First, we need to understand the concept of a partnership program. It’s a business strategy adopted by vendors and business owners in order to create an additional source of income by partnering with each other or more vendors, business consultants, etc. to promote their products or services.

The way your partnership program works depends entirely on your business model as well as the products and/or services that you sell. Of course, there are plenty of other factors that influence it. Business partners and partnership programs contribute to growth, which is why businesses have partnership programs.

No matter what scale your company is at, you would only benefit from a partnership program as it can help you reach more customers, which eventually helps you drive revenue.

Here are some other benefits of having a partnership program.

Benefits of having a partnership program

Increased Revenue

There is no doubt that a partnership program generates a notable amount of growth in sales and distribution of your business in targeted areas. When you have regional partners, it is easier and cost effective because they can help you get in to those markets easily and without excessive investment. At the end of the day, the new opportunities add up to your annual revenue.

Extra Sales Channel

Businesses have their own sales funnels. When you have a partnership program, you have even more opportunities to have multiple streams of income.

Extended Network

When you partner with a vendor, business or consultant, you also, by extent get their customers and other partners in terms of relationships. This helps you build out a more expansive network.

A partner portal is a collaborative space where your partner can have a dashboard to keep a tab on their earnings, leads they have forwarded to your business, marketing & sales collaterals, etc. You will also be able to have a bird’s eye view of all of your partners’ performances.

To help you understand better, here are some of the ways an online partner portal will help you with the partner management.

Group and Role Management

When you have a business to manage with other partners in the picture, you have to make sure that the right data goes to the right person. For this, you need a portal so that, you can create groups and roles by tiers, partner classification, partner business models etc. This way, you can safely manage all data and everyone can access what they need to access.

Marketing & Sales Forecasting

Marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, converted leads, and the marketing pipeline data gives you insight, which further lets your forecast ROI. This lets you allocate resources and funds to marketing and partnership activities. It is necessary to have all the data that you can have of older strategies in order to know what has worked before and what has not. This is much easier to do when you have a dedicated one-stop solution like a CRM partner portal.

Invoice Processing

Imagine you have over 5000 bills that you need to process. From that, you have to calculate your partner’s share on over 2000 bills. What is the easiest way to do it? Manually? No! That would be extremely difficult. You can simply have an automated process in place that takes care of all the details. This is especially convenient if you have more than 10 partners.

Single Interaction & Communication Point

With such a large network of partners comes the hassle of regularly communicating with all of them. General means of communication like email, messaging, or calls can become too taxing and are prone to miscommunication. A partner portal, however can easily replace all of it and become a single point of access, so no matter who the designated person of contact is, everyone can have access to previous conversations and decisions. This way it is much more difficult to miscommunicate.

Starting a partnership program sounds fantastic and in the beginning, it can be exciting. However, you must keep in mind that you have to maintain it, as well as the relationships you make through it. It can, after all, make or break your business growth.

Interested in hearing more about an online partner portal or customize partner portal solutions? Then get in touch today!