You’re looking to automate your partnership management. What are the best tools to use?

Automation is critical for partner teams. You wear many hats and you can be spread thin VERY quickly. Automating tedious tasks by baking templated processes for your rules of engagement will help you scale a program from a nice to have to a NEED to have. Because you're building a business within a business, that means you need to operate efficiently - perhaps even more efficiently than the business as a whole. This is where automation is critical from communications, to distributing just-in-time information, and properly surfacing things in a proactive way, instead of retroactively that most partner teams are doing today.

One of the most powerful tools I use as a partner leader is Slack, specifically Slack Connect. I have Slack Connect channels setup to manage partners internally, to connect partners into opportunities, and channels shared with Partners and Teams at Box broadly to share materials and alignment. It's like having Partners badged in my office when they can DM anyone on the team on Slack.

Before you automate anything you need to determine if it is actually going to drive value and efficiency. Automation is great for huge partner programs with many no-touch or low-touch partners. For small bespoke partner programs you run the risk of spending more time implementing than you will save and you risk alienating your hard won relationships by implying they are not worth your time to deal with directly.

Automation can be useful for large networks of opportunistic referral partners, as a way to maintain "mindshare" so that they remember you when an opportunity pops up. I am skeptical about the value of automation for strategic partnerships, which tend to be more personalized and interactive. We are also finding that there is "portal fatigue". Partners have too many vendors with different platforms, and they often can't be bothered to log in.

People don't want to read more emails. They want to work where they are already working (CRM, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.) and so you need to meet them where they are and at the right time. Automating communications in the platforms being used today is what partner managers need to do. For example, your seller is NOT going to go into a partner-tech tool (heck, they barely go into marketing resources or tools even though the company spends on them). Meet people where they are and make it EASY for them to respond. Automation within partnerships (with tools like Superglue) will help with streamlining communications.

One thing people don't always consider is the content calendar and consistency required for communication and collaboration and how you can help people know when you will be engaging them. We have a program at Box we've rolled out called Box Partners Talk that has a very consistent cadence, and it's a standing meeting on everyone's calendar to know when they will be getting additional enablement from partners. It may sound easy, but delivering to a set, consistent cadence has proven critical to my team to improve communication and collaboration with our partners

In order to drive an effective Cloud GTM co-selling strategy with Hyperscaler like Microsoft, AWS, and Google many top ISV's - Independent Software Vendors - use automation tools to streamline their communication and collaboration process. By tying your CRM solution to the vendors' partnership automation system - ISV's can more readily share whitespace, pipeline, and wins. The process helps the vendor's sales organization know what accounts the partner is engaged in, assist when needed, and track wins and join revenue.

This is key to winning with partners, as they see your automation investments as an investment in THEM. Automating partner management allowed me to prove that it has considerably improved cooperation and the flow of information in our ecosystem. The key to effective partnerships is efficient collaboration, and automation stimulates it in several ways. Automation simplifies internal communications. Teams, Slack, or the partner portal can offer a convenient space where partners can view the necessary information, share ideas, and work together effortlessly.

As much as you want to keep the communication standard across your base of partners. Make sure you track who is opening the communications and also using the platfirms to deseminate info to their client base.

Real-time data and analytics allow us to base our decisions on real-life information and ensure that all performance expectations are communicated clearly. This transparency generates trust and empowers honest communication with our partners. Secondly, automation facilitates PROACTIVE communication. We can now utilize our time more effectively by investing in strategic initiatives such as engaging with partners, developing relationships, and attending to their changing needs.

Measure, monitor and manage are the the key terms that top experts are encouraging partnership teams and leaders to focus on. Optimization for the sake of optimization will not provide results if you don't have instrumentation setup to measure and monitor your program.

Monitoring and optimizing your partnership performance needs to be closely tied to your organizations core set of tools. When most effective, partner results are directly tracked and measured within the CRM and Accounting solutions to build internal trust within the C-Suite that the results are accurate. Maniacal focus on the data and using these results to present and discuss trends, opportunity areas and gaps both internally and with your partner is a critical component to the health and success of the partnership.

Surfacing just-in-time information in partnerships is the name of the game. If you're late to an opportunity, you're only adding noise to the process. For example, Superglue can actually take information from the CRM record to identify low-hanging fruit and opportunities for sellers to tap in partners. Pair that with information from your account mapping tool (Reveal) and you are able to automatically and proactively surface important information. An example of this is recently closed-won opportunities of your partner and/or recently renewed clients of your partner. This information is exceptionally valuable for sellers to proactively take action with partners, instead of waiting for a partner manager to surface it 1 week later.

Sharing both your pipeline and white space opportunities with your partner create new leads, influence points and opportunities for both organizations. Tools like PartnerTap, Crossbeam and Reveal allow you to share this data seamlessly, providing for relevant and realtime partner sales engagement and strategy to drive net new revenue and wins for your organization.

My experience is you need to pilot with partners the right motion that will result in mutual opportunity and revenues. I increasingly see a knee jerk reaction where partners want to use tools to do account mapping without fully understanding FIRST why we should partner and what the joint value is.

I struggle with trust and automation being used in the same sentence. Trust is personal, highly subjective and human. Automation is a mechanization of data. Where the two intersect is using the data and the automation of sales and partnering specific tools to streamline process and show results. Results in pipeline, revenue, wins demonstrate that you are trustworthy of investment, trustworthy of a partners time to engage you in new opportunities because of your propensity to deliver repeated results.

If you want to build a sticky, dense web of contacts within your partner organization that generate more predictable revenue, you have to focus on building a partner activation funnel that helps you build, nurture, establish and reinforce relationships with wide web of partner contacts consistently at scale. Through an automated process, each of these partner contacts is shifted down the activation funnel, getting to know you, trust you, feel valued by you, and REMEMBER you all along the way, so that when the opportunity arrives, they bring you into a deal.

Automation CAN be a tool for proactive engagement with partners, but it is not the end all to be all. To get trust and loyalty, you must have constant contact with the partner, when and where they value it the most. Data automation gives us insights into the partnership (where we are strongest together and where we are lacking) so the sponsors of the partnership see us as attentive and receptive to their needs. Further, automation enhances clarity in communication, providing partners with the necessary dashboards, KPI details, resources, and prompt support. It also enables bespoke personalization of communication based on individual partner preferences and performance, then allows leaders to adjust their tactics to optimize interest.

One tool I make extensive use of is Box for Salesforce. In Salesforce, we create a Box folder on every account and opportunity we work on, and we invite our customers and our partners to collaborate with us. This allows us to keep all parties on the same page with proposals, RFP responses, PowerPoints and more within the context of our CRM and other customer data.

A simple way to think about tools for partner management is as follows: - How do I create a target list of partners? PartnerOptimizer, PartnerUtopia, HG Insights, CORO by Bain - How do I figure out which customer and prospect accounts to target after I sign partners? Reveal, Crossbeam, PartnerTap - How do I manage opportunities with partners? (Cloud Service Providers / GSIs for example) WorkSpan, Tackle, Clazar, Labra, Suger - How do I manage partner relationships? (Deal reg, MDF, partner marketing) Impartner, Mindmatrix, Allbound, PartnerStack, 360 Insights - How I manage communications with partners / workflows? Superglue - How do I do joint account planning with partners? Qollabi / Forecastable This is a good start

Reveal and Crossbeam are awesome for automated account mapping! If you work with hyperscalers, tools like Tackle help with the marketplace listing and management process. Tools like Superglue then let you the connect the dots and build a partner activation and co-sell funnel that leverages all that data (account mapping, CRM incl. ACE etc.) at scale.

Having implemented many tools, getting them integrated with each other and then back to systems used across the rest of the business is always more challenging than it should be. Despite many tools having integrations, there’s always gaps. At Zapier, we’re using our own integration products to bridge these and craeate some very valuable automated solutions for our partner program and infrastructure.

Outside of the necessary tool for ALL partner teams to start with - account mapping (Reveal.co, including the free version) - I recommend teams look at Superglue in conjunction with the aforementioned ParnterStack. Superglue helps to create workflows that partner managers spend too much tedious time on. It will help you align partnerships to sales and drive action with them in the background as partner teams do more of the strategic work and planning. Instead of needing to be the one to prompt sellers and send messages to get them to engage partners ad-hoc, you can surface information for sellers at the right time in order to enable them to use partners themselves. AKA the dream of all partner teams. I don't even work for Superglue!

Automations are good to increase productivity but don't be scared to break some things along the way that will help you discover new ways to support your partners. Partner management goes through maturity journey, and what works at one stage doesn't work at the next stage. This is not set it and forget it

The best start to gain CLARITY and FOCUS in any partner program is to account map with Reveal to get insights - including the free version. Then, leverage automation tools using the data that you push from your overlaps in Reveal, to your CRM (along with other intent-signal data) with tools like Superglue. Consider leveraging partner data as another source of intelligence to inform outreach, demoing, and how your sellers craft your pitch. This includes any outreach + marketing software they are using (ie. include partner mentions in prospecting emails, customer marketing, etc.). What are you waiting for!?

Partnerships automation has many facets because the business needs vary based on personas. For instance, Vendors’ internal teams might be looking to automate their partnerships operational stuff, whereas vendors’ partners might be looking to a seamless onboarding journey, find new ways to increase their top-line, and access the right information at the right time for their prospects. Thus, creating a stakeholder mapping should become the stepping stone towards partnership automation, followed by the tool selection. In the end, If you are looking to meet these needs, you should explore a comprehensive next-gen PRM tools like Mindmatrix.

Can we really automate human relationships ? Tools can help understand key infos faster, automate payment or report, but partnerships will never thrive on automate relationships !

Just remember the 'how' > the 'what'. All the tools in the world thrown out there without proper time invested in overall design/configuration (incl. back to CRM) will defeat every last bit of efficiency that could have been gained, and create more dirty data to boot.