Guide to Partner Portal Best Practices

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Guide to Partner Portal Best Practices
Alone we can do so little, but together we can
do so much Helen Keller. This is the motto of
businesses today. We are likely to see every
business using a partner portal to automate their
engagement process in this digital era. However,
too often, partner portals fail to deliver the
core promise because they lack important
features. What are they? How do we know partner
portal best practices? Both are fair questions,
and in this article, I will try to explain those
in a structured way.
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What is Partner Portal A software that helps your
business partners collaborate and
communicate. Simple, right? Well, a partner
portal is complicated, just like your partner
ecosystem. You may have partners from different
regions, though selling the same products from
one vendor. They may differentiate themselves in
various aspects such as their selling scale,
reach, business planning, marketing, sales,
incentives, etc. A partner portal ?gures this
out and serves them in the best way possible. It
allows distributors, resellers, installers,
service providers, and other stakeholders to
obtain direct access to marketing resources,
pricing and sales information, technical details,
customers data, etc. How Does Partner Portal
Help Lets take the example of Cadbury. How do
you think they reach every corner of the world?
By partnership. The distributors and resellers
are Cadburys partners in a way. However, not
every partner would be the same. Small partners
might not have the competency to sell certain
products, while a large partner may have it. So,
instead of differentiating the products
manually, the partner portal will ?gure it out
automatically.
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Next, instead of calling higher authorities for
purchase orders and delivery status, these
distributors and resellers can log in to the
portal and check it themselves. They can place
their order from their login space, view their
targets, accomplishments, and more. Apart from
this, you can leverage multiple propositions like
lead generation, sales automation, partnership
training, business consulting, etc. A partner
portal boosts relationships, improves ef?ciency,
and delivers transparency. A partner portal
depends on subsystems like CRM, learning
management, inventory, marketing tools, etc. But
developing it requires too much work. Making it
work together creates a complex experience. What
if you took a different road? What about
creating a uni?ed experience that makes it easy
for partners to log in, look for information,
search and ?nd tools easily within a few
minutes? In the below section, we shall see how
to do that. If you want a quick answer, you can
consult a team with expertise in partner portal
development. Talk to Experts
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Partner Portal Best Practices to Improve Channel
Experience Populate your partner portal with
useful and updated information, train your sales
team and partners, engage with them, automate
the business process, offer necessary resources,
and easy accessibility. We read about it
everywhere. But on the implementation level, how
to adopt these are unknown. Hence, we suggest
you follow these partner portal best practices to
get the most out of it. Offer Uni?ed
Experience One of the essential capabilities of a
partner platform is to provide a single point of
access with granular-level management
capabilities. The purpose of uni?ed access and
granular level pro?ling is that portal users,
i.e., partners, can pull out all the necessary
information about their invoices, orders,
status, leads, sales performance, incentive
utilization, etc., in one go from one place. By
leveraging partners data, vendors can control
their activities, features, and data that the
partner portal allows users to access.
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To implement that, look for a partner portal
development company that has deployed solutions
for small, medium, and large scale businesses
for different industries. The reason is that
they know the size of an organization determines
the complexities and features required. For
example, if you sell a product internationally,
you may require a solution that offers a
localized experience to partners. Well, that may
not be the case if youre targeting one speci?c
region like South Korea the Korean language
would suf?ce. Apart from this, offer
single-sign-on. Allow your partners to log in
with their social accounts. Provide seamless
experience between different modules. Avoid
asking them to enter the same information
multiple times. Pull the data from the system
and auto-?ll whenever and wherever required.
Sync the data with CRM and other
systems. Personalize Access Personalization
remains on the top of the partner portal best
practices list as 77 percent of consumers prefer
brands
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that deliver personalized service or experience.
Partners, being consumers too, expect the same
level of convenience that they receive as a
customer. They expect businesses to value their
experience and inputs.
Personalized access or role-based access means
that a salesperson can view the
sales/lead-related information on logging in.
They wont have to go through technical
information or marketing programs, which they
have no role in. Likewise, a support person can
view cases and help requests in their login
space instead of sales-related
information. Personalized access improves user
experience. Hence, while implementing a partner
portal, provide customization options to
partners. Allow them to design the portal layout,
change colors and logo according to their
business. Let them con?gure the dashboard and
view the data of their choice. For example, a
few partners may like to view the lead
generation data on a dashboard, while another may
prefer knowing about the orders and performance.
Allow them to
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view the data in their preferred way. As a part
of personalization, engagement with a portal
must be localized. Hence, offer multi-language
support. Offer Responsiveness It is what makes a
digital experience compelling. Most of the
partners are out and about. You must offer them a
mobile responsive solution that they can access
while on the road, which is also easy to
navigate and offers the same level of experience
as a desktop.
Mobile responsiveness doesnt only mean ?tting
the screen size. Its about ensuring that data
is well-aligned. Firstly, to implement that, go
for a cloud-based system so that your partners
can access the data from anywhere, anytime.
Secondly, allow partners to access their emails,
documents, and other data from their handheld
devices be it a smartphone or a tablet. Make
sure that they can work from their smartphones,
too, as most solutions allow viewing data
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from smartphones. However, users need to switch
to the desktop for modi?cations. If possible,
develop a mobile app. Accessing a website/web
portal on a smartphone is good, but a portal app
will offer a faster and frictionless mobile
experience. Keep Content Consistent and
Timely If you think that just because you build a
portal, your partners will use it, youre wrong!
You need to empower them with relevant
information whenever and wherever they need it.
If your portal doesnt provide adequate
information or is clustered with outdated
information, it may lead to extra efforts, added
time, and more work on your side for your
partners. Also, theres a risk of partners
sharing inaccurate information.
So, to avoid this, you need to have a knowledge
base that provides partners with all the
relevant information, including articles,
tutorials, and how-to guides. Make it searchable
by implementing SEO. Allow natural searches
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across various categories such as marketing,
sales, technical, etc. If youre sharing content
that has an expiration date or needs to be
updated, schedule a reminder to remove or review
that content. Create a content clean-up routine
on a weekly or monthly basis. Evaluate every
piece and ensure that the content is good for
your partners and other stakeholders. You can
bifurcate the content to different teams to speed
up the process. Or simply use a dynamic system
that automatically sorts the data, sets
reminders for the update, and archives
irrelevant data. Managing it dynamically will
save your and your teams efforts and time.
Also, it will ensure that the data is
well-organized, consistent, and
up-to-date. Engage and Collaborate Partners need
to know about the products and services when
doing business on behalf of other vendors. They
also need support and, for that, a medium to
communicate with the vendor. Those self-service
approaches, knowledge base, and incentive
programs wont be enough to retain or encourage
them to yield better results. It wont help you
as well if you dont know what your partners
need.
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Hence, encourage them to communicate. Take
feedback about their experience with business,
portal, and products and services. Integrate
collaboration tools to exchange information and
share documents. Use communication channels like
live chat, messaging via different channels, etc.
Build a community where partners can share
ideas, events pictures, suggestions, current
activities, and more. It will increase the
excitement level in partners and help you ?nd
inspiration and ideas to improve your products
and services. Establishing a relationship with
your partners will help you gain credibility. We
also know that this list of partner portal best
practices is long, and implementing these
changes can be overwhelming. The good news is
that there are different ways to adopt these
changes. An experienced portal development team
like CRMJetty can help you make these changes
sequentially in a holistic way. Contact CRMJetty
Team
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How does the Partner Portal by CRMJetty help? By
offering you exactly what partners look for in a
partner portal via custom portal
development. Ease of Use While doing business,
partners expect the solution to be simple and
easy to navigate. If they think that managing
operations in a portal take up a lot of time,
they wont prefer it much. Hence, in developing
your custom portal, we offer a seamless
interface and a uni?ed experience. Your partners
can manage programs, assets, leads, contracts,
sales, marketing, etc., from one place. They can
view their incentives, performance metrics, and
business analytics directly from the dashboard.
Apart from this, they can get advanced search
options with various customization
features. Well-Organized Content The most vital
sections of the portal are support sections.
They help your partners with relevant information
about products and services along with product
price, incentives, and more. We implement
partner portal best practices to ensure partner
success, i.e., keep content consistent and
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relevant. For easy searchability, we provide
content categorization along with a knowledge
base. Opportunity to Communicate We provide all
the features that partners may require to manage
leads, forecast performance, and implement new
business strategies. However, thats not enough,
and so we offer custom features to encourage
partner and vendor communication, such as
community support and feedback options. While
encouraging partners to share their feedback and
suggestions, we also encourage you to share your
feedback and ask for improvements, i.e., we
offer customizations. We ensure that the partner
portal is tailored to your business
requirements Lets Implement Partner Portal Best
Practices
Source https/ www.crmjetty.com/partner-portal-be
st-practices -guide/
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