommunications is another industry heavily relying on affiliates for customer acquisition, service delivery, and network deployment. PRM can aid in managing telecom channel partners, facilitate efficient communication, and coordinate sales activities. Also, their tracking performance tools, overseeing commissions, and ensuring compliance lead to enhanced partner productivity and revenue growth.
Retail
Retail organizations often collaborate with suppliers, distributors, and franchisees to expand their product offerings and geographical reach. PRM solutions help streamline the onboarding process for retail partners, centralize marketing assets and promotions, and facilitate seamless communication. This way, retailers can create consistent brand experiences across multiple locations and increase customer satisfaction.
Finance
The Financial services sector, including banking, insurance, and wealth management, frequently relies on strategic partnerships to extend their product portfolios and reach new customer segments. PRM solutions enable financial institutions to manage partner relationships, provide training and compliance resources, and automate lead distribution and deal registration processes.
iGaming
PRM also significantly influences the iGaming sector by improving collaboration, streamlining operations, and driving revenue growth.
PRM plays a vital role in shaping the iGaming sector by enabling effective partner management, streamlining operations, and leveraging data-driven strategies. It helps operators build strong relationships with partners, drive customer acquisition, and ultimately enhance their competitive edge in the dynamic iGaming market.
These are only some of the worldwide industries that have seen substantial benefits from adopting PRM solutions. PRM can be advantageous for any business that relies on partnerships and collaboration as part of its go-to-market and expansion strategy.
How can Affise help your PRM marketing strategy?
Affise is an all-in-one affiliate tracking software platform offering various marketing tools for Brands and Advertisers. With Affise, you can manage, track, analyze, and optimize all your online affiliate/partner campaigns in real-time and exponentially grow your business. It offers various affiliate marketing features to help your PRM, boost your outreach, and skyrocket profits.
Affise lets you get granular, whether you’re tracking marketing performance, identifying growth opportunities, or forecasting risks.
Affise partner portals can be customized for each business’ needs depending on the industry and type of business and include various features for PRM to enable companies to carry out affiliate marketing activities. Affise Analytics and Business Intelligence tools offer diverse ways to track partners’ activity and performance, with over 50 data breakdowns to monitor partner program performance.
Network managers can create, configure, change, and delete offers, and affiliate partners can see offers they can obtain for promotion. Managers can search for affiliates by name, ID, and more and filter by various criteria, such as whether they’re active, not active, banned, or in moderation—with portal access only to active affiliates.
Affise automation enables marketers to automate repetitive manual tasks such as simple partner communications, invoice generation, and opening offers to publishers. AI features, including traffic back, cross-postback URLs, and deeplinks, also help to boost revenues.
Affise customers also benefit from automation to simplify partner payouts and many other financial aspects of partnerships, with the option to select from different currencies and payment providers.
Users can also transfer offers quickly due to the API integration between the sources of offers and the software. Affise CPAPI accesses raw data and imports it according to the recipient’s system requirements rules.
Affise allows you to create customizable reports and view multiple pieces of data on a single page.
You can group reports via an account manager, affiliate, advertiser, and more. Users can also employ custom statistics and view specific, detailed data over a certain period of time. Last but not least, you can quickly share these reports with your partners.
To conclude…
Implementing PRM in your marketing strategy offers several key benefits.
Firstly, PRM enhances collaboration and communication with partners, fostering aligned marketing efforts and improving campaign effectiveness. It streamlines partner onboarding and training, reducing the time and resources required to get partners up to speed and enabling them to start generating leads and sales quickly.
Furthermore, PRM provides better visibility into partner performance and sales metrics and allows your company to identify top-performing partners, optimize resource allocation, and drive revenue growth.
Additionally, PRM helps expand market reach by leveraging partner networks, increasing brand awareness, and enabling access to new customer segments. Lastly, PRM facilitates efficient marketing resources and collateral management, ensuring consistent branding and messaging across partner channels.
Using Affise to boost your PRM marketing strategy can tremendously impact your general marketing strategy and growth. With its customizable dashboard, Affise lets you personalize your PRM experience, quickly onboard affiliates, keep track of contact information, and check their activity status. Furthermore, its automation features can help you smooth the onboarding process, take care of repetitive manual communication tasks, and generate customized performance reports, saving you and your firm valuable time.
Incorporate PRM strategy with Affise now, strengthen your affiliate partnerships, and reach new customers worldwide. Learn more about Affise and its features by contacting our customer service today.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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