Using your Partner Portal as a Competitive Advantage when fighting for New Partners

10.26.21 11:30 AM By Vartopia Team
All is fair in love and war, and partner programs. In today’s world of 10x valuations, IPOs, growth rates, and everything it takes to make headlines organizations going to market through partners need to use everything they can as a competitive advantage. The difference between your logo in Times Square on the multi-story screen or a simple press release on LinkedIn could be whether you landed the right partner or not. Your partner portal could be just the tool you need that enables you to connect, communicate, collaborate and enable commercial activities for your organization. On the other hand, a poorly designed, overly complex, and under-resourced partner portal could be the reason partners choose to not do business with you. A well-designed platform that enables partners to interact with you when they want to, is personalized to them, and removes as many barriers as possible will certainly aid in helping partners to do business with you. A partner portal that is properly integrated with your CRM can be a valuable platform that provides detailed information about the entire lifecycle of your partner.

A Portal does it all for you!

A well-built partner portal gives partners everything they need at their fingertips, including things like access to demo accounts and direct support for timely responses to technical questions. Training, certification, enablement, product brochures, pricing information, marketing collateral, and competitive battle cards are all standard documents that should always be included in partner portals. Choosing the right partner portal technology can be a competitive edge in your market. The right portal will become a highly effective tool for communicating and collaborating between your organization, and your partners. Partner Lifecycle Consider the entire lifecycle of partners during any evaluation of partner portal technologies. Whether your organization is launching one for the first time or considering a revamp of existing technology it is probably a good idea to map out the journey your partners go through. Recruitment, onboarding, enablement, marketing support, deal registration, customer support. Leaving anything out could be the nail in the coffin for you when your partners choose another organization to go to market with. The Entire Lifecycle of a partner can be tracked through a partner portal correctly integrated with your CRM. It gives complete visibility into how the channel business is performing and sheds light on the various relationships being built between your organization and your partners. Let’s take a deeper dive into each section that should absolutely be considered when looking at partner portal technology.

Partner Recruitment:

You have identified your ideal partner, and they have said yes! The next step is to get them signed up, set up as a partner in your CRM, and marked with the correct information that should be used to help group them into personalized partner experiences. Be sure to keep the time from signature to entry into your portal as short as possible, you don’t want to lose the momentum.

Partner Onboarding:

Partner onboarding, do it well and things will go great. Fail here, and every dollar and minute of time you spent recruiting that partner will be wasted. Onboarding is much more than a welcome email, it should include everything from the re-confirming of the details of the partnership to an orientation of your portal and a review of what the partner needs to be successful. A well-structured onboarding can carry the initial motivation partners feel to success and bring in early revenue for you. Don’t leave your partners to wander around aimlessly once the partner agreement is signed, the real work has just begun!

Partner Engagement:

Your partner has officially been recruited, and has completed onboarding so your job is done, right? Wrong! Onboarding gets your partners to the dance, now it is time to get them excited to party with you. Getting your partner engaged means that they are actively talking to their prospects about your solution. They are actively working with your marketing team to cobrand content together for placement on social media and a host of other examples. Carry the early momentum and immerse them in your world by offering to help them as much as possible.

Partner Performance:

Ultimately, partner performance will be the key performance indicator the dictates whether all the time and money up until now will have a positive ROI. At the end of the year, is it time to fire this partner, or double down on your mutual success? Having the right partner portal, with a tightly integrated CRM will easily answer the hard questions for you. Make sure expectations are set on day one, are monitored over the lifecycle of the initial term of the relationship, and then reviewed at the end of the year. Be transparent with why you are doubling down or firing that partner. Don’t ghost them. Conclusion: Not deploying a partner portal solution makes any of the above items basically impossible to measure. Gain an edge over your competition today and deploy a partner portal that takes the partner experience into consideration. Request a demo today to explore Vartopia’s partner portal.

Vartopia Team