Many vendor organizations today are considering the implementation of end-to-end partner marketing automation tools. What’s more, many have already put in place a set of point-tools that are trying to make them all work together. The key for both of these scenarios is to make sure that partner marketing automation doesn’t take a life on its own and serve as a means to an end. The primary purpose of a partner marketing automation platform is to drive profitable growth, so yes, it must increase your partner-led demand generation activities, but it also must reduce costs by introducing more streamlined processes and greater efficiency. However, the success of a partner marketing automation platform depends directly on organizations’ following specific, sequential steps in order to deploy such capabilities globally. The following is a brief overview of the five critical choices a vendor organization must make before an integrated partner marketing automation platform can be deployed worldwide.

In summary while the very purpose of a partner marketing automation platform is to give you the ability to drive growth through your partner network at a lower cost, there’s more to it than that. To achieve this goal, an organization must think through the partners to who they will deploy the platform, what parts of the world will adopt the platform most readily and in what order, which campaigns must be loaded and why, and how sales incentives should be aligned to reward closure. Once these choices are judiciously made, your partner marketing automation platform is almost guaranteed success.