We all strive to do well in our careers. Whether it’s completing the most sales within the month or providing excellent customer service. Ultimately, every business has the same goal in mind, to grow revenues and provide the best service possible.
As an individual contributor, you focus on the goals of your business while also pursuing your own personal goals and career dreams. Each action you take in your role helps you advance in both the company and your career. To maximize your success, it’s important that your achievements are recognized by those who can support your ambitions – your management team.
What better way to impress your management team then by introducing an exceptional business tool that will help drive revenue and increase business growth? Here are 7 benefits of a Partner Relationship Management Portal that you need to tell your management team about to help reach business goals.
Effective Management of the Relationship with Channel Partners
Working with channel partners who are not always physically available can be a challenge for most businesses. When partners reside elsewhere or are constantly in and out of the office, communication becomes problematic and could impact sales performance.
A PRM Portal provides communication and collaborative tools that will diminish communication issues. No more emailing back and forth for updates, both you and your partners will have full access to results and resources.
- Want to know how many leads a channel partner has brought in this month? Check your PRM Portal.
- Want to know if your channel partner needs more MDF funds? Check your PRM Portal.
- Want to provide information to all of your channel partners or a select few? Use your PRM Portal to provide the communication.
So, having better communication with channel partners will help push your business ahead of your competition.
Training & Channel Sales Enablement
It is clear that effective, on-going training and education forms a significant portion of channel sales enablement. When your channel partners are competent, they are perceived to be trustworthy, and this is a positive contributor to the sales process.
Considering the dynamic state of industry trends, common practices and the competitive landscape, getting channel partners to stay informed can be challenging. A Partner Relationship Management Portal provides the perfect solution to this. It can be used to increase channel partner engagement by creating an environment where sales partners can learn and enhance their knowledge.
The LMS (Learning Management System) feature in a PRM portal provides channel partners with training courses that are managed by channel managers or administrators. For instance, the business can set up a bi-annual mandatory training course for channel partners to help keep them ahead of the game. Results and progress can be monitored and tracked, enabling the business to ensure completion and provide support to any participants struggling with the course.
Do Your Channel Partners Have the Necessary Resources to Sell?
An LMS module is not the only tool in a PRM portal that provides on-going training and learning. Many PRM portals also feature document sharing capabilities. For example, a document library can be created to share any important documents and resources with users. It can also be used by channel partners to create their own playbooks that will assist in not only keeping them informed but can also be used to close deals.
Providing knowledge to channel partners helps improve their understanding of your business and products/services. This in turn enables your partner to provide prospective customers with more relevant and timely information resulting in a more educated buying decision.
Onboarding Channel Partners
A PRM portal makes it easy to sign up new channel partners and partner employees. The onboarding process to engage new partners, partner sign ups, and partner training can be managed and controlled directly by the management team/administrators. Having more control over the onboarding process, will help reduce the time it takes for a new partner or partner employee to transition to a full-fledged channel partner, who successfully closes deals.
In addition, with a PRM portal, flexibility can be built into the onboarding process. The business has complete control over the approval process, and acceptance can occur directly on the portal. Using an electronic signature method, such as Adobe Sign, potential partners can agree to the business Terms and Conditions instantly.
Sales funnel Visibility – Lead and Deal Management
Visibility into your pipeline provides you with an understanding of where things stand – are sales target on track to being achieved? How are your channel partners performing? What is the distribution of leads across sales stages? When accurate, real-time data is at your disposal, you can analyze the data, evaluate the outcome and decide on actions.
A PRM portal will help close the gaps between the business and channel partners. With automated lead distribution, deal management, and powerful reporting features, your channel management team will no longer need to question where the leads are, they can just check the PRM portal.
From the initial stage of the sales funnel, channel partners can share leads with management teams/administrators in an organized fashion. Opportunities can even be followed, with the option for leaders to receive real-time updates.
In addition, as a lead moves through the sales process, partners and leaders can easily track it to ensure it stays on course and does not fall through cracks. Full reporting dashboards keeps everyone in the know and increases the sales funnel forecasting accuracy.
We need more collaboration!
Collaboration is key to building strong business teams. Unfortunately, there are many instances where the lack of collaboration amongst a stakeholders can be the source of many issues. A PRM portal provides a business with a centralized network where partners, channel managers, teams, employees, etc. can communicate with one another on leads, opportunities, sales forecasts, resources, and all information that needs to be shared.
Not only will a PRM portal open the door to collaboration, but it can also engage channel partners with different teams and members of the business. For example, community news feeds allow users to post any updates that needs to be shared and allows other users to comment and provide feedback on any posts. This ensures that everyone is not only in the know but is also working together.
Get actionable analytics
We all know that when it comes down to it, performance and ROI is the number one factor in determining if a channel partner is an asset to the business or not. But, how do we know if a channel partner is an asset or not? Analytics!
Having access to analytics and KPI’s, gives the business the leverage it needs. Identifying metrics for what works and what doesn’t work is the only way leaders and channel partners can determine the right strategies to take.
Book a meeting with your management team
Who knows, one day you may want to be part of your management team and eventually, even work above them. Climbing the corporate hierarchy can be challenging and timely but presenting exceptional ideas to help improve the business will help you get noticed and climb up the ladder faster.