Let’s begin with an introduction to the Partnership Program.
The Partnership Program is a business strategy embraced by business owners and vendors, wherein they create additional sources of income by joining forces with business consultants, other vendors, etc., who promote their services/products.
Different business models use different partnership programs depending on the products and services they provide to their customer base. In addition to this, partnership programs are chosen based on numerous internal and external factors.
Partnership programs or business partners kindle growth. Development and growth are the main reasons behind many business partnership programs.
Let’s look into some of the benefits of partnership programs to help you turn your business into a success story.
Benefits Of Partnership Programs:
1. Revenue Boost
The biggest benefit of a partnership program is that it produces a notable amount of growth in sales and distribution in targeted areas. Eventually, all the opportunities add to the annual revenue. When you have partners who are regional experts, it helps you break onto the scene in those markets and doesn’t take much investment on your part.
2. Additional Sales Channel
Every business has its own sales channel. When you have a partnership program, additional channels are opened up to you. These programs are an auxiliary source of income for your business.
3. Widened Network
When you join forces with another business, vendor, or consultant, you don’t only have access to those entities but also their customer base and their partners. This helps you widen your network.
Maintaining a Partnership Program is more challenging than it sounds. It’s not a walk in the park to manage and communicate with your partners spread across the globe. Getting a partner is easy, but sustaining that partnership takes time.
Below, you will find some useful tips on how to grow your partnership program.
Managing and Growing a Partnership Program
It takes work to sustain a partnership.
Good communication is what bridges the chasm between you and your partner. You can manage this with routine emails, messages, or calls. But long-term partnerships require more.
The best way to make your partnership program permanent is to have a CRM partner portal or any online partner portal. Before we get into that, let’s look into the ways you can grow the partnership.
Manage Assets
A good way to grow a partnership is to have proper sales assets and proper marketing materials, such as brochures, PPTs, email copies, and product descriptions. When you have useful assets, they help you create a quality experience for partners and provide motivation to put in good work in their network. And presto, more partners! So keep a close eye on the content you provide.
Partner Management System
Streamlined partnership portals are bound to be a huge success. But you should do more. No matter how many partners you have, you need a way to manage them smoothly with all the conventional ways of communication, like calls and emails. You need a proper management system to expand your program and focus solely on pitching new partners.
Rank Your Partners
You need a good ranking or grading system to grow your business. You need to know what works for you and what branches to cut off because they are unproductive. In a similar manner, you need a ranking system for your partners in order to determine who brings in the top-notch customers. Once you do this, you will better understand their strategies and help others implement them.
And once your program gets a boost, it will start growing.
After the growth has begun, we come to the management stage. The next step is to find a solution to manage your partners. As already stated, a partner portal is your best bet.
A partner portal gives your partners a dashboard where they can view their earnings, leads they may have forwarded to the business, etc. Moreover, you get an overview of their performance.
Listed below are the various ways an online partner portal helps you with partner management.
How Do You Manage a Partnership Portal?
1. Sales Forecasting and Marketing
You must forecast ROI before distributing funds and resources in partnership programs and marketing. This can only happen once you have all the required data from sales-qualified leads, the marketing pipeline, converted leads, and marketing-qualified leads. It’s imperative that you have all the data from strategies already implemented, based on which you must evaluate what’s working for you. All of this is only possible when you have a uniform solution like a CRM partner portal.
2. Communication Point
Once you get the ball rolling on your network of partners, your salespersons will have to contact them on a regular basis on multiple platforms like messages, calls, and emails, which soon becomes exhausting. You will have a single point of communication when you use a partner portal. This eliminates the need for emails and calls that seem redundant, and all the conversations are logged in one place.
3. Role Management and Group Management
When you have a fully established partnership program, you will have a lot of data to deal with, which can be shared with some partners. An effective portal will create groups and roles assigned by partner tiers, partner business models, and partner classification. This is important so only the required data is shared with the partners.
4. Invoice Processing
You have about 3000 bills, and you need to circulate your partner’s share on 1000+ of those bills. How are you so that? Doing it manually sounds exhausting! You need an automated process to take care of all the fine details.
Conclusion
Starting a partnership program may sound easy-breezy, but once the first phase is done. And all these efforts will come to fruition, and our Salesforce Partner Portal is the perfect solution!
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