Partner Relationship Management (PRM) is an eBusiness strategy

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) is an eBusiness strategy which uses shared extranet applications to streamline your sales and marketing business processes and achieve speed-to-market through partners. PRM enables real-time collaboration among vendors and their partners for developing, launching, tracking and refining partner programs and operations. Some examples of the indirect channel activities accelerated and streamlined by PRM are:

Partner Acquisition

Lead Distribution & Management

MDF & Co-op Administration

Partner Profiling

Channel Program Management

Extended Team Selling

Channel Forecasting & Reporting

 

 

 

 

 

Why do you need PRM?

 

 

Today, indirect channels account for the majority of sales in a number of industries. In fact, more than 50 percent of all high tech sales come from indirect channels. PRM solutions, leveraging the standards of the Internet, fully enable the indirect model by tightly integrating companies with their partners. PRM is a critical component of a company's overall eBusiness strategy, particularly for channel-focused companies. These solutions cut time-to-market and enable companies to instantly respond to market dynamics.

 

 

Implementing PRM provides significant competitive advantage to channel-focused companies. According to the Technology Channels Group in their white paper entitled Partner Management and the Internet, "Intelligent PRM allows vendors to erect electronic barriers to entry that will make it increasingly difficult for less automated manufacturers to compete in the channel."

 

 

Working with indirect sales partners requires focusing on more than just making the sale. It's about building the processes and channels of communication that produce win-win results for vendors and their partners. Speed is a critical component of an effective PRM solution. Vendors can rapidly achieve superior market coverage by having the right partners effectively sell their products into many target markets simultaneously.

 

 

An effective PRM solution should include:

 

An automated, comprehensive set of PRM functionality to help overcome the complex challenges involved in acquiring, communicating, and supporting partners, as well as facilitating collaboration among multiple partners

Web-based configurability for adapting to market changes and flexibility to rapidly add new functionality without writing custom code

Open, scalable enterprise-class technologies and multi-dimensional extranet security models

Channel best-practices provided through a dedicated team of experts as well as built into the design of the application

What is PRM?

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) is an eBusiness strategy that enables companies to rapidly penetrate their market through the intelligent use of partners. PRM uses shared extranet applications that tightly integrate companies with their sales and marketing partners. It offers real-time collaboration among vendors and their partners for developing, launching, tracking and refining partner programs and operations. PRM is a critical component of a company's overall eBusiness strategy, particularly for channel focused companies.

 

What makes Partnerware experts on PRM?

Partnerware has been in the relationship management software space since 1994. Partnerware made channel automation its sole focus in 1996 and coined the term "Partner Relationship Management". Since that time, we have been widely recognized as a leader in the PRM space. Bob Thompson, a consultant focused on PRM, noted in December 1998, "The PRM space is wide open, with Partnerware the early leader thanks to the vision of company founder Eric Hills."

 

Our focus has been on helping vendors deploy powerful extranet-based sales tools since 1996, Partnerware has interacted with over 100 companies, interviewing channel managers on the shortfalls of manual approaches to identify ways that partner extranets can maximize vendor's speed-to-market through channels. Partnerware is noted to have the leading PRM solution:

 

 

"Partnerware's eXtended Enterprise product is distinguished by its configurability. Moreover, Partnerware has a strong vision and solid roadmap for helping companies that drive significant revenues through sales and marketing partners."

Deanne Moore, The Yankee Group, October 1999

 

 

Who within Partnerware has specific channel experience?

The Partnerware team has experience in all parts of the channel including manufacturing, distribution, resell, and retail. In fact, Partnerware employees have 200+ years of channel experience with previous employers such as Autodesk, Compaq and IBM. These real-world practitioners have dealt with the challenges that our customers have faced and will create new, bold PRM channel programs. Of particular note is our SBS Team, composed of channel veterans that serve as a resource for customers during the design and deployment of our solutions.

 

What are the benefits of working with Partnerware?

As a world-class resource to our customers, we understand the challenges of selling through a multi-channel model. With a winning combination of proven technology, leadership, and expertise, Partnerware delivers a best-of-breed solution with measurable results -- faster and more intuitive than any other PRM application. Four primary competitive advantages of working with Partnerware are:

 

Breadth & Depth of PRM - Partnerware eXtended Enterprise 2000™ (XE) blends innovative technologies and a comprehensive foundation to provide you with the full spectrum of channel and partner processes

 

Maximum Market Responsiveness - Configurable through our unique eXtensible Module Designer™ (XMD), Partnerware's solution gives you the power of rapid customization to instantly respond to market changes

 

Scalable Internet Technologies - Built with Java and leveraging XML, Partnerware delivers an open, portable, and scalable application to give you the highest degree of flexibility

 

Channel Best Practices -Partnerware's unique Strategic Business Services group is a value-added resource that works with you to design and implement the industry leading approach to Partner Relationship Management

 

How is PRM different from CRM?

 

CRM is designed for companies that focus on direct sales, whereas PRM is specifically designed for companies that focus on selling through indirect sales channels. The processes for selling through indirect channels are fundamentally different from selling direct. (For example, the process for recruiting and training channel partners. This method consists of numerous steps to recruit, evaluate, approve, and train partners. The parallel process for direct sales is recruiting sales reps, which is actually an HR procedure.)

 

According to the Yankee Group, "Indirect sales partners often must be treated with more care and subtlety than internal sales employees. Given their representation of multiple product lines, channel partners require significant effort to acquire and retain their loyalties."

 

 

In addition to the functional differences, there are significant architectural requirements for a robust PRM solution that are not typically found in CRM applications. Examples include a multi-dimensional security model and configurability of personalized extranet sites for multiple partner constituencies.

 

Why is speed-to-market so important?

 

Speed-to-market is becoming increasingly critical as competition explodes. With development cycles and product margins shrinking, vendors will derive most of their competitive advantage from their go-to-market capabilities. Companies that penetrate their markets quicker with new products dominate and are rewarded with superior market capitalization and growth.

 

Why are configurability and flexibility so important for speed-to-market?

 

Expanding market share and ultimately increasing ROI requires vendors to react and adapt instantly in order to stay in the game. Many companies implement a 'brittle' solution that works for them today only to find it does not allow them to expand quickly and they are burdened with time-consuming administrative tasks. The outcome is missed opportunities and mediocre results.

 

To achieve and maintain speed-to-market with measurable results, Partnerware provides you the tools for rapid customization using scalable Internet technologies. Partnerware eXtended Enterprise 2000 enables you to quickly add new functionality with our innovative eXtensible Module Designer. Through a simple Web interface, Partnerware XE is designed to be specifically tailored to your business processes with out expensive and time-consuming custom coding. This means you expand and respond in real-time -- staying ahead of the market and maximize your results.

 

How long does it take to implement a PRM solution?

 

Many of Partnerware's customers have implemented Partnerware eXtended Enterprise and received immediate benefits in less than six weeks. This is because Partnerware alone offers 3 of the essential elements required to gain speed-to-market advantages using PRM extranets. The first is our product, Partnerware eXtended Enterprise, a best of breed, out-of-the-box PRM solution. Second is expertise in designing and configuring the PRM solution to meet the unique needs of you and your channel partners. Third is our partnerSpeed methodology, which ensures rapid impact while setting the stage for long-term continuous improvement.

 

Partnerware's Partner Relationship Management Solution

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Direct Results from Indirect Channels™. As a vendor that delivers your product to the market through indirect channels, you know that nothing is more important than managing the relationship with those companies that represent your name and your product in the marketplace. To effectively sell product through the channel, you need to partner with those companies that are passionate about selling your product, for when they are successful, that translates into success for you. But, who are these companies? Where can you find them? How can you keep them? And how can you help them to continually become more and more successful?

 

 

 

 

 

Partnerware's Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution gives you what you need to acquire the best partners, track their activities, communicate with them fully, and help them be successful. All of this is accomplished with our automated rules engine, freeing you from manually tracking and monitoring partner activities on a case-by-case basis. Partnerware gives you six modules that encompass all the activities needed to help you develop the most successful channel possible. These modules start with the foundation of acquiring the best partners and continually build on that foundation until you have a robust partner relationship management solution that will assist you and your partners in reaching new heights of success in the indirect channel. The Partnerware modules that interact to complete the Partnerware solution include:

 

pAcquire. Register Partners Quickly and Easily. Through an intuitive combination of web registration and automated business processes you can move through the registration phase quickly and effectively.

pProfile. Once you have acquired the best partners, understanding their attributes, strengths, and how you can work with them to deliver sales success is essential. pProfile gives you detailed, flexible profiles through which you can track all the information on your partners.

pComm. After you have profiled your partners and fully understand their strengths and abilities, effective communication is necessary to keep your partners informed on all that is happening with your offerings, programs, and their status as valued partners. pComm provides the tools you need to keep them up to speed and selling successfully.

pLeads. Perhaps the most important communications with your partners center around prospect leads. pLeads gives you the tool set you need to effectively distribute, track, and follow-up on leads that you pass to your partners.

pSales. Complex selling made easy! With pSales, you have all the necessary information on other key partners within the network, to help you meet the needs of the customer in those key collaborative selling situations.

pFunds. Funding your partners is key to having them continually and successfully sell for you. The pFunds module puts you and your partner in control of the process for distributing and administering Market Development Funds (MDF.)

 

 

The Partnerware PRM solution is a suite of modules that build on one another to give you a progressively more robust and feature rich solution for managing your partner relationships. The modules are presented here, in their logical order of deployment. Using the navigation bar below, you will be able to walk through this logical progression and get a strong understanding of each module and where it fits within the total solution. We begin with pAcquire. Acquiring the best and most effective partners is key for successful channel management.