Leveraging Technology for Greater Partner Success

Organizations using a channel and alliance partner approach to market have plenty of untapped opportunity to leverage those partnerships for greater mutual success by breaking down silos.

In Market Guide for Partner Relationship Management Applications (April, 2023) the Gartner team makes it clear that channel and alliance partners are increasingly involved in opportunities for driving growth, taking part in co-marketing and co-ideation efforts. At the same time, organizations' efforts are hampered by lack of critical insight into how, and where their partners engage.

Even more interestingly, Gartner analysts say that the value that partners uniquely bring to the table could be better understood.

This suggests vendors and partners are still operating in silos, and that inevitably impacts on the end customer. Even if that impact isn't overtly negative — at least, not until it reaches scale —  there is clearly room for improvement all round.

Technology alone is not the answer

The key learnings from Gartner's PRM research are only partially addressed by partner relationship management applications.

Instead, it's clear that some of the deep understanding necessary to build strong partner relationships themselves is missing.

Conversations are a rapid and lasting cure for that. Understanding what specific partners can do, that your own organization cannot, is key to any program's success. Partner strengths can only be leveraged if they are known and understood.

Without these conversations, essential context and nuance is completely missed, so bypassing this step, and focusing only on relationship management technology leaves opportunities on the table.

Leveraging technology for greater partner success

Organizations have had a longstanding dependency on distributed tools such as one-off partner portals to support channel partners. While their partner portal will typically have an integration with their chosen CRM, giving them the ability to sync relevant data between systems, this often leaves significant gaps in visibility and information.

Even where partners register leads and deals, providers have no view of how they are engaging with those leads, or of the actions they're taking to progress deals, because the tools they have are only superficially connected to their CRM.

Organizations that can tap into HubSpot's ability to track all activity pertaining to prospects and customers, have the ability to solve the key challenges Gartner analysts have tabled.

In particular, leads or deals registered using a partner portal built in HubSpot, such as AllianceHub, can immediately be associated with the partner company, and partner sales representative, who owns them. Any emails exchanged, or meetings booked, with those leads can be automatically captured within HubSpot, and associated to the deal.

It all depends on the email cc: field

When your team is set up to record all of their activity in HubSpot, emails they're cc'd on will automagically be sucked into the HubSpot CRM. If a contact from the customer company is there on the email thread, the emails will be associated to the deal in your HubSpot. If not, your team can do manual associations as they go along... though streamlining with automation is always going to be preferable.

Making these capabilities work for you gives your entire organization additional visibility into deal activity, as well as making it easy for channel partners to see deal stages, notes and next steps.

This real time insight gives partner sales teams and sales administrators compelling reasons to log in to partner portals. Just as importantly, savvy revenue teams can leverage HubSpot's capabilities to automatically generate emails and other notifications triggered by relevant activities and status changes.

As a result, channel partners can retain ownership of key relationships that extend far beyond vendors, while the vendors themselves can gain an appreciation of where deals are at, and what input may be required from them.