As we adopt more and more digital tools in our lives—at work, home and school, and while travelling away from home—silently but surely we are rebuilding how we work, live, learn and enjoy our leisure. Partner relationship management (PRM) software is no different. Partner management has existed since commerce existed in pre-historic times, but over the past few decades, with the adoption of digital tools and digitization of commerce, more and more companies have focused on automating their channel management and partner relationship management activities. In this article we will explore how we can manage the partner base remotely and globally using state-of-the art partner relationship management tools.

Here are the core activities we need to engage in to build and manage a channel remotely:

To run an effective partner recruitment program, an organization needs to have profiles of the kinds of partners that they want to recruit. Target profiles can be created by researching existing partners’ firmographic profiles and/or establishing capabilities the organization needs a potential partner organization to have—characteristics like certifications, regional coverage, go-to-market sales models and so on. Once this target profile has been created—a process we call partner profiling—then the recruitment journey can begin.

If a prospective partner is interested, they may apply and go through a simple or a comprehensive review process to be registered as an authorized partner to sell the organization’s products. In case of captive distribution, this could be a franchise model where a partner has to pay to play, but in other cases—e.g., agents, or resellers and distributors—they may qualify to join for free, based on certain selection criteria. This is the next key step in partner relationship management—figuring out who you want and how to recruit them—and all of these activities, or certainly most of them, can happen remotely via a state-of-the-art PRM tool.

Each of these onboarding steps can be fully digitized. For instance, a partner can receive an email stating that their preliminary application has been approved, and now they have to log in to a portal to sign an agreement. This agreement can also be fully digital. If an exception needs to be made, documents can be signed offline and uploaded into a partner account manually as well. After an agreement has been signed, the partner has to go through a set of online training courses. These courses can again be linked to various tracks—e.g., a marketing track, sales track, technical track or service track. This is how personalized content can be delivered remotely to partner employees in a focused way for onboarding. After training, business planning is conducted in collaboration with the partner’s management team. This entire process can be digitized and achieved remotely via a partner relationship management platform, like ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management (UPM) platform.

For most companies selling through the channel, enablement also includes some level of lead distribution and management. It is critical to have a system that can automate—and remotely distribute and manage—leads to and from partners. In organizations where there are significant opportunity overlaps in the channel, a deal registration program can reduce channel conflict and increase partner satisfaction. An integrated approach to lead management and deal registration is always critical to streamline the core focus for partner recruitment and onboarding, which is revenue generation. In addition to providing content and sharing marketing tactics, a good partner relationship management platform will allow a vendor to efficiently manage lead distribution and deal registration remotely and digitally for a distributed network of channel partners.

Performance management in a remote and distributed world not only requires a PRM-like digital platform, but it also requires the entire channel workflow to be automated end-to-end. Without automating recruitment, onboarding, enablement and other core activities, and without the ability to integrate digitized sales data into a seamless dashboard, it is impossible for organizations to determine what is really going on in their partner network in real time. That’s why a partner relationship management platform like ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform is required to enable remote partner management—so organizations can digitize these activities and track them dynamically, but also to  weave them together into an analytical “power tool,” allowing them to take their channel performance to a much higher level.