Features to Look for in PRM Software: Boosting Your Sales Strategy

In today’s ever-evolving business realm, collaboration has emerged as a key to success. This indirect flow of world trade relies on a partner network of channel partners such as affiliates, resellers, and distributors to increase their brand recognition and stay competitive.

However, effective management of such intricate partnerships is not easy. Businesses can go for a sophisticated approach such as partner relationship management (PRM) software to streamline and automate many of the processes. Basically, it is a strategy to grow your business, achieve goals, and increase revenue.

A PRM marketing strategy is crucial to keeping your partners engaged and invested in your partner lifecycle. It makes them feel empowered to sell more of your services or products. In this guide, we will explore certain features of PRM software that can make your general marketing strategy more efficient and strong.

What is Partner Relationship Management PRM?

Partner Relationship Management is a comprehensive approach to optimizing a company’s customer relationships with its channel partners. It combines PRM software solutions, processes, and strategies that businesses use to engage, enable, and manage their partners.

It covers every aspect of the partner management process such as:

• Recruiting partners and onboarding.
• Partner training and enablement.
• Sales operations.
• Lead distribution.
• Performance tracking through metrics and KPIs.
• Co-marketing and co-selling.
• Training and support.
• Security and access control.
• Feedback loops and more.

The primary goals of a partner relationship management partner program are to:

• Enhance collaboration.
• Improved partner engagement and communication.
• Ensure efficient partnerships to drive mutual success.

How Partner Management Software Improves The Partner Management Process?

PRM software is the hub where all operations related to partner relationship management take place. For instance, you can use content management tools to launch partner onboarding pipelines and create sales tasks for your partners.

Some other perks of having a PRM software include:

• Collaborating with numerous business partners and businesses.
• Tracking and managing partners’ pain points, tasks, and progress.
• Saving loads of time via automation.
• Saving human effort by skipping manual data private tracking and recording on spreadsheets.
• Building trust and credibility between you and your partners.
• Sharing sales and marketing assets to best prepare your partners for representing your brand.
• Avoiding chances of creepy errors and mistakes.

Simply, PRM software enables you to handle all processes of your partner program in one place. You just need to grab the best partner management software to effectively implement your PRM strategy and it will smoothen your route to market.

Key Features of Partner Relationship Management PRM Software Tools

If you are looking for PRM software to incorporate into your marketing strategy, this section can help. It will highlight some of the key features a PRM software tool must have to uniquely meet your business goals and amplify them.

1. Dedicated Partner Centric Portal

Partner management PRM software tools must provide dedicated partner portals to assist companies in automating and managing partner pipelines. They relieve you from constantly hounding partner teams for the most recent information.

A dedicated partner PRM software portal provides:

• Clarity on leads and opportunities.
• Partner progress.
• Customized reward structures.
• Automated partner onboarding and customer relationship management.
• Updated metrics and reports.
• Access to admins and partners to regular data and reports.

Dedicated partner portals also provide authority to your partner program. You automate the partner onboarding process, give partners access to their portals, and boost their productivity.

2. Lead Management

Businesses want their channel partners to attract more leads that reach them to increased partner revenue. In this pursuit, they onboard more partners that will ultimately extend their market reach.

However, it increases the workload on the software companies such as individually tracking each partner and manually recording his leads. This manual procedure is prone to errors as some leads may miss and some may get duplicated.

PRM software has a special feature that not only saves time and human effort but also builds trust between you and your partners. The lead management feature of a PRM software platform automates the entire partner ecosystem platform.

A good partner marketing management platform helps:

• Streamline the lead management business processes.
• Find the source of leads, track it, and take the necessary steps to close the deal.
• Minimize chances of missing leads or duplication of leads.
• Close deals faster by avoiding unnecessary tasks, meetings, and documentation.
• Save time to focus on activities crucial for boosting your business growth.

3. Dashboard to Analyze Goals

Easy-to-navigate dashboards help businesses smartly manage partners networks. They feature your reseller partner activities and regular data. You can analyze these metrics and KPIs to determine your business success and goals. If your marketing strategy is not working well, PRM’s regular reports will help you revise it and appropriately direct it to achieving success.

Dashboards also display each partner’s performance and help you find the most profitable ones to invest in. They give companies an opportunity to experiment with different reselling partner strategies to find one that drives better revenue.

4. Marketing Campaigns Management

Tracking marketing campaigns for several partner programs can be quite challenging. Particularly, if you have partner teams of large sizes, the process can become more hectic and time-consuming.

For instance, every time you onboard partners, you have to invest time and effort in:

• Responding to multiple partner requests.
• Tracking marketing collaterals and related documents.
• Repeatedly sharing the same materials with channel partners.
• Sharing necessary resources and training materials.

Here, PRM software enables companies to provide self-guided training materials and enablement documents. This saves you time from indulging in redundant resource-sharing and training activities. Hence, the marketing campaigns management feature of PRM software gives your team a unified partner experience.

5. Communication

If a company has multiple partner programs running in parallel, it can be daunting to timely and consistently communicate with all reseller partners. A PRM software features a partner portal that has self-service access to information whenever necessary.

PRM software fosters a strong bond between you and your partner by:

• Enabling feedback.
• Sharing knowledge.
• Providing valuable partner experience.
• Encouraging discussions.
• Sending alert notifications to remind important activities on time.

Conclusion

Companies indulge in several partner programs to excel in today’s highly competitive market. Traditional methods of establishing and managing relationships and trading with wider audiences make collaborations tedious and less effective. PRM software is a new and comprehensive approach to not only build meaningful partnerships but also to smartly manage partners in ways that prove successful for driving business growth.