ZINFI Technologies, Inc.

Affiliate marketing essentially refers to an activity where a third party – a person or an organization – promotes your brand to their connections or networks or audiences. Affiliate marketing management software allows you to automate the process of recruiting, engaging, enabling and managing such a marketing partner.

In this article, we will explore what affiliate marketing management software is and how it works.

What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?

As we hinted at in the introduction, an affiliate represents your brand. Your brand could be a product or a service or even a person. Celebrities are individuals, but they are also their own brand. The goal of an affiliate marketing partner is to represent the brand and get paid in return for promoting it. This is the basic give-and-take relationship between an affiliate and a brand.

Now, let’s talk a bit about what a brand is. When we think about brands, we traditionally think of big names, like Coca Cola, Nike, Samsung or Apple. All of these brands represent a group of products, and some also offer services. Some brands, like Disney or Niagara Falls or the San Francisco Zoo are called hybrid brands – a combination of products and services, but essentially an “experience.” When you take a Viking Cruise or board a United Airlines jet you are not actually buying a product that you can own, but rather you are paying for an experience.

People can be brands, too. Perhaps the most obvious example is Michael Jordan. Remember Air Jordans? Nike made millions from selling a simple shoe, merely by associating the shoe with a famous name. In this example there are two brands at play – Michael Jordan the athlete and Nike the shoe company. In this particular case, even though Michael Jordan is himself a brand, he is also an affiliate insofar as he is promoting the Jordan-branded shoes sold by Nike.

I could keep going with various examples, but I think you get the point. In today’s world, there is are many brand types, ranging from a simple product like an iPhone or a combination of products and services like Disney to a micro-brand like a local boy band—you name it. Every one of the brand examples I have mentioned so far are promoted by someone.

If a marketing agency is promoting a brand directly, that is called direct marketing. However, if a person or another company is promoting a brand, the promoter is called a brand ambassador or a spokesperson or an affiliate. Whatever the case, when a brand gets promoted by a third party, someone does it and money exchanges hands. Affiliate marketing management is, essentially, the oversight of that process.

Now that we have discussed what affiliate marketing is, we should talk a little about affiliate marketing management software. This category of software is relatively new, even though affiliate marketing has existed for a while. Historically, most affiliate marketing management software has been offered by small, specialized software companies. However, with the rise of the channel and the evolution of partner-driven marketing and selling, affiliate marketing is now being recognized as a more mainstream software category, and organizations like ZINFI have begun to develop affiliate marketing management software as part of a more comprehensive package of channel management tools.

What is affiliate marketing management software and how does it work?

I have written on this topic before, so I won’t go into a lot of detail about the various capabilities of affiliate marketing  management software, but here are its core functions:

Affiliate Recruitment – One of the very first steps in developing an affiliate marketing program is to identify a set of partners who are able and willing to promote your brand. These partners can range from individual influencers to companies or agencies. You need to make a list of these target individuals or organizations and present them with a business partnership proposition.

Affiliate Onboarding – Once you have targeted and engaged with a set of potential partners, it is essential for you to sign agreements, plan activities and guide them through some sort of a setup process so that they can upload their tax information and other company details to complete basic transactions like getting paid.

Affiliate Training – Before your affiliate partners can go out and start promoting your brand, they need to be trained on the various attributes of your products and/or services. An affiliate marketing software tool should have a learning management module to provide this training and, if necessary, issue certifications.

Affiliate Enablement – The next step is to make sure you give your affiliates appropriate promotional tools. These tools may be brief descriptions of your products and services which affiliates can put on their website or newsletters or handouts. This is how they will drive web traffic back to you.

Affiliate Payments – Once an affiliate successfully drives traffic back to you and/or your website, you must track those activities, counting the impressions, leads or referrals, and then pay your partners commissions for promoting your products or services, or even for helping you close a deal.

I think you can see even from this brief overview how powerful affiliate marketing can be as a tool for amplifying your brand and extending your reach. The goal of affiliate marketing management software is to enable you to conduct these activities in a methodical and structured way. In addition to streamlining the workflows, the software can also help you to identify who is performing well, determine why, decide which campaigns you should focus on for a deeper dive, and understand how everything fits together. But the most fundamental purpose of this software is to give you higher ROI at a much faster rate.

In other articles we will discuss how to select affiliate marketing management software. There are a lot of choices out there, but based on the products and solutions you are promoting there are basically three types of software you need to evaluate and make sure they fit your business. Please keep an eye out for follow-up articles in this area.

For more information, please check this article.

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Partner Management Software (PMS) is a strategic technology infrastructure designed to automate and structure the end-to-end management of an indirect go-to-market model. It handles diverse partner types—from resellers to affiliates—to reduce operating costs and accelerate time to revenue. By facilitating structured onboarding and continual enablement, a best-in-class PMS platform can exponentially improve financial performance.

Who is this for?: Partner Managers, PartnerOps Managers, Chief Revenue Officers, Partner Marketing Managers, and Distribution Managers.

Core Problem Solved: Managing the rapid redesign and global deployment of differentiated programs for various partner types (e.g., new, existing, affiliates) and simplifying complex, performance-based compensation workflows.

Key Tech/Entities: Learning Management System (LMS), Partner Portal, Deal Registration, and Automated Payments (including Commissions, Rebates, and MDF).

This decade is about the growth of the ecosystem. With rapid changes in technology, continued deglobalization and the redefinition of supply chains, the channel as we know it will transform our economies in terms of both demand and supply. That’s why onboarding of partners on a continuous and regular basis will become a central theme for most organizations, and onboarding is an important area is where partner management software can be a tremendous help. However, before we delve into multiple aspects of partner onboarding software and how it can help accelerate partner onboarding and time to revenue, let me provide some background on partner onboarding.

As markets evolve, businesses digitize more and more to reduce operating costs while increasing access. In the process, they tend to de-leverage their direct go-to-market structure and emphasize an indirect model instead. As a result, we are now seeing a proliferation of various types of partners, such as affiliates, agents, consultants, wholesalers, resellers, brokers, retailers, etailers, franchises, system integrators and more – there are too many to name. However, all do essentially the same thing: they represent a brand to a buyer. Sometimes these third parties focus exclusively on generating brand awareness, but in other cases they carry inventory and resell a product, and sometimes they also provide services beyond the sale.

When you have a thriving partner network, it is highly likely that you will have a mix of various partner types. Therefore, as you design programs and processes and invest in people to manage your indirect go-to-market model, it is important that you have the right technology infrastructure – namely, partner management software – to automate these workflows in a deliberate and structured way.

Partner onboarding applies to both existing partners and new partners. Why? Because you are marketing and selling solutions that are constantly changing; even long-time partners will need to complete training or recertification processes or territory realignment from time to time to continue to sell effectively. Now when it comes to new partners, of course you need to recruit them, train them and put them through structured onboarding programs, much like you do with your new employees, but there may be a lot of differences between your new and existing partner programs. Without a solid partner management software infrastructure it is very difficult to rapidly redesign, redeploy and globally manage an infrastructure that can accommodate these differences.

Typically, a partner onboarding process goes through the following steps, which your partner management software should be able to flow through seamlessly:

Partner Recruitment: This is where you conduct outbound and inbound marketing activities to drive awareness with your existing or potential new partners about your offers, programs and business proposition.

Partner Registration: Once the promotional phase is over, partners move into the next phase of signing up on your partner portal – your first digital hello.

Partner Signup: Once the registration process, powered by your partner management software, is complete, you may want your partner to apply for certain programs, products or other offerings. Once approved, they are “signed up” to market and/or sell and/or service your target buyers.

Partner Training: After sign-up, training them on your partner portal is critical. Your partner management software will need to have a learning management system and guide partners through certifications training.

Partner Enablement: If you have recruited affiliate partners, you will need to provide them with assets and tools to promote your brand across the web or off the web.

Partner Referrals/Deals: Once your partners start marketing, they will generate leads and deals for you. You need a way to keep track of those activities. This is a key area where partner management software can automate workflows and simplify complex processes.

Partner Payments: Based on partner activities you will have to compensate them via commissions, rewards, rebates and loyalty points. Your payment processes may be quite simple, but for some organizations partner payments depend on a variety of factors and can be very complex. Good partner management software is essential to manage payments efficiently and accurately.

These are the seven most basic steps in the partner journey. In some cases there may be another dozen or so steps that your partners have to go through. We won’t cover those in detail here, but we will go into more detail in subsequent articles. The point we want to emphasize here is that partner onboarding is not a single step. For an employee to be effective in your organization, you must take them through multiple steps in a training process before they are ready to start performing. The same rationale applies to partner onboarding. Partners must be guided through a structured onboarding program in order to succeed in the activities you want them to engage in. A best-in-class platform like ZINFI’s partner management software can significantly accelerate this process while reducing your costs and exponentially improving your financial performance.

For more information, please check this article.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How does Partner Management Software facilitate the core stages of the partner journey?

Partner Management Software streamlines the entire partner lifecycle by automating seven key stages: recruitment, registration, program sign-up, training, enablement, deal management, and financial payments. This structured approach guides partners through the necessary steps to become effective sellers or promoters quickly.

2. What are the primary benefits of automating partner onboarding with a dedicated PMS platform?

Automating partner onboarding significantly reduces operational costs and drastically accelerates a partner’s time to revenue. By providing instant access to necessary resources and certifications, PMS ensures all partners are current on product knowledge and program requirements, thus improving financial performance.

3. Which essential features must a comprehensive Partner Management Software platform include for robust partner enablement?

A comprehensive Partner Management Software platform must include a secure Partner Portal for registration, an integrated Learning Management System (LMS) for training, and dedicated modules for both Deal Registration and Automated Payments. These components ensure seamless collaboration, knowledge transfer, and accurate compensation tracking.

4. Is Partner Management Software only intended for managing the recruitment of new partners?

No, Partner Management Software applies to both new and existing partners. While it manages the structured recruitment and initial sign-up for new partners, it also supports continuous enablement for long-time partners via ongoing training, recertification, and territory realignment processes to maintain effective selling.

Partner Management Software (PMS) is a unified platform that automates the recruitment, onboarding, and ongoing management of diverse channel partners, including transacting resellers and non-transacting affiliates. It is essential for modernizing go-to-market strategies by providing personalized engagement workflows. A core function is the utilization of dynamic business analytics to tie partner performance to specific programs, facilitating the "Holy Grail of partner ecosystem management."

Who is this for?: Partner Managers, PartnerOps Managers, Chief Partner Officers, RevOps Managers, and Channel Leaders operating in mixed-model environments.

Core Problem Solved: Inability to efficiently segment, onboard, and track the performance of various partner types (e.g., influencers, B2B affiliates, resellers) within a single, personalized management system.

Key Tech/Entities: Groups and Profiles (granular access rights segmentation), Point Scoring (modern, activity-based performance tracking replacing medallion status), and Automated Tracks (configurable pathways for training, registration, and program completion).

It is an exciting time to be in the world of partner management. As the worldwide GDP grows and more advanced technology proliferates, go-to-market motions are being rethought constantly. Who would have thought a decade ago that Instagram would be a major influencer platform and companies would invest billions in promoting their brand ambassadors? Today’s partner management (PRM)  software is a part of that economic evolution, and a state-of-the-art PRM platform can enable seamless management of various partner types, including influencers and affiliate partners. In this article, we will explore what affiliate marketing is and how partner management software can help organizations onboard these types of partners.

“Affiliate” is a term that has been around for centuries. The word comes from the Latin stem affiliare, meaning "to adopt." From a marketing perspective, affiliate refers to a person or an organization that is associated with your brand and willing to promote that brand to their customer base. In consumer marketing, affiliates have traditionally been celebrities, but over the past several years we have seen the rise of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter influencers. Every country has their influencers, but the specific social media platforms that are most widely used by influencers tend to vary by country or region. Influencers can have a huge follower base and, depending on their specific focus and the size of their audience, may provide enormous value to brands by reaching a loyal base in a much more targeted way than traditional mass marketing is able to do. Today, there is partner management software in the marketplace that focuses exclusively on consumer affiliate marketing and management.

When it comes to businesses, affiliates tend to be individuals who are consultants or experts in a specific domain; technology bloggers are great examples of that. However, the majority of affiliates tend to be smaller organizations or individuals who consult with and/or support their client base in various aspects of a solution, rather than carrying a product to resell. The primary difference between a B2B affiliate and a reseller is that the latter not only promotes a brand and finds a customer, but also actually completes the transaction. Affiliates, on the other hand, tend focus on promoting a brand and finding prospect buyers rather than completing a transaction. However, in many cases a partner may be both – an affiliate as well as a transacting partner. There are a handful of companies today providing partner management software that can manage both affiliates and transacting partners. ZINFI is a leader in both areas.

Given this context, if you are thinking about automating your onboarding workflows, you should take some time to think through what you need from your partner management software. To make your onboarding highly personalized and adaptable, here are the capabilities you’ll need from your partner management software:

Groups and Profiles – You must be able to create access rights to your partner portal based on whether the partner is an affiliate, a reseller or both. Your groups and profiles capabilities will need to address partners’ specialization, which countries they are coming from, their medallion status or their status in a point-based system. Unless you have partner management software that allows you to manage groups and profiles in a highly granular way, you will not be able to adequately manage a mixed channel environment with both resellers and affiliates.

Programs – We have noted in other articles that onboarding programs may vary greatly based on who you are onboarding and how you are onboarding. If you are onboarding an existing partner into a new program, then you have one set of workflows, which may be shorter and focused, but if you are onboarding a new partner into the company, then your onboarding program needs to be quite comprehensive. Your partner management software must be able to provide the tools to set up, deploy and retire various programs quickly and efficiently.

Tracks – Programs are overall pathways or tracks for your partners to travel through, such as filling out a registration form, getting approval to access certain content, completing a business plan, getting trained on a product or on marketing, or learning the steps involved in deal registration or referral registration. However, your affiliate partner organizations may have a variety of tracks – say, marketing, sales and technical support – that aren’t appropriate for everyone to go through. That’s why your partner management software must provide individual tracks and be able to automate the assignment of tracks to specific users.

Point Scoring –Jay McBain, the Chief Analyst of Channels at Canalys, has recently noted a trend in which leading companies like Microsoft are rapidly moving from medallion status to a point-based activity management system for tracking partner progress. Therefore, your partner management software should be able to distinguish tracks by function and activities under broader programs, and as partners or partner reps complete those tracks, the software should be able to automatically calculate and allocate points and instantly indicate partner status changes based on those points.

Business Analytics – You cannot have an effective onboarding system if it doesn’t tell you what happens when users are onboarded. The purpose of engagement with affiliate partners or reseller partners is to either generate leads or drive sales or both. Therefore, it is essential to tie the program back to groups and profiles of partners to track efficiency – i.e., to see how specific individuals and programs are performing. This is the Holy Grail of partner ecosystem management: having the intelligence to know what’s working and what’s not. Your partner management system must enable you with dynamic analytics that gives you this information.

I hope this article lays out a logical approach to onboarding your affiliate marketing partner using state-of-the-art partner management software. While there are many more things your partner management software needs to do – such as tracking the efficiency of promotions, allowing partners to publish and track promotional content, providing commissions for generating referrals and associated analytics – we will discuss those functions in other articles. If you are interested in learning more, please give us a call.

For more information, please check this article.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What capabilities are essential for Partner Management Software to handle affiliate onboarding?

Essential capabilities include granular Groups and Profiles management to define unique access rights and content visibility for affiliates, and flexible Programs and Tracks functionality to automate personalized onboarding workflows specific to their non-transacting, lead-generation roles. This structure ensures that affiliates receive relevant marketing and training assets without unnecessary steps.

2. How does a PMS platform differentiate between affiliates and transacting resellers?

Affiliates primarily focus on promoting a brand and finding prospect buyers, and typically receive commissions for generating referrals, while transacting resellers also complete the final sales transaction. Effective Partner Management Software manages these differences by automating distinct compensation models and providing separate workflows for referral registration versus deal registration.

3. Can Partner Management Software support both B2B and B2C affiliate channel management?

Yes, state-of-the-art Partner Management Software is designed to manage various partner types, including B2B consultants/experts and high-follower B2C influencers. This is achieved by offering configurable engagement models and providing co-branded marketing tools optimized for different platforms, such as email automation for B2B and social media syndication for B2C.

4. Why is Point Scoring considered a critical feature for modern partner channel management?

Point Scoring is critical because it moves tracking beyond static medallion status to a modern, real-time activity management system, as noted by leading industry analysts. The Partner Management Software automatically allocates points based on completed tracks and activities, providing partners with instant status changes and transparent performance visibility.

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Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software can help organizations manage commission payments to their partners in a timely and accurate fashion.

More and more companies are marketing and selling through the channel to increase reach and velocity of product distribution. With that said, implementing this sales approach is a very complex undertaking, and it’s easy to get off track. Here are the 5 core partner relationship management best practices to help you scale.

Know Your Partners

Before you can put together a solid partner relationship management framework and strategy, it is essential for you to understand who your partners are, how they make money, how they differ in the marketplace they sell to, and what keeps them awake at night. Without understanding these fundamental drivers, it is almost impossible for an organization to get true engagement from its partner base.

In addition to understanding their business drivers, it is also important for you to figure out how your products fit into their product portfolio. If your solution is the primary product in their portfolio, they will engage accordingly, but if you are just an add-on, your approach to managing the relationship will have to be different. For example, if your partner sells burgers, and you provide French-fries, then you are essentially providing an add-on. However, if you sell beef patties then you provide something that’s core to the partner primary solution, i.e., burgers. Any partner relationship management strategy needs to focus on this strategic versus contextual offer.

Understand the Mathematics of Reach

Sometimes it is tempting to go for the widest distribution possible by signing up as many partners or resellers as you can. However, this approach brings challenges like over-distribution, channel conflict, and potential lawsuits. So, your partner relationship management strategy needs to center around profitable growth, i.e., what’s the minimum number of resellers that would give you the maximum reach.

Needless to say, it poses the risk of creating a lot of unproductive and unhappy partners. Therefore, it’s very important to understand in detail how you are going to distribute your products to end buyers and calculate how many partners you need to hit your revenue growth goals. You would be surprised how few companies sit down and do this math.

Calculate Training and Incentives Requirements

Just like any new relationship, onboarding new partners can be quite exciting in the beginning. Eventually, however, companies realize that it actually takes more to train an indirect sales force than it does to train your own employees. The reason for this is very simple:

Learning about your products is the primary focus of a direct sales force, but partners typically are learning about and selling products from multiple vendors.This makes it difficult for them to invest the time in learning about yet another product, especially if the product is constantly changing due to new capabilities, new versions and so on.

The fact is, partners tend to spend more time selling existing or mature products more than new products. This is a major insight that many companies overlook at first, often realizing it only after they have failed to reach the sales velocity of new products they had hoped for. Your partner relationship management approach needs to focus on understanding partners sales mix and velocity and how you can help them accelerate revenue with minimum changes.

Manage the Loyalty of Partners

It is important for you to understand that a partner’s primary loyalty is to their customer base and their employees. No matter how great your products and services are, if your activity in any way undermines a partner’s relationship with their customers, you risk losing them.

So, while you must put your partners in the middle of your service and support infrastructure, you absolutely need to make sure their end customers are treated with a white glove approach. This is essential in building a reputation with your partner base.

Your business may be transactional, but most partners build their business based on relationships first and transactions later.

Eliminate Under-Performers

Despite your best efforts, sometimes relationships simply do not work. That’s when you must sharpen your pencil and have that tough conversation with those partners who are not performing determining whether it is better to part ways or change something to get the relationship back on track. Your partner relationship management program needs to include a structured approach to this pruning at least once a year.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that if you just hang on to a relationship it will get better over time. In most cases, that doesn’t happen. If your partners are not delivering, or your support costs are going through the roof because your partner is not investing enough time in learning your products and services, it’s time to end the relationship. It is better to focus on fewer partners who are delivering than spread your resources too thin and waste time with those are not.

This is easy to say but very hard to do, but if your approach is business centric and you don’t randomly cut partners off, and you have a rational conversation with them, they will also understand. They are your business partners, so if there isn’t any significant business to pursue, it doesn’t make sense to continue a partnership.

Enacting Best Practices in One Place

Whether your partner base just doesn’t have the marketing and sales competencies necessary to keep revenues growing or your sales velocity has diminished because of increasing channel management costs, you have a choice: try addressing each of these problems one-by-one or invest in a comprehensive, fully integrated PRM framework that establishes a strong business proposition for your partners.

ZINFI is a channel management software that enables organizations to onboard, train, incentivize, and manage partners from one easy-to-use location. Whether you already have hundreds of partners or are just starting out, ZINFI’s platform allows you to pick which features you need most to create a fully customized management system.

“Hope is not a strategy,” goes an old saying. It may be a cliché, but it fully applies to partner relationship management best practices. Approaching it analytically–studying partner segmentations, their business drivers, core needs, solution alignment, incentives investment, and performance output–will help you truly understand who is performing and who is not. And ZINFI can help you do it.

For more information, please check this article.

The concept of a channel has existed since the Stone Age–when one person bartered with another. While technology has evolved rapidly over the past few thousand years, for many companies the state of their channel maturity still resembles antiquated methods that stifle growth.

Based on our engagement with thousands of channel partners worldwide and our evaluation of how vendors deploy channel management, we have come up with a basic four-step framework for partner lifecycle management (or activities). We break down this lifecycle into four core areas: partner recruitment, partner engagement, partner enablement, and partner management.

As a part of the channel management maturity evaluation, it is essential to understand which phase a company is in when it comes to these four different areas of activities. This serves as a starting point with the idea that the channel will evolve and grow.

Phase 1: Laying the Foundation

This is the start-up phase of channel development. When you look at the activities at this level, it covers the following:

Partner Recruitment

The company has some basic partner recruitment capabilities in place by running tradeshows, webinars, and call-out campaigns. Recruitment is ad hoc, and not really focused around partner profiling or competency development, but more opportunistic.

Partner Engagement

The company knows how to provide a basic infrastructure. In many cases the following are homegrown:

Partner portal- Tends to be patched together using either open source software, SharePoint or some other web development tools. However, the portal is monolithic, not localized and cannot offer personalized content. With that said, at this stage the basic content exchange capabilities are in place. Some companies in this phase deploy a basic level of partner relationship management automation.

Partner onboarding- Signing contracts, training partners on how to sell and putting business plans together are the core steps in this phase, but most of these activities are done manually and there are no systems in place to track the progress of partner engagement.

Partner communication- A weekly or monthly newsletter goes out to partners, but communication is not broadly aligned with strategic initiatives and intent. Most content is highly tactical, and not necessarily controlled and aligned with broader corporate initiative. Very rarely at this stage do we see deployment of partner relationship management automation.

Partner Enablement

The company provides a basic level of marketing and sales tools.

Marketing and sales enablement- Price lists, product data sheets, marketing templates are available for partners to use. However, content is not mobile-friendly and not easy to search, tag and find at this level.

Partner training- A basic partner certification and training mechanism is in place, but there is no structured learning management system (LMS) to digitally train, track and certify partners across multiple countries and languages.

Partner Management

The company has a loosely defined partner incentive structure in place, primarily using market development funds.

Incentives are available on an ad hoc basis, but no structured quarterly programs are in place, nor is there any competency alignment.

Phase 2: Refining the Structure to Scale

Companies entering this phase have a significant portion of their revenue (perhaps more than a few hundred million dollars) coming from the channel, and the channel is a strategic piece. Also, we see more prevalent deployment of automation to streamline multiple areas and workflows globally.

Partner Recruitment

Partner recruitment is a strategic initiative–structured in a few countries, but ad hoc in others. Some partner profiling analysis is done to understand what territories need pruning, and where new partners needed to be added. Multi-quarter programs are rolled out.

Partner Engagement

The company has a structured approach towards partner engagement by partner type, verticals, competencies, sales velocity, etc.

Partner portal- This becomes a strategic tool to provide segmented content to specific sets of partners and is used extensively.

Partner onboarding- The entire partner onboarding process is automated, and progress can be tracked dynamically using partner relationship management automation tools. Complete partner relationship management (PRM) tools are deployed sporadically as well.

Partner communication- At this stage, communication tends to be more structured, regular and mature. Some level of communication personalization is achieved via partner profiles and usage of partnership relationship management automation tools.

Partner Enablement

The company has built a set of structured tools that are deployed by countries in various languages.

Marketing and sales enablement- In addition to basic content, the company provides advanced, academy-level marketing and sales content. Integrated marketing tools and campaigns are available for partners to use. Many companies at this stage also use multi-partner demand-generation activities using some sort of a partner relationship management automation platform.

Partner training- Both training and certification tend to be quite organized at this level, and also aligned with partner profiles (e.g., competency matching.). Training is also aligned to incentives and awards, and may even tie to strategic objectives.

Partner Management

The company has put together an advanced performance management process, and is trying to implement that across multiple countries. Performance and incentive parameters are clearly defined and actively enforced.

Deal registration and protection- One of the core performance management and enhancement tools is deal protection and registration. The company may provide some basic level of automation and alignment with the rest of the programs.

Advanced incentives- In addition to market development funds (MDF) and/or co-op funds, the company may also provide additional rewards, rebates and incentives. However, these programs may or may not be fully aligned with other programs and initiatives. Partner relationship management automation is used in an ad hoc way to create, deploy and manage incentive programs.

Phase 3: Optimizing the Channel to Excel

This is the most mature and advanced phase, where hundreds of millions, and may be even billions of dollars are flowing through the channel, and the entire existence of the company deeply depends on the success of the channel.

Partner Recruitment

Partner recruitment is a strategic initiative, and highly organized. Partner profiling is done on a regular basis to understand strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats on a territory-by-territory basis. Regular partner recruitment activities are carried out to fill gaps, prune and align with growth strategies.

Partner Engagement

The company fully streamlines its go-to-market activities behind competency-based profiling that aligns with end-user/customer segments. Allocation of resources is highly strategic, tied to overall sales objectives and initiatives.

Partner portal- Partner relationship management automation is deployed end to end to ensure structured, segmented, and sequential engagement with partner companies and resources. The partner portal is a highly strategic asset that streamlines partner engagement and communication. Multiple functions and departments use the portal as a strategic tool for product releases, updates, pricing, program changes and enhancements.

Partner onboarding- This is recognized as one of the most critical phases of engagement. Ramp-to-revenue is considered a highly important metric, and partner relationship management automation is used end to end to speed up onboarding, tracking and management of new partners.

Business planning- A structured business planning step is introduced and managed actively. Premier partners are required to submit detailed bi-annual business plans, which are reviewed with channel managers on a quarterly basis. Partner relationship management automation is used to track all business plans and their current status.

Partner communication- Segment-based partner communication plays a critical role in making sure the right content is available to the right partner at the right time. Partners can personalize content access and delivery. Partner relationship management automation is used end to end to keep partners informed and productive.

Partner Enablement

This step takes center stage in mature channel organization. Organizations that excel at partner productivity tend to have a highly structured and robust enablement program. Partner relationship management automation plays a critical role in making a robust enablement program a true reality.

Marketing and sales enablement- The entire marketing and sales enablement program is highly dependent on a robust partner relationship management automation platform, and has a set of aligned programs and elements in place. Marketing activities are strategic and are focused on extending the reach of the company via a distributed channel network. Programs are initiative-based, and are fully aligned with a performance management and incentives program.

Partner training- All partners have access to training at various levels of complexities. Partners who are starting up have access to basic certification programs, but the company also offers vertical and multiple competency-based training paths that are value-added to partners’ technical staff and differentiate from competitive partner ecosystems. The strength of the partner ecosystem is directly measured via training and certification modules of the partner relations

Channel Management is the structured process of recruiting, enabling, transacting with, and motivating external distribution partners to sell a vendor's products or services. It is essential for driving predictable, profitable growth by efficiently scaling reach into new markets and lowering selling costs. The entire channel partner lifecycle is based on five core, sequential phases: recruit, onboard, enable, transact, and manage.

Who is this for?: Partner Manager, PartnerOps Manager, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Distribution Manager, Chief Partner Officer.

Core Problem Solved: Inefficient management of complex, distributed partner networks, leading to delayed market entry and inability to scale channel revenue predictably.

Key Tech/Entities: Partner Relationship Management (PRM), Partner Marketing Automation (PMA), The 6 C's Framework, SCORM-compliant training.

When managing any team, you must have processes in place to support your initiatives and help you streamline tasks more efficiently. This is especially true in the channel management.

Each type of channel’s lifecycle is essentially the same – recruit, onboard, enable, transact, and manage. It’s important that each of these components is considered when mapping out an overall channel strategy. After all, growth depends on the success of distribution partners.  

Here, we highlight the 6 C’s of channel management and how you should be applying them. 

1. Create

The first step of your channel strategy is to know who your target partners are and how you’re going to create programs to support them. Channel programs serve as a foundation – for both the product you’re trying to sell and training. Consistently curating programs and relevant content can keep your partners engaged, and most importantly, informed. Knowing that you’ll have the latest information to aid in their efforts will undoubtedly keep them coming back. Consider frequently including assets like web pages, documents, and videos.  

Utilizing a platform to easily update and house these documents makes the process of educating partners even easier. ZINFI, for example, boasts a content library module in its partner portal platform that enables vendors to upload and update any collateral as needed.  

2. Communicate

Communication is two-fold in channel management. You need to have both a communication strategy for new partner recruitment and existing partners.  

Recruitment Communication  

To penetrate a market of new resellers, you’ll likely have to rely on social advertising, online events, trade shows, etc. There should be a concerted effort to target verticals that will market your product directly to those most likely to become partners.   You will need to know who you want to bring on as your reseller, and what would entice them to partner up with you. Your messaging needs to focus on what business value you bring to them, and how you will help them win in the marketplace. 

Communication with Existing Partners  

When you launch a product when you acquire a company, when you roll out an incentive program, when you launch a training program, you have to have a clear set of communication plans tied to those activities, initiatives, and programs.  

It may seem overwhelming to have communications in place for each, individual initiative. But this is crucial to ensuring partners have the information they need to sell. Many channel management teams make it easy by utilizing a partner marketing automation platform that streamlines the process for you. Is it a social campaign? An advertising campaign? A trade show campaign? A partner marketing automation platform can enable you to create dedicated campaigns for each initiative and does the communicating for you.  

3. Connect

You should be constantly keeping your partners informed. They need to know what's new, what's changing, what must get done, just like the way you communicate to employees on a regular basis for a management infrastructure–what the company goals are, what the quarterly objectives are, etc.

Consider connecting on a regular forum–whether it's an online event or regular email communications. You can also invest in a channel management platform, like ZINFI, that enables you to connect through mobile alerts and pop-ups so you have multiple touchpoints with partners.

4. Cooperate

Cooperation means working with partners to create a plan so that they can enter a market segment they may not be competent in. These are large partners that you’ll want to cater to as  smaller partners may not produce the results to make the time commitment worth it to build entry into new segments.

Remember, the point is that it needs to tie back to your overall channel strategy. In the end, the entire goal of your channel management investment is to sell faster and at lower costs.  

5. Collaborate

While cooperation in channel management is about organizations helping partners to create a contract and plan, collaborate is to do something together (vendor and the partner). For example, to cooperate a vendor might work with a partner to help develop their business plan or strategy to increase sales.

Alternatively, when collaborating, a vendor will work with partners to go after the end-buyer (prospect or installed base). This might mean you're cultivating a joint marketing campaign or running an event during a training program–you're collaborating with them to do something together rather than guiding them to go it alone.  

6. Commerce

A channel, when it comes down to it, is about commerce – buying and selling on a large scale. With this in mind it’s important that you’re focused on making communications applicable to whatever stage of the lifecycle partners are in – the recruitment phase is different from the onboarding phase as is the enablement phase and transaction phase–because, it all comes down to the management of commerce.  

Your communication should clearly tell the partner what steps they need to complete for them to be able and successful in carrying out transactions. The relationship with a partner organization is purely financial. Whether you have a referral partner, sales partner or a service partner, in the end the partner organization is out there to make money. 

Therefore, all your communication, training, incentives, deal registrations, service competency development and related channel programs need to constantly link back to how the partners can make money from your products, services and programs.

Automation is Key

In order for a channel organization to drive profitable growth, they need to consistently and efficiently manage their network of distributed partners. This means having processes in place beyond excel spreadsheets and quarterly in-person trainings. To scale fast and with purpose, you need to automate. That’s where ZINFI comes in.  

A leader in through channel marketing automation and partner relationship management, ZINFI is a state-of-the-art platform enabling vendors to expand their partner relationships and quickly scale. With the ability to choose features they need most, organizations create a custom partner portal that is rich with content and functionalities allowing them to recruit, onboard, enable, transact, and manage partners with ease.

To know more about Channel Management, please read the article - The Ultimate Guide to Channel Management.

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. What are the foundational components of the 6 C's of Channel Management framework?

Effective Channel Management is built on six critical elements: Create, Communicate, Connect, Cooperate, Collaborate, and Commerce. These 6 C's ensure that every partner interaction is purposeful, helping to streamline organizational growth and maximize revenue potential from external channels.

2. How does a Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platform support the "Connect" principle?

A PRM platform supports the "Connect" principle by centralizing content and enabling multiple communication touchpoints, such as email notifications and mobile alerts. This ensures partners are regularly and immediately informed about new programs, collateral, and evolving company goals, thereby minimizing information friction.

3. What is the operational difference between "Cooperate" and "Collaborate" for channel partners?

Cooperation involves the vendor working with the partner to establish a foundational plan, such as an entry strategy for a new market segment. Collaboration, by contrast, requires the vendor and partner to jointly pursue the end buyer through activities like joint marketing campaigns or co-selling initiatives.

4. Why is the "Commerce" C the most critical aspect of the vendor-partner relationship?

The vendor–partner relationship is fundamentally financial, as partners are driven by revenue generation. The "Commerce" C ensures that all communication, training, incentives, and deal registration processes are explicitly tied to helping partners achieve predictable and guaranteed financial success.

5. What is the primary business objective of automating the Channel Management function?

The primary objective of automation is to drive profitable growth by managing a distributed partner network consistently and efficiently. Leveraging platforms such as Partner Marketing Automation (PMA) enables vendors to rapidly scale their partner ecosystem while reducing

The discipline that embodies the principles and tactics of managing channel partners is called partner relationship management (PRM) or channel relationship management.

At the foundation of channel management, you’ll find partners. Partners fuel channel marketing, sales, and service efforts–their success is directly correlated to the overall channel’s success. While finding ways to manage them efficiently can be challenging, it’s a crucial component that can enable your organization to recruit and retain more partners, as well as, increase revenue at a much lower cost of sales and services than a direct sales and service model.

The Partner Journey

The word journey means it has a roadmap–with a beginning and an end. Regarding partner relationship management, the roadmap is about attaining higher sales velocity and better customer satisfaction at a lower cost of sales and services. The beginning of this journey starts with partner recruitment and it ends with a high-performing channel.

The truth is it never ends, because the channel is a living and breathing entity. It’s always changing. So, yes you start with a roadmap and you execute, but there are constant changes, detours, and optimization that you have to do with the new focus.

A successful and growing organization is always introducing new products, acquiring new partners, realigning their groups and incentives, etc., to achieve a higher level of performance. So, while you don’t want to make changes every ninety days, you certainly don’t want to stick with a stale channel program year after year either.

That’s why the notion of a partner journey revolves around a framework, but it’s highly dynamic–not like a Disney roller coaster ride, but more like a seasoned traveler that ventures through dozens of countries with a pre-determined budget to attain certain specific goals. In this case, those goals are to make more revenue at a lower cost with a higher customer satisfaction rate and very few business risks or (legal) exposures.

With this said, few things are constant. For a channel-focused organization, partners are always going to be a critical component of any business strategy, whether it’s a vendor just starting or an organization that has been established for years. After all, the productivity of the partners determines the success of the channel. This is where a well-tuned partner relationship management (PRM) software or system can truly help an organization realize its channel strategy and business goals.

With this in mind, let’s go through an overall partner journey with a vendor organization–starting with partner recruitment, training, enablement, sales, and ongoing relationship management.

Partner Recruitment

This is the first step in a partner journey–joining a vendor organization or partner recruitment. You can’t expect to scale without adding new channel partners to your organization. There must be an ongoing and proactive effort to build relationships with potential channel partner organizations that can sell and support a vendor’s solution. This includes both outreach and onboarding processes. A well-designed partner relationship management (PRM) platform should allow you to do this well.

Rather than targeting any available partner, outreach efforts should be built around a strategy–one that seeks out channel partners who are likely to perform. But recruiting is only half the battle. Once you’ve signed on the dotted line it’s time to give them all the resources and knowledge they need to begin actively selling as soon as possible.

Partner Training

The goal here is to ensure partners’ functional teams are properly trained on how to market, sell, deploy, and support a specific solution. This means more than just a two-day conference in a hotel.

To properly give new partners the tools they need to sell you need to take a more holistic and ongoing approach. By that, we mean offering online courses, including webinars, courses, tracks, and certifications. For example, ZINFI offers a Learning Management System that can be customized based on the vendor and even offers an incentives tracker to encourage continued training.

Analyzing current partnerships should also be ongoing. By identifying partners that are under-performing, you can determine why and work to improve their productivity. Thomas Reid said it best, “A chain as strong as its weakest link.” And, once you know that you can focus on offering specific training and certification programs to bridge those skill gaps in your channel.

As I said earlier, the channel is continuously evolving, so the training you did a year or two ago, may be outdated. You need a dynamic platform to constantly keep your partners trained and equipped with the latest marketing, sales, and technical aspects of your solutions.

Partner Enablement

The goal of these activities is to provide partners with the right tools and tactics to develop a market, sell to the customer base, and then serve. This includes additional training, from webinars to face-to-face meetings.

Additionally, partners need to look the part–partners of your organization. That’s why in addition to providing online or face-to-face training, you will need to enable them with marketing, sales, planning, and other necessary tools. State-of-the-art software, like ZINFI’s partner relationship management (PRM) platform, allows you to do so.

Through ZINFI’s PRM platform you can provide them with templated forms, letters, and documents that allow them to simply paste their logo in and share those assets with their customers. You should also give access to any collateral–from marketing to legal documentation–that they need to streamline the sales process. The last thing you want, as a vendor, is to be the bottleneck for your partners. So, make all your resources easily accessible, co-brandable, and usable in a partner’s marketing, sales, and technical activities.

Partner Marketing

Once you have enabled your partners with basic marketing, sales, technical, and service aspects of your business, the first big step is to go out and market to generate leads for your products and services. In many cases, if you are just starting a channel, you may just be helping partners to sell to their installed base. However, even in those cases, you will have to provide some basic channel marketing materials to the partner.

ZINFI’s PRM platform can help you put together a set of simple email, social, web syndication, and other type of marketing campaigns that partners can quickly use to launch in minutes. This becomes a necessity when you have a very large channel, as you will have to offer different types of campaigns, e.g., healthcare, manufacturing, SMB, mid-market, enterprise, etc., but at an early-stage simple email template or co-branded asset, tools can go a long way to drive your partner’s marketing efficiencies.

Partner Sales

As a part of your partner journey, the most important destination is to increase sales– and do it at a lower cost. Therefore, the goal here is obvious–go out and generate demand and then close transactions to drive revenue. How to start? As part of the training, a great incentive to begin selling is to provide leads. This is a great opportunity for new partners to apply what they’ve learned and go after a real prospect.

It’s especially important that, as the vendor, you implement processes that enable you to track conversion rates. This is a great way to identify over-achievers or those struggling. If conversion rates are extremely low, for example, it may be indicative of insufficient training or the need for more of it.

PRM tools are a great resource and can serve as an extension of training and engagement. For example, ZINFI’s partner relationship management software enables vendors to customize and personalize portals based on groups and profiles.

So, you can have partners in different regional groups, and then have different profiles–sales, marketing, technical, etc. This way if someone in sales from Germany logs in they can get specific materials on how to sell in Germany whereas somebody in tech logged in from New York City will only see technical training.

This robust, customization of partner enablement and content empowers partners to learn as much as they want about products to help them achieve their goals (and yours).

Managing Partner Relationships

Once partners have been onboarded, trained, and have access to the resources they need, the priority becomes ongoing management. This means consistently engaging with your partners and providing them with everything they need to be successful.

If you are trying to build a large successful channel, your partner journey should consist of groups of different types of partners who are enabled with various targeted programs across multiple industries, e.g., verticals, sizes, and locations of businesses, etc., and functions, e.g., marketing, sales, technical, etc.

A state-of-the-art partner relationship management platform makes this profile management easy, but most importantly will allow you to map your programs to your groups of partners. We will discuss that in detail next.

Partner Programs

For any approach to partner relationship management to work, it is essential to clearly define and plan various types of programs related to partners. It’s helpful to imagine the process you’d take when hiring a new sales associate–you’d first want to introduce them to your product through extensive training, give them the resources they will need to be successful, provide them with leads to start, and (if you’re good) offer incentives for motivation.

Partner programs will look very similar. To be truly effective, these programs should be a continuous feat, one that extends the length of your business together.

While it would be great if all partners learned everything there is to know about your organization and ride off into the sunset selling forever,...

A lot has changed around the world in all aspects of our life over the past 18 months, and that includes how lead management works in a distributed partner network. Before we delve into what has changed, what will change further and how to prepare for it, let me take a moment to describe what channel lead management is: If you are selling through a channel then you have one or more types of partners, such as resellers, value added resellers (VARs), agents, sub-agents, distributors, wholesalers, affiliates and more. Nearly all of these types of partners have an impact on your sales, either directly or indirectly.

In general, there are two types of partners:

Transacting partners – These are the partners who are actually actively selling your products on their website or through their business services. They may or may not provide additional post-sales customer care or services, but most do today because they can get recurring revenue from a sale. Since transacting partners are selling, they will have need to have access to your lead management system.Non-transacting partners – These are the partners who “refer” or a “send” a prospect to your company via your web site or some sort of a lead management system. These partners tend to be called affiliates, but some of them may also simply be pure service partners. They don’t necessarily sell your products, but they nevertheless serve your customer base. Mortgage services companies are great examples of this.

Now, both types of partners will have some form of engagement with a lead management system, and in some cases they will also engage with a deal registration management system. (We will not discuss deal registration here; you can find many articles on deal registration on our website.)

During the pandemic, as the world coiled back to a quarantine mode, face-to-face engagement has pretty much disappeared or has been curtailed substantially for business transactions. There is no longer a reliable way to generate leads from a “lunch and learn” or from a local fair or some sort of an event. All events have moved online, and therefore generation of leads has also moved online. As a major provider of lead management software, we at ZINFI have seen a rapid rise in demand for the lead management modules we and other software developers provide.

As we get closer to a post-pandemic world, we are very likely to see the evolution of a hybrid world. Physical interactions will not disappear. Humans are tribal in nature and require social face-to-face engagement. We can expect physical events to come back, but they will rely on many of the digital tools we are currently using. It’s sort of like this: Instead of having your dinner delivered by Uber Eats, you place the order online but go pick it up yourself. The app will still be there in your life. A similar dynamic will emerge in lead management, where much activity will take place online, but there will still be some space for in-person interaction.

This is great news, because traditionally it has been hard to get channel partners to adopt new software and automate their processes. This fundamental shift towards the adoption of lead management software will ultimately make the channel more efficient and effective. Leads are like fish out of water— if you or your partners are not moving quickly, most of these leads will die. Time is of the essence, and lead management can make lead processing super-fast and accurate.

Finally, once you have an online lead management system in place and you move away from Excel or email- or phone call-based manual tracking, you can monitor all activities online and spend your time focused on driving programs that increase your leads and ROI.

This is a whole new world. While the last 18 months have been horrible for most, the world of lead management will get substantially better. That’s another silver lining to look forward to as we gradually get back to normal.

For more information, please check this article.

Salesforce is an amazing company led by its founder and CEO Marc Benioff. What started as a CRM-focused SaaS company has evolved over the past several decades into a business process automation ecosystem. Salesforce’s core strategy is to provide a few core applications around customer relationship management (CRM), service management and marketing, and allow independent service providers to connect to its platform and augment its core capabilities to create a more niche application. Salesforce also provides basic partner relationship management (PRM) capabilities, and in this article we will explore the pluses and minuses of Salesforce PRM.

Before we proceed further, let’s take a step back and understand Salesforce’s overall strategy. As I said in the beginning, it started as CRM platform in a SaaS package—an alternative to on-premise software that had to be installed and configured on a company’s physical servers. (Yes, remember those days? Not so long ago, eh?) More recently, Salesforce has followed the lead of software platform providers like Microsoft in offering customers a development environment called Force.com, with its own software built on that. In much the same way Microsoft provides Windows as an operating environment, but then also sells Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Salesforce provides a solid CRM platform and allows third-party providers to build and run applications on its Force.com platform and connect to its core applications. In fact, ZINFI’s own PRM application connects to Salesforce CRM as well as Salesforce PRM.

Now, over the past decade or so has Salesforce dabbled in the area of partner relationship management. At one point in time, it had a dedicated product, but according to industry analysts achieved only lackluster sales, and therefore decided to roll that into the Salesforce Community Cloud business line. Salesforce PRM today is essentially an extension of Salesforce Community Cloud, rather than a purpose-built PRM platform. Salesforce PRM has unique strengths and weaknesses, and if you are considering investing in it you should understand what they are.

There are basically three core positive areas for Salesforce PRM. They are focused on a) extending your direct selling motion to the channel via Salesforce PRM, b) minimizing or eliminating any integration work for another application if you are a Salesforce CRM house already, and c) giving you powerful tools to build custom workflows for your channel applications, in much the same way you can build workflows for direct sales automation activities. 

Let’s take a moment and explore these three areas in a bit more detail:

Extending Direct Selling – If your organization has chosen Salesforce CRM for sales and/or marketing automation and you are looking to provide some basic capabilities for sharing information with your channel partners, then Salesforce PRM is certainly worth a look. Using Salesforce PRM community capabilities, you can build some basic collaboration capabilities and share content with your channel partners. This allows your direct sales team or inside sales team to easily collaborate with partners using a few basic communication tools.

Eliminating Integration Work – If your organization is already using Salesforce CRM, then turning on the PRM capabilities is quite simple. Even though Salesforce PRM is not a purpose-built application and may require you to do a lot of configuration and customization work, in the end you can eliminate any integration requirements. While ZINFI’s PRM platform—along with other third-party purpose-built PRM platforms—comes with easy-to-connect PRM to SFDC connectors, in the end some organizations simply don’t want to manage another application. If you are in that boat, Salesforce PRM is a reasonable option for you to consider.

Powerful Workflow Tools – even though it comes with very limited PRM capabilities, what makes Salesforce PRM truly great is it inclusion of powerful workflow and application configuration capabilities, which are almost limitless. If you have application development know-how and budget, you can keep building on Salesforce’s platform to your heart’s content. Some organizations with deep expertise in these areas tend to do quite well by developing custom workflow applications on top of Salesforce’s limited PRM functionalities.

Now with this as a backdrop, let’s assume you don’t have deep bench strength in configuring Salesforce, and you aren’t worried about connecting to a purpose-built third-party application like ZINFI’s PRM.  In this case, you should seriously consider the limitations of the Salesforce PRM platform. There are multiple weaknesses, but we can focus on a few: Salesforce PRM offers a) few if any dedicated PRM applications, b) exposes customers to considerable expense and overhead in customizing the platform and c) lacks channel-focused workflow templates. 

Let’s deep dive a bit deeper into these three areas:

Lack of Dedicated PRM Applications – Beyond Salesforce Community Cloud, where you can register a deal and share some documents, Salesforce PRM doesn’t come with any other purpose-built PRM applications like onboarding, contracts, business planning, market development funds, asset co-branding, marketing tools and so on. In order to expand Salesforce PRM into a true channel automation platform, you have to buy third-party applications, so you are back to square one where you are essentially buying an additional platform.

Lack of Channel-Focused Templates – While an organization extending its direct selling motion to a channel organization can use some of the basic capabilities of Salesforce PRM, it doesn’t come with set of pre-built application modules or templates that you can use to augment your current workflow and adapt to automate your channel activities. This is a gap that becomes obvious the moment you try to expand beyond community and basic deal registration capabilities.

Exposure to Configuration Expenses – While there is no doubt Salesforce PRM has incredible workflow and application development tools, developing an application is not easy. It requires workflow expertise, Salesforce-skilled resources, time and money. We quite often hear from companies who dropped Salesforce PRM and adopted a purpose-built partner relationship management (PRM) platform like ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management (UPM) platform because the cost and complexities of developing on Salesforce PRM forced them to switch.

There is no product in the world that is the right fit for everybody, no matter how great that product is. This is certainly true of Salesforce PRM. It’s has great functionality as a core CRM platform, and has some basic extensions to PRM automation, but it is no match for a purpose-built PRM platform. It is not that Salesforce PRM cannot be used to automate the required channel activities, but the development dollars and time required to do so far exceed its core value as a unified platform. Therefore, while Salesforce remains a powerhouse in the core sales and marketing automation segment, because of the total cost of ownership and its expensive licensing structure, many companies of all sizes today are looking for more purpose-built channel automation solutions like ZINFI’s PRM software as well as other third-party PRM tools.

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