How a solid partner relationship management strategy boosts revenue and drives value for your organization

In today’s competitive, digital-first landscape, embracing customer intimacy is the most important key to success. Fostering user intimacy ensures that one-time buyers become lifelong advocates. That focus extends beyond traditional B2C & B2B customers — your partners expect personalized experiences that make doing business easy and efficient. Creating true intimacy with your partners requires an intense focus on who is engaging with your products and services. It’s important to prioritize these relationships, because a positive partner experience is an essential part of fostering customer intimacy and ultimately driving equitable outcomes.

When companies seek to understand who their traditional B2C buyers are and how to serve them best, they naturally explore the partner relationships that products and services pass through en route to the end customer. Investing in partner relationship management (PRM) strategies not only provides insights and collaboration at inflection points and decisions along the sales process, it also creates access to end-customer market data.

If you want to generate customer intimacy while successfully driving more equitable outcomes, then your resellers, distributors and partners need processes and tools to effectively share inbound leads and ultimately book and deliver business.

What’s happening with channel sales (PRM) right now?

If you manage partnerships and sell through resellers, brokers, distributors or dealers, one thing is certain: your success depends on the success of your partner ecosystem. As of 2022, 75% of world trade flows through indirect channels. Current trends in the PRM space further demonstrate the importance of generating intimacy from your channel sales motions. These include:

◉ Increasing shifts towards SMB and indirect channels for revenue growth

◉ Channel conflicts and inefficiency in optimizing indirect channels

◉ Inability to use emerging collaborative tools to successfully drive indirect channel sales

◉ Lack of visibility into channel activities, reducing overall channel effectiveness

With this increased focus on channel sales, enterprises need to understand the features that enable success in today’s digital landscape. The route-to-market channel is anchored in these core business capabilities that creates ease for your partners:

◉ An account structure that aligns partners to geographies and tiers, tracks revenue and referrals, and reports operational and financial data in real-time

◉ A partner onboarding process that reduces cycle time with automated forms and flows that gives faster speed to value and saves and tracks status

◉ A deal registration process that includes guided, dynamic flows to capture and route info with clean, consistent registration experiences (UX/UI)

◉ A partner community with customized branding that allows partners to collaborate on business plans, campaigns and shared docs, including robust reporting and analytics

◉ Effective lead distribution so that the right leads get routed to the right partners and representatives that will reduce competitive issues and channel conflict

◉ Partner support that allows you to promote important information, rewards engagement with tiered incentives and enables streamlined case management

Overcoming common PRM challenges

When you optimize the PRM experience through all aspects of their journey (onboarding, enablement, deal management, training and engagement), you create a sticky partner network that maximizes value for your business. And creating that network matters now more than ever. In fact, by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.

But as promising as the indirect sales business model is, many businesses struggle to unlock its full value due to these common challenges:

1. Dated, manual business processes make it difficult to adapt to the changing needs of your channel partners. The culprit is often inflexible legacy systems that are overly complicated and clunky to manage.

2. Winning partner mindshare can be difficult when partners may carry dozens or hundreds of different products, including those of your competitors. Being easy to do business with is the way to stand out – but static portals don’t create the seamless experiences that partners demand.

3. The channel can present challenges with finding and accurately capturing data. Companies are tasked with making data-driven decisions to track and grow their businesses, but they can’t manage what they can’t measure. The lack of visibility stems from disconnected data that’s scattered across many systems.

To overcome these challenges, put yourself in the shoes of your users who are enabled by processes and technology. Part of fostering partner intimacy is understanding and helping them solve their pain points. Manual processes and static portals should become personalized, intelligent experiences. Clunky legacy look and feel must evolve into a more delightful B2C-like UI. Stale information should be replaced with fresh content and real-time data. And limited productivity must be overcome by making resources accessible on demand from anywhere.

Today’s businesses meet these needs and expand their growth by teaming up with their ecosystem partners, co-innovating to bring solutions to market faster, and co-selling collaboratively to accelerate deal closing and increase win rates. The most innovative companies partner with several co-sellers to offer a satisfying, whole-lifecycle experience to their customers.

By leveraging Salesforce Experience Cloud’s tools, you can become the preferred brand by giving your partners (dealers, distributors, agents) the resources they want. Strengthening your sales cycle with a strong PRM unlocks line of sight into the data flowing from interactions and helps ensure you provide the customer (and partner) intimacy your users expect.

Business outcomes of your PRM solution

Making it easy for your partners to do business with you makes business sense. By simplifying touchpoints and using the data at your disposal, you’ll maximize business value and build an industry-leading partner network. Implementing a consolidated, personalized, intelligent digital experience is the best way to achieve a variety of business outcomes:

◉ 46% increase in partner engagement

◉ 25% increase in channel pipe growth

◉ 33% increase in deal registration

When your partners learn that it’s easier to do business with you than with others, revenue will increase thanks to better lead management and partner enablement resources. Cost to serve drops as collaborative forums and knowledge bases let partners answer their own questions. The smarter and faster dashboards and analytic processes made possible by a partner experience help achieve other goals as well:

◉ Increase partner revenue and collaboration

◉ Increase partner retention, advocacy and satisfaction

◉ Reduce time to productivity and cost to serve partners

◉ Improve partner communications

◉ Manage partner performance

◉ Increase conversion and shorten deal cycle time

How to implement a PRM solution in four steps

Implementing a PRM solution focused on intimacy will set your partners up for success, so they can be more productive and close more deals. With a full-fledged partner experience, you’ll streamline processes, boost visibility, enhance collaboration and unlock a centralized hub for access to resources. Regardless of where you’re at in your PRM implementation journey, there are easy steps you can take to get started.

First, you need to identify the key elements of your PRM:

◉ WHO will be the key users of your partner experience

◉ WHAT business processes and rules will be integrated to start

◉ WHICH technology will be used to create the partner experience

◉ WHO from your organization needs to champion this effort

◉ HOW information will be captured, organized and structured

After taking these initial steps and regularly innovating within your experience, you’ll be able to see and analyze the progress your organization is making. You’ll know you’ve been successful when your partner experience:

◉ Delivers partners relevant and impactful information

◉ Enables partners to sell, serve and grow more effectively

◉ Provides a unified way to engage with the vendor

◉ Keeps partners informed about their leads, opportunities and business

◉ Drives productivity by eliminating friction and streamlining processes

◉ Fosters long-term partner relationships based on mutual success

IBM has guided dozens of Salesforce PRM strategy implementations, so we understand the best ways to empower and enable your channel strategy. Partnering with IBM is the best way to unlock these features and exceed your partners’ expectations for a positive experience. With tools and checklists in place, you’ll ensure that your PRM implementation drives customer and partner intimacy and maximizes value for your business now and in the future.

Source: ibm.com

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The challenges facing today’s SaaS resellers—and how to turn them into opportunities

Is the digital economy a buyer’s market? Where business is won or lost based on whether it takes one click or two to complete a transaction? If you’re a “two-click” seller, is all hope lost?

The hallmarks of our digital world—simple, immediate, always-on, personalized—do not mean that sellers and resellers, operating in an increasingly complex environment, are now driven by a buyer’s sporadic whims. Just the opposite. They provide us with a roadmap to create superior customer experiences that turn challenges into opportunities.

At AppDirect, we’re focused on creating these experiences. We help companies enter, grow and thrive in the digital economy. And we do that by providing the cloud technology and expertise that SaaS resellers need to create that positive buying and lifecycle management experience their customers desire.

Experience is everything

In business, the customer experience has always been important. But in our new digital economy, it is becoming a make-or-break factor for success. According to IDG, 62 percent of companies say that customer satisfaction scores are the most important factor that indicates the success of digital initiatives. While a separate study from Walker Information found that by 2020 “customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.”

Trends like these may be giving technology resellers pause. But why? As technology becomes more complex, resellers, especially those that sell SaaS solutions, face more complexity. This complexity stretches across every aspect of their businesses, from provisioning and integrating software, to migrating users, to billing and much more.

Thanks to advances in consumer technology, B2B buyers now expect a procurement process that is intuitive and seamless. For resellers that fail to deliver, the consequences can be lost revenue or, perhaps even worse, lost competitive advantage.

Crucial questions

How to provide a best-in-class SaaS experience is an important question for every reseller, but it’s particularly critical for companies that resell IBM’s portfolio of SaaS products, such as IBM® Cloud™, IBM MaaS360®, IBM Watson™ Studio and IBM SPSS® Statistics.

IBM is a global technology leader and has been for the past 100 years. And as the business world makes the transition to digital, customers still expect a best-in-class experience from their IBM solutions. This is the challenge that IBM resellers must now rise to meet: delivering a seamless experience—from purchase, to provisioning, to ongoing management—for complex, mission-critical applications.  

As an IBM reseller, you have a choice of cloud aggregators to work with. Here are three factors to consider as you select an aggregator partner:

1) Is the partner born in the cloud?

Born in the cloud can offer an advantage. As Deloitte Consulting’s David Linthicum explains, born-in-the-cloud companies “have not gone through the pain of migrating to the cloud but have all the advantages that cloud computing provides.”

2) Does the marketplace offer a best-in-class experience?

Digital marketplaces are becoming a huge business. Forrester predicts that marketplace-based B2B commerce will be worth USD 1.2 trillion by 2022.

3) Does the partner make it easy to bundle solutions?

Bundles can help you drive higher revenue and better traction with customers, since using more services will help them see more value from their investment. It can also be a great way to differentiate from competitors who can’t easily combine multiple solutions into a single package with a single recurring subscription fee.

These questions can help you determine which cloud aggregator partner is best to meet your needs.

Source: ibm.com

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Digital alchemy – Turning data into gold

Data is the means by which enterprises can truly understand their customers – their needs, behaviors and buying patterns. And within an enterprise’s data lies the potential for greater revenue, increased efficiencies, reduced costs.

This race to unlock that potential is the most significant play in business today.

As technology continues to evolve – and data moves to the cloud via the ever-expanding choice of operating systems, databases, platforms and computing models – the challenge of ensuring that this information is not only safe but useable presents a significant challenge. At the same time, the volume of data is growing exponentially. Governance and sovereignty issues weigh heavily. And IT budgets are either flat or declining.

At Predatar (formerly Silverstring), our primary goal is to protect data. But we believe customers need more than simple insurance against loss. Refining managed data into a reusable asset represents the next great business opportunity, and our aim is to ensure our customers’ data defense is robust and ready for them to turn it into data offense, via a unique combination of automation and smart people with the right skills and capabilities.

Data has been called the “new oil,” but we believe that by refining and repurposing it, data has the potential to be even more valuable.

The true value of data

To help create this “digital gold,” we developed our Alchemis Protect solution, which delivers to our customers the confidence of knowing their data is more secure and available, no matter where it resides. Based on IBM® Cloud™ and utilizing IBM Spectrum® Protect, our as-a-service offering gives customers the opportunity to transform their backup data into a useable business asset.

Our solution is rooted in IBM technology for a simple reason – with IBM, partners like Predatar gain access to a rich and varied portfolio from which we can pick and choose the offerings that form the foundation of our solution. The cross-fertilization of technology and expertise that IBM brings, gives us the confidence that every element will play together effectively.

But the technology is just the beginning. Alchemis Protect combines security intelligence with machine learning and the expertise of our team of skilled data specialists. Together, we are able to analyze historical data trends in data integrity to identify potential trouble areas where customers may experience incidents of non-recovery. Then, we help them to plug those weaknesses. We call it intelligent recovery.

With data being the key to an enterprise’s fortune, you cannot afford to let a single bit slip through your fingers.

Source: ibm.com

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Tech Data’s new Tech Labs put the power of AI in the hands of partners

The use of technology to support quicker and more informed decision-making is fundamentally changing the way we do business. Our customers expect faster, better and more innovative services. Our shipping and distribution channels need to be streamlined, eliminating waste and delivering everything just-in-time. Our boardrooms demand richer insight into performance metrics—and they want them now.

This acceleration of business—and knowledge—is why augmented intelligence (AI) has become one of the hottest topics in industry today.

However, here at Tech Data Italia, we have seen a relatively slow uptake of AI in the channel market. So, to help our partners understand the potential of this game-changing technology, earlier this year, we opened a permanent center of expertise for AI in Milan. We call it the Tech Lab and with it, we aim to help partners and their clients take full advantage of AI, in partnership with IBM and Red Hat.

Experimenting with innovation

The Tech Lab aspires to be the platform on which our partners can develop new skills by getting hands-on access—either in person or remotely—to a series of solutions and platforms that can be used to build innovative AI offerings. We work closely with these partners to develop new use cases and turnkey solutions for integration. And we also try to create an environment in which they can develop innovative client value propositions.

The lab space is open to Tech Data resellers who, in turn, can invite partners and clients for individual or group exploration and technical and business development. And for those that can’t make it to one of our lab locations, we make the technology available for remote use at our reseller or client sites. Throughout this process, our experts remain available to provide dedicated technical, sales and marketing support.

Our work at these labs is about helping our resellers and their clients accelerate their AI journey. And these efforts are based on the most advanced technologies from Red Hat and IBM, including IBM® Watson® and IBM Power® Systems.

Collaboration in practice

Tech Data is one of the first distributors in Italy to offer this kind of sophisticated AI facility. It’s a prime example of the power of collaboration between IBM and Tech Data in Italy and around the world, and it is a significant step forward for us in transforming the channel AI opportunity.

Since we launched the Tech Lab in February 2019, a large number of our partners have made great use of the facility to demonstrate the value that collaboration in AI can unlock for their partners.

◉ Plurimedia joined the IBM Partner Ecosystem relatively recently. The business specializes in developing hybrid cloud, IoT and AI solutions. And Plurimedia cites the principles of open source as being key to the transformative power of cloud technologies. Further, the company is passionate not only about cloud being a technology disruptor but also about the impact it can have on every aspect of business.

◉ Marketing MultiMedia Group (MMM Group) is a leading provider of digital advertising based on machine learning. We are partnering with the MMM Group, IBM and the Politecnico di Milano on creating innovative marketing campaigns that combine technology along with commercial and human expertise to create a new generation of advanced marketing possibilities.

◉ Relatech has been an IBM Business Partner since 2014. A specialist in AI development and integration, the company believes that the real value in our partnership is based on the powerful combination of IBM technology, Tech Data’s commercial expertise and its own deep technical expertise.

◉ Aptus.ai has demonstrated an impressive competence in various AI fields, including a solution that aids cancer detection using image recognition. It is currently working with IBM and Tech Data in order to enhance its existing business offerings.

For Tech Data and all our partners, it is the power of partnership which enables us to go beyond the limits of our own individual capabilities. Working as part of this next generation ecosystem enables each player to capitalize on the expertise, market insights and technical capabilities from across our market.

Source: ibm.com

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