Partner Relationship Management (PRM) tools are designed to help companies manage their partner network and drive revenue through the channel. Here are a few reasons why partnership teams might find a Put the partner program on autopilot by setting up automation that drives partner behavior. For instance, set up automated tasks for creating new deals or sending follow-up emails when a deal is in the proposal sent stage for more than 7 days or add a task to schedule meetings with the client if a deal is in the prospect stage for 30 days. PRM tool useful:
The automation feature encourages partners to log into the partner portal, facilitating their completion of essential tasks and ultimately, leading to more active and engaged partners.
Moreover, automating partner program management can make it easier for partner managers to implement these behaviors across partners, thus improving overall program performance.
Short answer, No! CRM typically covers a broad range of activities related to managing customer relationships, including sales, marketing, and customer service. PRM, or Partner Relationship Management, on the other hand, is more narrowly focused on managing partner relationships, such as partner onboarding, training, deal sharing and collaboration. PRM is a strategy focused on managing relationships with partners, such as resellers, distributors, and other channel partners.
Modern PRMs like Zomentum works in tandem with CRM so you can gain a complete view of partner activity, including sales performance and partner engagement.
There are several smart automation that can be set in a PRM system to better manage your channel. Here are a few examples:
Automated Onboarding
Deal Collaboration
Drive Partner Behavior
Ready-to-use templates
Partner Training
The amount of time saved through partner automation can vary depending on the specific tasks and the number of partners involved. However, a study by Forrester Research found that channel managers can save up to 15-20% of their time through the use of partner automation tools. This can translate to several hours per week, which can be used to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives such as partner recruitment and relationship-building.
Partner automation can also benefit partners themselves by streamlining their interactions with the vendor and providing them with greater visibility into their performance and deal pipeline. This can lead to increased partner engagement and ultimately, better business outcomes for both parties.
In short: when done right, partner success automation will
Help improve your company’s overall revenue
Increase revenue pipeline from the partner program
Boost productivity of your partner management team
How, you might ask? Let’s see!
The amount of time saved through partner automation can vary depending on the specific tasks and the number of partners involved. However, a study by Forrester Research found that channel managers can save up to 15-20% of their time through the use of partner automation tools. This can translate to several hours per week, which can be used to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives such as partner recruitment and relationship-building.
EXAMPLE #1
The PRM system can notify your partner management team about any developments at a deal they’re following. These developments can be partners sending the proposals, logging a sales call, sending an email or a response from the customer.
When you are aware of these things happening, you can have meaningful conversations with your partner team on deal flow and opportunity pipeline.
EXAMPLE #2
In addition to helping with the sales process, you can automate renewals and notify your partners about renewal due dates and upselling opportunities.
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Partner Portal Adoption
With a PRM you can easily seek out the best new customers for your business added by your partner team, find the best deals and gain relevant information about them.
Another thing that you can do is filter out the promising deals based on actual data like deal size, decision-makers involved and their interaction with your product.
Be sure to initiate a meaningful contact by enabling partners to know everything about the prospects to make a great first impression. Your sales reps can be in the loop and assist partners on high-value and important deals.
Scheduling meetings and calls
Automation makes the process of scheduling meetings and calls with potential deals a lot easier and free of human error. Partners can, for example, get reminders about overdue deals. They can get notifications about scheduling a meeting with prospects.
Data collection from meetings and calls
Let’s be honest – data collection and validation consume most of the time in the sales process. Lucky for all of us, PRM platforms help you save data and information throughout your sales process. You can capture data about the customer and their business during the complete sales process, and view that data directly into the integrated CRM system.
Deal Management
With a PRM, you can easily handle contact management and order management, as well as record calls, emails and meetings automatically. This way you can create a personalized deal for a user, taking their needs into consideration. By tracking deals within one dashboard, you can skip manual data entry and always stay on top of deal flow.
Email
One way to reduce the amount of time spent sending emails is to automate email campaigns that send specific messages to individuals when they perform a desired action.
For instance, when someone starts a free trial with your SaaS company, you could set up a series of automated emails to welcome them and offer a discount on their subscription after the free trial ends. Once you set up the email campaign, it will run automatically every time someone meets the predefined trigger. This can save you time and effort in the long run.
Additionally, a PRM system can help manage your email templates, securely storing them in one place so that you can make edits or create new templates as needed.
Contracts, Proposals and requests for proposals (RFPs)
You can automate the RFP process, communicate more easily with partners, track the results you get and easily reuse RFP templates. Make use of ready-to-use templates and track customer activity on the documents. Partners can create, send and e-sign contracts and proposals all from one place.
To sum everything up here’s a checklist to help you get started with partner success automation:
Know your sales process. Know your partner’s sales process
Identify your best-performing partners, incentivize partner behavior and implement it across the program
Collaborate on deals and save the data you get from them
Automate responses to your prospects
Create reminders about moving deal stages and steps to take if a deal is in one stage for more than stipulated time
Automatically move through stages in your pipeline: for example, scheduling meetings, creating documents and e-sign contracts
Be ready for the next steps after closing with automatic reminders to your partners about renewals, cross-sell & up-sell
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