PartnerStack co-founder, Luke Swanek, once wrote that one of the questions to answer before launching a partner program is, “What tools will you use to manage and measure partners?”
That viewpoint still stands today, as proper partner management is critical to the long term success of any partner program. And the right tools and automation partners can make all the difference.
Managing your partners well ensures they are more engaged, productive and successful at selling your product. And the all-in-one partner relationship management (PRM) platform you need in your arsenal is PartnerStack. PartnerStack supports the partnership efforts of B2B SaaS companies and helps them manage relationships with their partners to drive more revenue through indirect.
So, we sat with Melissa Stoddart, Director of Product Marketing at PartnerStack, to discuss how to use the platform to automate your partner management.
In this article we will:
- Describe the importance of automation in partnerships
- Share six ways that PartnerStack automates work for program managers and their partners
- Share helpful tips along the way for using automation in a strategic way (while not forgetting the importance of human touch in building trusting business partnerships)
See more: PartnerStack’s co-founder’s 5 questions to answer before launching your partner program.
Why automate partner management?
Running and managing a partner program is no easy task. You have to deal with multiple moving parts, such as partner onboarding, training, communications, reporting, payouts and more.
Traditionally, partner management has involved many manual processes, like using spreadsheets to track partner performance, communicating with partners via emails or phone calls and manually processing payouts.
As Stoddart says, “This can become tedious, weigh them [partner managers] down and stunt the growth of their program.”
However, automating these processes saves partner managers time, improves the relationship with partners and allows the program to scale and handle more partners — without compromising efficiency.
See more: Here's how business automation saves you time and money.
How PartnerStack powers automation
There are five distinct ways PartnerStack functions as an automation tool:
- Centralizing information in your tech stack
- Onboarding
- Reporting
- Payouts
- Communication
Let’s look at each one in detail to understand how you can power up your program through your PRM.
Centralizing information in your tech stack
Your CRM serves as a centralized repository for all customer-related information. It’s where you store your customer and often partners’ contact details, company profiles, partnership history, deal data, etc. Consolidating your CRM and PRM data ensures everyone has easy access to the most up-to-date and accurate partner information in case of questions or issues.
You can integrate your CRM (whether Salesforce, Pipedrive or Hubspot) into PartnerStack to sync customer and partner data between both tools. This eliminates the need to manually enter and update partner information in multiple systems, reducing duplicate entries and ensuring the data is always up-to-date.
The integration also makes communication with partners easier. You can initiate emails, schedule calls and document meeting notes without ever leaving the CRM. It’s more efficient than the old way of jumping between multiple tools to coordinate with partners.
Get started: Connect your Hubspot CRM with PartnerStack today.
Automated onboarding processes
When you sign up new partners, the first step is to onboard them. When done well, partners feel supported and empowered from the beginning, which makes them more likely to become engaged, productive contributors to the partnership. Conversely, a poor onboarding experience can lead to frustration, disengagement — and even partner churn down the line.
Unfortunately, onboarding new partners can take a lot of time and effort, especially if you’re managing a growing number of partnerships.
PartnerStack automates this entire process. When partners sign up, they gain access to a partner portal you’ve set up with automated workflows and information about your program. This guides them and gives them access to all the necessary resources, eliminating the need for individual onboarding calls or emails.
See more: What great partner onboarding looks like in 2024.
Automated onboarding is great for all parties. It helps partners get started faster so they can start generating revenue for your business.
It also frees your team to focus on more strategic activities like building relationships and supporting high-performing partners.
Essentially, Stoddart says, PartnerStack “makes the onboarding experience easy for vendors and the partners they're trying to manage.” It eliminates the need for them to do a lot of manual stuff like reviewing applications, getting partners into the systems and trying to ensure they are ready to start selling and driving affiliate traffic.
Automated reporting tools and dashboards
Once your program is up and running, you need to track it to understand how your partners are performing, identify areas for improvement and showcase ROI.
PartnerStack offers Performance Reporting tracking of partner activities that provides an overview of your program at first glance — all-time total revenue generated from partnerships, total revenue from the previous month and total revenue by partner group. This gives you a high-level understanding of your partner program's performance so you can make data driven decisions.
You can also drill down into individual partner analytics to see their specific contribution, such as the number of leads and deals every partner submits and their customer journey. This allows you to identify top performers and those who need more support.
Additionally, on the partner side, PartnerStack provides detailed reporting and stats to your channel partners so they can optimize their performance, too.
Automated payouts
When Genesys wanted to relaunch its partner program, one of the problems they faced was how to pay thousands of different partners efficiently. Imagine the administrative burden of manually calculating commissions, generating invoices and distributing payments to such a large network of partners. It’s a nightmare.
Stoddard described it as a “back-and-forth relationship with the finance teams and partners, where partners will invoice their vendors, who will share that invoice with their finance teams, and then finance teams have to go and pay out the partner directly.” We describe it as very exhausting.
So, Genesys turned to PartnerStack. Stephen Procopi, Director of Global Partner Strategy and Development, says, “Without PartnerStack, we would be faced with manually onboarding hundreds, if not thousands of different partners with our vendor management and accounts payable teams and required to convert each payment to local currency. It would be a huge operational overhead that would be cost prohibitive to support.”
PartnerStack automatically calculates commissions based on predefined rules (like paid signups or upgrades from referred customers), generates a single invoice and automatically disburses payouts for them to withdraw in their preferred method. This ensures that partners are paid accurately and on time, which is crucial for maintaining positive relationships.
It also has a fraud protection feature to spot fraudulent partners and prevent them from being paid.
Genesys estimates that by using PartnerStack to process referral commission payments, they save approximately 20 hours per month.
Read the case study: How Genesys fuels partnership growth at scale with operating efficiencies supported by PartnerStack.
Automated communication
While human communication is essential to good partner relationships, it has its limitations, mainly your time. You and your team can’t be available at all hours to respond to partner inquiries or send timely updates. Automated communication channels through PartnerStack help fill this gap.
You can set up automated email sequences to welcome new partners. Beyond that, however, you can create email sequences or one-off emails triggered and sent to a partner when they complete an action like getting their first signup or first account or after periods of inactivity.
This automated communication improves your responsiveness and engagement with channel partners so they always feel supported.
What’s more, PartnerStack's in-app messaging allows you to broadcast important announcements and have real-time conversations with your entire partner network directly in the tool.
You might also like: 5 partner pros who saved time with partner tech.
Automated training programs
Training programs equip your partners with enablement and product marketing materials to represent and sell your products or services effectively.
Instead of delivering on a one-to-one basis, use PartnerStack’s built-in learning management system (LMS) to create self guided and interactive courses that partners can access on-demand. This ensures they have the training they need when they need it, without your constant involvement.
You can then track their progress and completion rates to identify knowledge gaps and provide additional support where needed.
When automating, always keep the partner experience in mind
Stoddart was clear about one thing: “Any organization that wants to drive revenue through partnerships, really needs to think about how they're building and fostering relationships with their partners. If they don't engage with their partners, provide them with the resources they require, communicate with them and build a strong relationship with them, they're simply not going to see the results that they're looking for.”
This sums up the importance of partner management — it’s the foundation of a successful program. PartnerStack, helps by automating the workflows associated with partnership management so you don’t live and work out of emails and spreadsheets. This allows you and by extension, your partners, to become more productive and earn your business more revenue.
.jpg)
