Partner marketing automation platforms have been around for some time now. In this article, we will talk about how you can drive partner performance around the world by leveraging your partner marketing automation platform. Before we get started, however, let’s take a close look at the evolution of partner marketing automation platforms over the past decade or so.

With the advent of the Internet and, subsequently, the setup of extranets, starting in the early 2000s many companies began to integrate their in-house CRM software with their extranet to create partner portals. The intent behind setting up these partner portals was mainly to facilitate one-way communication—informing partners of available assets and programs that the company was launching. However, this approach presented a major challenge. Most of the content available in these portals was not customized or localized, and it had no mobile responsiveness. Also, additional applications were plugged in over a period of time to address a variety of aspects of partner relationship management. Applications like partner training, partner incentives, deal registration and more all got patched into this legacy infrastructure and created a hodge-podge workflow that resembled a patched-up quilt. This had a significant (and negative) impact on satisfaction with regard to the quality of the user experience.

Unfortunately, even now most large organizations selling through the channel have not made significant efforts to invest in their partner marketing automation platform and create a best-in-class experience for their partners. While there are plenty of point products that can be patched together and integrated into a partner portal, each and every one these applications—whether it’s partner training, partner business contracts, business planning, incentives management, marketing campaigns or sales enablement tools—has a different interface. From the partner perspective, the enormous complexity associated with this multiplicity of interfaces is a big problem. Not only do partners have to navigate through a massive amount of content to find what they’re looking for, they also face a completely different experience when moving from one application to another. While it may be understandable that a vendor would be reluctant to “rip and replace” the entire partner marketing automation platform, there are plenty of options that exist today—like those provided by ZINFI—where a vendor can lay out a roadmap and migrate their existing partner portal over to a state-of-the-art partner marketing automation platform over a period of time by turning on different modules successively.

In this article, we’ll explore the three most essential areas to focus on—ease of use, partner enablement and business analytics—as you work to upgrade your partner marketing automation platform to a next-generation level. Your platform should be able to provide an end-to-end solution that incorporates and integrates these three key areas. If you are trying to solve these challenges by cobbling together different applications, chances are you are already creating a level of complexity that will be hard to resolve because of the user experience issues we discussed earlier.