What is a partner portal? What are the primary components of today’s partner portal? Where does program content end and relationship automation begin? And why are so many systems needed to make it work (even though in reality we know that most of the elements of the partner portal don’t actually work well together)? In truth, most partner portals today require too much work and too much dependency on subsystems like CRMs and learning management and incentive management tools that are all patched together. We know they don’t flow together well, they don’t work together well and ultimately they create a very complex experience for all users. As a result, partners are frustrated, vendors are frustrated, programs are not updated on time, and it’s hard to find price lists or product information or the latest training information or events. Basically, it’s a nightmare.

What if we took a different approach? What would the next-generation partner portal look like? What about adopting a unified approach that creates an entirely different user experience? If you had a magic wand, perhaps you could wave it and rebuild your partner portal today in a way that would make it really easy for your partners to log in, find the information that’s relevant to their role, search for and easily find the tools they need to do what they need to do and then get out—and all of this within few minutes. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? In this article, we’ll explore the seven essential components you need to make available to your partners in a high-functioning partner portal, and then seven additional capabilities that your own organization requires in order to manage that partner portal effectively.

The Unified Partner Experience

When a partner logs in to the partner portal, he or she will access multiple tool related to program information, product pricing, product details, training, incentives, marketing plans, sales plans and so on. That entire experience needs to happen in a seamless way. When a partner goes from one zone to another—say, from the marketing zone to the sales zone—the experience shouldn’t change. However, the prevailing reality today is that each of these zones are supported by different systems that are poorly integrated, and so they repeatedly encounter different user interfaces and different workflows. For example, partners may have to enter the same information multiple times as they move from zone to zone within the portal, despite the fact that the information is already in the system. It’s really a clumsy experience.

The goal of the unified partner experience is to eliminate all of these issues. To get there, your partner portal needs to address seven key requirements:

* Personalized access. When a salesperson logs in to the partner portal, all of the elements of the partner portal available to that individual should be about sales. There is no point for that person to be reading about technical issues or marketing programs and plans when that individual is not responsible for those aspects of the business. Similarly, if a technical person logs in and is fully focused on technical content or content related to products and solutions, there is no point for that individual to have access to content related to sales incentives or marketing development funds or any other sales- or marketing-related materials. Personalized access is the most important way to simplify the user experience. As a part of that requirement, it’s essential that the entire engagement with the partner portal always be fully localized—i.e., it needs to appear in the user’s own language.

* Onboarding automation. This is a huge enabler, especially if you have a broad channel with hundreds or perhaps thousands of partners and are constantly launching new produc...