The Hidden Costs of Manually Managing your Partner Program

When executives at any organization outline strategic initiatives, there are a variety of factors that determine their prioritizations, but typically the most important thing is boosting the bottom line. 

When prioritizing initiatives within a partner program, there are some desired outcomes that nearly every partner leader will think of first: adding more partners, increasing partner sourced revenue, optimizing partner engagement, etc. These objectives are usually addressed broadly through a shift in strategy or new and “improved” workflows.

Unveiling Hidden Costs: The Role of a PRM

What a lot of partner teams miss, however, are some of the hidden costs, which would yield a huge ROI if detected and addressed. Usually these costs require some form of business intelligence tool or complex analysis to uncover and are associated with manual operations. 

While there are certainly challenges with getting the right data to discover these hidden costs, some folks simply aren’t focusing enough on discovering them in the first place, and it shows in their profitability margins.

Here are some questions about your partner program that most executives at growing tech companies typically aren’t thinking about when determining prioritization:

• How many more partners would you have if you could demonstrate your program’s maturity with a sophisticated platform to support their endeavors?
• How many partnerships have you missed out on because your onboarding experience does not meet their standards?
• How many partners would you have if you were able to onboard them in minutes or hours, not days or weeks?
• How much more pipeline would partners have brought in if you had effective training and asset management provided to them?
• How much time is your team spending manually processing payments to partners? 
• How much revenue is slipping through the cracks due to human error and manual reporting?
• How much time is being spent manually corresponding with partners about the status of ongoing deals?
• How much time are you spending manually entering information from email or spreadsheets into your CRM?
• How much time is being spent manually creating reports based on pipeline generation from partners?
• How much could partner satisfaction be improved if there was more structure and information provided to them in a centralized hub? Would they bring you more revenue?

This is just a sampling of the specific questions you should consider when evaluating how your partner program and considering how it can impact your bottom line. From a high level, it may make sense why the partnerships are not immediately prioritize, but when leaders take the time to analyze these deeper questions, then the hidden costs and benefits of sophisticated partner management technology immediately appear. 

Based on the hundreds of conversations that we have had with executive teams, the hidden costs of poorly managed partner programs are abundant and often overlooked. When you consider how quickly the implementation of PartnerPortal.io can be done versus a massive CRM or BI tool initiative, the ROI starts to get pretty appealing and becomes something of a ‘quick win’ for the team.

Reach out to our team by finding a time that works for you to discuss more of the hidden costs of manually managing your partner program.