5 Ways to Drive Prospecting Using Your PRM Tool

The purpose of a channel is to drive sales, and this is where multi-partner prospecting programs can enable an organization selling through the channel globally to scale quickly. Your partner relationship management (PRM) tool can play a very important role in this effort. In this article, we will explore briefly how a PRM tool can help you recruit partners into a prospecting program, train them with the right tools and approaches, enable them with demand generation kits and then reward them for building your sales pipeline.

Your PRM tool should have distinct process automation capabilities that allow you to recruit and onboard partners, and then train them on various aspects of your channel programs, particularly prospecting programs. Once you have recruited and trained them, the next focus needs to be on making sure they are capable of driving leads and closing sales. This is another area where your PRM tool needs to be very robust.

Most PRM tools in the marketplace tend to focus only one or two aspects of partner management. However, there are providers like ZINFI who provide end-to-end management. When you are looking at a prospecting program, be certain your PRM tool can go above and beyond in partner recruitment, onboarding and training.

Once you have recruited and onboarded your partners, it is important that you load up your PRM tool with a comprehensive set of marketing campaigns that the partners can use for prospecting. In other articles, we have discussed how to drive partner adoption with horizontal campaigns. This is the right starting point. You should load up as many horizontal campaigns into your PRM tool as you think your partners will use.

However, once you have built up some marketing “muscle” by running prospecting programs quarter after quarter, you can also begin to provide niche campaigns. These campaigns can be tailored to smaller segments of the channel for alignment with current business objectives.

Once the partners are recruited, trained, and enabled with marketing campaigns, the next most important step is to run the prospecting program over a period. Use your PRM tool to communicate to partners when the prospecting day or period begins or ends.

Companies that run prospecting initiatives successfully tend to run them over a couple of months every quarter, and then they celebrate success on a specific day of each quarter. On this day of celebration, you will want to hand out awards. Your PRM tool should be configured for these activities, and it should be able to track them in a very dynamic way. You can use your PRM tool to promote activities to partners participating in the program. More importantly, you can also use it to engage partners outside the program to bring them into the fold over multiple quarters.

The purpose of a prospecting program is to scale multi-partner demand generation. We have repeatedly seen from our client base that the organizations that take a multi-quarter approach—and leverage their PRM tool to drive partner recruitment, onboarding, training, demand generation and rewards—can quickly build a formidable demand generation and sales initiative by using PRM tools and prospecting programs. In fact, this is probably the most effective way to engage partners, drive results, celebrate success and, of course, scale globally.