The Must-Have ROI of PRM

With 64% of sales going through the channel, a PRM solution has become as fundamental a business tool requirement as your accounting or CRM solution. Can you run a channel without one? For a time maybe, but the opportunity costs add up quickly.

Don’t Manage a Process, Manage your Growth

As any channel manager will tell you, the number of hats required to run a program are numerous. Without the right tools, your channel team spends their time answering one-off partner questions, sending sell sheets, tracking deals in spreadsheets (when your partners tell you about them), and countless other tasks that keep them from focusing on driving revenue.

A PRM solution enables you and your team to automate 90% of the manual management of partners and frees time to focus on high value touches with partners:

• How can you help partners grow their business?
• How can you support your top performers and understand why underperforming partners aren’t seeing the growth you or they would like?
• What content is being downloaded and used, and in what ways can you create more effective content?
• Where are new partners in the onboarding process and where are existing partners compared to goals?

Like a contractor’s toolbox that enables them to carry everything they need in one place, a PRM solution organizes content and creates a repeatable process around onboarding and pipeline management in a way that is formalized and standardized for the benefit of both you and your partners.

Track, Measure, Adjust, Repeat

CFO’s don’t fund what they cannot measure, and you cannot effectively nurture what you don’t understand. A PRM solution enables you to track the core measures of your business, including growth metrics, ROI on MDF, who your top and bottom performers are, which content is most effective, and other variables that are critical to deciding where to spend your team’s time.

Partner Attention and Retention

Any tech company with a channel has heavy competition when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of partners. How do you get their attention in a sea of options? A one-stop portal that delivers a strong onboarding and training process that gets them educated and motivated about you and everything they need to sell your product on a day to day basis, combined with your attention focused on how to support their growth will win out over a less formalize process every time.

And partners have to track and measure too. With your portal your partners can track and measure how many leads they get from you, protect deals, manage MDF and have clear visibility into your joint business objectives.

ROI of your PRM

As with other foundational systems, the return on the investment comes from your ability to do business in a competitive and fast-moving environment. Just like a fireman doesn’t run into a fire unarmed and unprepared, and a bookkeeper doesn’t try to do payroll without that accounting system, you cannot run a successful partner program without the right tools. But how do you measure ROI on PRM?

Your PRM will deliver ROI when:

• Your ability to clearly report partner revenue, growth and trajectory to company executives delivers continued budget support to your channel program.
• That same visibility into your partners enables you to make the right decisions about which partners should get your time and attention.
• Automating the repeatable channel tasks enables your channel team to spend their time on relationship and growth-related activities, amplifying the ROI on their overhead costs.
• Intuitive partner enablement keeps your partners engaged and selling.
• Incremental revenue generated gives you a PRM solution payback period of less than 1 year and year 1 ROI of 150%. Want to know how? Contact us to walk through your custom ROI calculations.

Creating a successful channel program depends on the seamless management of several moving parts. Partner Relationship management software kicks the manual tasks of partner management to the curb to enable your organization to realize the true ROI of your channel program.