What is Partner Relationship Management Software? A Complete Guide

What makes for successful partnerships? Great partnerships are all about relationships. But they’re also about growing revenue, increasing market share, and delivering better service to customers.

Over the past decade, partners have become increasingly important players in the world of sales. Partner relationship management (PRM) software has made managing relationships with reselling partners more efficient and streamlined. Read on to learn how this software can work for your business.

What you’ll learn:

• What is partner relationship management?
• What is partner relationship management software?
• Why is partner relationship management software important?
• PRM versus CRM: What’s the difference?
• Key benefits of PRM software

Partner relationship management (PRM) is the software, processes, and strategies used to streamline business processes with partners that sell your products or services. Before the advent of PRM software, partner relationship management looked a bit different. Meetings took place in person, over the phone, or through the mail. Computer software has streamlined the processes, making PRM more efficient, scalable, and data-driven. But the fundamental principles of PRM — managing relationships, facilitating communication and supporting partners — remains the same.

Partner relationship management (PRM) software is a set of digital tools designed to help companies manage and automate aspects of their relationships with business partners. It makes it easier to grow partner programmes, especially with resellers. PRM software works within customer relationship management (CRM) software to create a portal between a company and its external partners.

The PRM software also allows your partners to have account executive (AE) experience-like access to any component of the platform — without the risk of exposing sensitive data. Those external partners can also collaborate on the company’s projects through the PRM using a log in to access the partner experience. However, the company has complete control over what they can access.

A lot of companies — especially smaller ones — try to manage partner relationships without any kind of software. However, managing relationships with external partners creates a risk of duplicating efforts. Without PRM software, there’s often a breakdown in communication. Multiple vendors could be chasing the same leads, or redundant emails might be sent.

And once the communication breakdown starts, it can expand quickly from the vendor to the customer.

Some of the nation’s largest companies use PRM software, including manufacturing companies, financial service organisations, and companies with more than a million partners. It’s very adaptable software and infinitely scalable. As small companies grow, they can continue to tailor their PRM software in a way that fits their business.

And building a PRM solution is worth the investment. Over a three-year period, partner communities saw a 195% return on investment (ROI), according to research by Forrester .

While both CRM and PRM software are essential for managing relationships, each platform is tailored to meet the specific needs of its audience. CRM software is used by internal employees of a business. In contrast, PRM software is used by external partners. It specialises in customer acquisition, interactions, sales, and retention. PRM software targets partners and focuses on enablement, management, collaboration, and performance.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps companies enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. It is built for direct sales, where a company sells its own products or services. CRM software helps companies manage its relationships with customers by using a single source of truth.

CRM software excels with managing contacts. It stores and manages customer information and you can add details like buying habits, spouse’s name, and birthdays.

With CRM software, you can also manage service requests, respond to customer issues, and offer solutions.

One of the best features of CRM software is its analytics and reporting. It provides insights into customer behaviour, sales performance, and marketing effectiveness.

PRMs helps companies enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention too - but through partners. PRMs help partners collaborate fast and get results. They’re built for managing indirect sales — or, where an external partner resells a company’s products or services to increase market reach and revenue.

PRM software acts as a portal, providing a centralised platform for external partners to access a company’s resources, tools, and information. It also facilitates communication and collaboration between the company and its external partners.

Using the portal, PRM software streamlines the process of recruiting and training new partners. It manages and tracks deals that partners are working on to avoid conflicts and ensure proper support.

PRM software also tracks and analyses external partners’ performance, providing insights and metrics to improve outcomes.

PRM software was developed to complement CRM software. For years, companies relied on CRM software to manage everything and anything that had to do with sales — including managing outside partners. But as businesses grew and became more reliant on external partners for sales, those businesses needed a separate platform to manage outside vendors.

Software developers listened to sales pros who wanted to share certain aspects of their CRM with outside vendors, while protecting proprietary information. With PRM software, external partners can now easily log in and access tools to help sell a company’s products or services — without being able to access that company’s sensitive data.

Aside from table-stakes capabilities like lead routing and deal tracking, here are some PRM software features to look for:

• Experience builder: Personalise the partner experience based on each user’s needs with easy-to-build templates and drag-and-drop tools. Keep partners engaged with updated, relevant content, from enablement to AI-driven deal insights. Help partners stay on track toward revenue achievement with individualised partner scorecards — all while staying on brand.
• Partner onboarding and growth: Capture attention, maintain consistent engagement, and motivate long-term success. Guide partners the moment they enter the portal with clickable walk-throughs. Steer partners to deliver revenue growth by tying revenue generation to achievable milestones and outcomes-based programmes. Serve up the necessary resources, goals and assets with easy-to-navigate programmes that ramp, develop, and grow partners.

And here’s how to partner productivity with data, automation and AI:

• Channel management with AI: Ensure partners sell the right way with AI-generated emails and prompts.
• Guided-partner efficiency with AI: Make it easy for partners to pinpoint which deals are progressing with embedded scores in the PRM experience.
• Partner sales and marketing automation: Drive demand with the help of partners. Get partner marketing projects off the ground fast with pre-built, approved marketing journeys and co-branded marketing assets that they can tap into on their own. Implement approval workflows for marketing development fund requests, campaign launches, deal proposals, and discounting needs. Pull in additional marketing partner solutions and Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) information for additional automation power.

Finally, make it simple for partners to work deals from anywhere and get insights that will help them come back and sell more:

• AI-powered partner analytics: Activate partner selling with out-of-the-box dashboards and reports specifically for them. Give them access to AI-generated insights about pipeline and revenue potential. Connect insights to actual deals and guide partners with steps to take to achieve more wins.
• CRM integration with any partner: Get visibility into deal progress and update partner selling data from any CRM using Partner Connect. Give everyone automated, real-time updates on co-selling deals across multiple CRMs. Maintain data integrity and decrease duplication of efforts with easy-to-set-up data mapping.

With predictive and generative sales AI working hard to automate a wide range of tasks, these advanced PRM platforms will take care of tedious chores — and give you more time to actually spend managing relationships with your partners.

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Working with outside partners can be tricky. But your PRM software doesn’t have to be.

PRM software is an indispensable tool that streamlines communication, facilitates collaboration, and provides a secure and intuitive platform for your company and its external partners. And with advanced features like predictive and generative AI, it can level up your sales game — automating routine tasks and providing deeper insights into partner performance and market trends.

If you want your company to strengthen its alliance with external partners, there’s no better plan of action than to launch PRM software within your CRM platform. It’s one of the best ways to grow revenue and deliver better service to your customers.