Managing a relationship with channel partners can be a bit tricky. As partners, your relationship needs to be in good standing from every angle. Sure, weekly meetings at a local coffee shop is one way to strengthen the relationship, but we have a better solution for partner relationship management.
We suggest offering your partners personalized communications and role-based, strategic access to information resources. In other words, a community portal for Partner Relationship Management. This can give your partners access to the collateral they need to get their job done and really improve their engagement with you and their clients. Thus, strengthening your relationship!
Consider these 5 ways of how an online PRM community can give you and your channel partners the relationship boost you need.
1. Provide your Partners with Tools & Resources
Working with someone you don’t see in the office every day can be difficult. It can be even more difficult if your partners are on the other side of the world, in an entirely different time zone. Work environments like this can make communication tricky and frustrating.
A well-designed PRM portal is a great way to streamline communication and clarify any ongoing questions related to a partner’s role and your business.
For example, your partner may need market development funds, but doesn’t know how to get this from you. With communication amongst you and your partner strained due to working environments, a PRM portal fills the gaps in communication. Your partner can ask and receive the marketing development funds directly on the portal. The back and forth between you and your partner is eliminated, and you now have a clear market development funds process in place.
2. Educate Partners with Informative Content
Community portals make it easy to present content to partner users. Whether your partner is looking for technical, executive, sales, marketing or operational materials, they will easily find what they are looking for on a PRM portal.
A powerful search function, well-designed navigation, and mobile-friendly architecture are all excellent ways to encourage channel partners to make your portal the first place they go to for information. Partners will also have access to personalized content, reducing irrelevant information while protecting sensitive data that should only be available to certain roles.
You can also use the informative content on your portal to increase your partner relationship marketing. Consider having FAQ pages, short video clips with explanations of your processes, or simple PowerPoint presentations.
3. Drive engagement with an interactive community portal
A PRM Community portal offers partner portal solutions for collaboration with features like:
- Discussion forums
- Lead registration and support case initiation
- Social sharing of ideas, articles, and questions
- Training for product and service delivery
- Document sharing like brochures, contracts, and technical documentation
These features help promote a collaborative, engaged community that is able to share experiences and tips that may not be found in your training manuals. Think of it as your own internal share and learn. The information that can be discussed is endless and provides you and your partners with on-going training.
An interactive community portal will support a connected workplace and channel team, which can result in an ROI of 16x your investment.
4. Track Results
Integrating your portal with Salesforce or Dynamics CRM can generate rich analytics to track forecasts, service requests, and performance against targets and product certifications. Your partners can access this data in an easily digestible chart or a graph as opposed to tracking everything manually on disconnected spreadsheets. Your partner managers will also have access to the same data through your CRM, giving them the insight to jump into an opportunity to help close a sale when needed.
If your company has incentive programs such as MDF, customizable reporting dashboards make it easy for your partners to access their performance data and for your internal team to monitor who is excelling and who may need coaching.
5. Keep your Partners with Engaging & Relevant Information
Use partner relationship marketing on your PRM portal to increase engagement. For example, you can reward partners who share ways they’ve implemented or customized your products in interesting ways to address a specific customer problem. Customer success stories are excellent resources for partners and vendors, and you’d be surprised how effective co-opetition can be in driving innovation.
Fresh, channel-generated content is another great way to keep your partners coming back to the community on a regular basis. Encourage partners to submit stories for publishing on a company-wide blog for everyone’s benefit. Your own departmental employees could contribute articles as well. A partner community portal with many diverse opinions is a great way to generate ideas and spark interesting discussions.
Ready to enter the PRM world?
Whether you have weekly casual coffee meetings with your partner, or not, there should be an aspect of fun in your partner community. There are a number of ways that you can use your PRM portal to make working with partners fun and engaging. The amount of engagement and partner relationship management that you can do to strengthen your relationships is endless.
We want to hear from you!
How do you keep your partners and employees engaged? How do you use your community PRM portal? Let us know in the comments!