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. If you have different applications patched up together, each user interface is different, and your partner marketing automation platform will not provide a seamless user experience from end to end. Therefore, as you begin to address the crucial issue of ease-of-use, think about putting together a roadmap and selecting a partner marketing automation vendor that provides partner relationship management, partner marketing management and partner sales enablement tools under a single umbrella.

Now let’s look more closely at each of three core elements:

Ease of use, partner enablement and business analytics are the three core pillars that you should add to your partner marketing automation platform to bring it to the next level. Keep in mind, however, that within each of these areas there are multiple elements that need to work together seamlessly so you can provide a unified experience to your partner base.