It has been almost two decades since customer relationship management (CRM) applications began to be adopted as a powerful way to automate sales processes. Meanwhile, we have also seen marketing automation grow rapidly over the past 10 years or so to augment the CRM process experience for direct sales teams. However, the rise of partner relationship management (PRM) SaaS applications like ZINFI’s has demonstrated where an application like Salesforce often falls short. While the development of a Salesforce-like CRM applications that can be customer-configured to address many partner relationship management requirements has been a big step forward, companies still need to invest substantially to customize these solutions successfully. The fact that CRM systems also lack built-in applications essential for PRM means they fall short of  providing true Unified Partner Management (UPM). This is why connecting an existing CRM infrastructure like Salesforce to a PRM infrastructure like ZINFI’s makes a lot of sense. In this article, we will explore the core common points of connection between a CRM and PRM.

When you think about sales automation, the first thing that comes to your mind is the word “revenue.” Yes, sales is all about generating revenue by closing deals from the leads that marketing generates. That’s pretty much what a CRM does. CRM takes a bunch of leads that the marketing automation system feeds it, and then allows the sales team to nurture those leads in a systematic way through various sales stages like discovery, qualification, demo, trial, review, agreement, purchase, renewal and support. Sales managers can run various reports across their sales representatives and determine who is most effective, what is working and what needs changing. Automation also allows the elimination of repetitive tasks such as sending out a reminder to a prospect or offering sales collaterals or coming up with automated pricing. There are multiple use cases that a Salesfsorce-like CRM system can address, and its functionality can be extended by using a large number of applications available in Salesforce AppExchange. Some of the standalone applications that plug into Salesforce address other aspect of sales and marketing needs, including rewards, incentives and analytics. This is where ZINFI’s partner relationship management (PRM) comes in.

ZINFI is an AppExchange-approved PRM application provider. While Salesforce also lists a few other PRM applications, unlike those other applications ZINFI’s PRM features an architecture and user interface that closely follows the logic of a CRM system. This allows a seamless flow of data flow back and forth between a Salesforce-like CRM and ZINFI’s PRM. 

Let’s explore three core connection points in more detail here:

Lead Management – As I began this article, I mentioned the primary purpose of a CRM system is to generate revenue by systematically managing the entire sales process from lead to close. The automation of this process is the focus of lead management in a CRM. Now, using a CRM for lead management works great for a direct sales team, but the moment you try to do lead management for channel sales using a CRM, things can quickly get quite complicated and expensive. This is where a purpose-built PRM like ZINFI’s platform can help tremendously by seamlessly connecting to a Salesforce-like CRM system. The integration allows the direct sales team to use the CRM as they always do, while the indirect channel sales and partners can use ZINFI’s PRM for lead managementDeal Registration – One unique use case for channel sales is protecting an opportunity for a specific partner. We have written multiple articles on deal registration, so I won’t get in the details of it here. Let me just point out that the entire focus of deal registration is to eliminate channel conflict and allow a specific partner to pursue an opportunity from lead to close. Unlike CRMs,