(A PSG Classic – Originally Published February 2005)

NETTING IT OUT

Portals provide a popular way to make it easy for your channel partners—the people who sell and service your firm’s products—to do business with your firm. Today’s modern portal platforms make it relatively easy to provide account-specific, role-based access to all the information, applications, and resources that your partners need to do their jobs. Whether partner representatives need to access your latest product marketing collateral, to coordinate a co-marketing campaign promoting your products, to help a client select the right solution for his situation, to provide a competitive quote, to book an order, to renew service, to expedite delivery, and/or to troubleshoot a problem, a partner portal provides secure access and “one-stop shopping ” for all of these partner activities.

Don’t design your partner portals in a vacuum. Our customer co-design sessions have taught us that partner portals should be designed to support end customers’ most important activities first, and partners’ business processes second. If your partners can’t use their portal to service your mutual customers, it won’t be valued or used.

USING PORTALS TO SUPPORT YOUR CHANNEL PARTNERS

Partner portals are hot! Lots of companies have replaced proprietary client/server applications with Web-based extranets or partner portals. The goal is to make it easier for partners to do business with your firm.

Consider Combining Your Customer and Partner Portal Teams

As we’ve worked with companies to refine their esupport strategies for their channel partners and to develop and deploy partner portals, we’ve noticed an important critical success factor: It works best if you design your partner portals to support your end-customer portals (and the rest of your cross-channel customer self-service touchpoints).

Your customers, and the channel partners that sell to and service many of your customers, all need access to a common set of information, tools, and resources. For example, both customers and partners need easy access to product information and specifications, to decision-making tools that will help them select the most appropriate solution, to competitive comparisons, to answers to questions, to troubleshooting and diagnostic tools. While there may be differences between the information and prices that are appropriate for partners and those you’d want your end customers to see, those differences can be easily managed by using the role-based access that’s part of any portal platform.

If you have separate and distinct teams housed in different parts of your business driving your customer portals and your partner portals, you’re probably wasting valuable resources. And you’re probably not able to deliver a seamless customer experience across channels.

The Customer Lifecycle

© 2007 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.

Illustration 1a. Customer portals should support customers through all the stages in their entire lifecycle for each product or service they buy and use.

Partner Support for the Customer Lifecycle

© 2007 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.

Illustration 1b. Partner portals should make it easy for partners to support customers throughout their lifecycles.

Who Are Your Partners?

Does your company use channel partners to sell and/or service some or all of your customers? Lots of companies reach some or all of their business and/or consumer customers through channel partners.

Sometimes these partners are “captive.” They represent only one supplier’s products and services. Other times, partners sell and service products from a variety of suppliers. Your firm may have dedicated partners or independent partners.

Before we talk about how best to support your channel partners, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about the kinds of partners we’re describing. We’re talking about the business partners that represent your company and your brand to your customers. The experience customers have in dealing with your representatives reflects positively or negatively on your brand.

Some Examples of Channel Partners

There are lots of different kinds of channel partners in a variety of industries. Here are some examples:

• Insurance agents sell and service policies for insurance companies.

• Investment advisors and brokers sell financial services—from stock trades to mutual fund investments, to annuities and bonds.

• Manufacturing representatives sell equipment and supplies, often assembling all the components for complete bills of material from a variety of suppliers.

• Car dealerships sell and service vehicles.

• Farm dealers sell agricultural supplies, irrigation equipment, and tractors.

• Franchisees sell rooms in their hotels, meals in their restaurants, and tools and diagnostic equipment from their mobile showrooms.

• Value-added resellers and system integrators sell, integrate, install, and service high-tech systems and applications.

One-Tier, Two-Tier, or N-Tier Distribution Channels

Depending on the industry, many dealers, agents, brokers, or representatives purchase through distributors. Distributors typically aggregate products from many manufacturers, manage inventory, and extend credit. If a customer buys a product from a dealer that, in turn, purchases that product and finances it through a distributor, that’s considered two-tier distribution. Occasionally, a wholesaler comes into the picture, making it a three-tier distribution chain—that is, three levels of parties between the buying customer and the actual supplier of the products.

Complex Relationships Lead to Complex Requirements for Partner Support

Often, customers don’t get to choose whether they transact directly with the product supplier or with a partner that represents that brand of products. Does your company have a channel strategy that determines which products you sell directly and which products you sell through partners, to certain sets of customers, in certain markets? If so, you’re in the majority.

Selling through channel partners is not a bad thing from a customer experience standpoint. Many customers often prefer to deal with a partner that understands their particular situation or business and that provides local and/or tailored service than to deal with a large, impersonal supplier.

But lots of customers also want the option of dealing directly with the supplier. Customers often go right to the supplier’s Web site. Customers typically feel that they get more authoritative information or support—information and support they can trust—directly from the supplier.

Today’s customers typically prefer what HP refers to as a “blended channel relationship.” The customer chooses whether to buy directly or through a partner. And the same customer may make different choices in different situations.

From the supplier’s standpoint, servicing channel partners well is a complex issue. Most companies that sell through partners also sell directly. Many companies that sell directly and through one tier of channel partners may also use a two-tier distribution model for certain markets or geographies. All of this “demand chain” complexity makes it both hard to provide a seamless experience to the end customer and complicated to support channel partners well.

THE EVOLUTION OF ELECTRONIC SUPPORT FOR PARTNERS

Channel partners increasingly rely on electronic linkages with the suppliers of the products and services they sell and service. In today’s fast-moving, competitive climate, phone calls and fax machines no longer suffice. In order to compete, today’s channel partners must arm themselves with technology—from laptops at home to PDAs on the go, to their own CRM and quote-generating applications at the office. Partners don’t want to rely on mail or delivery services for needed product collateral, to retype pricing and configuration information from faxes, or to wait to get sign-off on a deal. They expect and demand 24 x 7 electronic support from the suppliers whose products and services they offer.

In the past, electronic support from suppliers to channel partners has taken a variety of forms. Let’s look at some examples.

PARTNER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (PRM) APPLICATIONS. PRM systems typically were dedicated applications very much like CRM applications, but for partners rather than end customers. Like most CRM systems, PRM applications were typically designed from the inside out—to support the account managers at the supplier who manage partner relationships. Very few PRM systems were designed for partners to use as self-service applications. PRM applications usually provide partner accounts, profile information, and order history, along with a variety of resources and tools to streamline partner-related business processes, such as libraries of current product collateral, product catalogs, configurators for complex products or bills of material, quote generators, and contractual terms and conditions. No matter how good the PRM application was, partners still had to deal with a person to get their jobs done.

PARTNER ORDER-ENTRY APPLICATIONS. Many companies have invested in applications that enable partners to log on, place orders, check order status, and get updates. Often these were client/server applications that the supplier provided to the partner (often for a fee) in order to streamline their business operations. The downside for partners that represented more than one supplier’s product line was that they often had to deal with several such systems.

PARTNER ACCESS TO CUSTOMER SUPPORT KNOWLEDGEBASE. For partners that provide support for end customers, it’s imperative to have a good pipeline to the manufacturer/supplier to be able to get quick answers to questions and/or to troubleshoot and resolve customers’ issues. Most companies now provide both phone support and online access to knowledgebases that are the same or similar to the ones they use to support their own direct end customers.

PARTNER ECOMMERCE APPLICATIONS. As companies began to move their partners’ order entry applications either online and/or to EDI, they also typically rolled out a complementary set of eenabled applications to help partners with the entire sales cycle. These partner-specific applications often included online configuration tools and quote and proposal generators. Smart companies leveraged the etools they provided to their direct sales organization—often through a CRM application or sales force automation program—by giving the same etools to their indirect sales partners.

PARTNER EXTRANETS. The Internet has been a godsend for partner support. Instead of forcing channel partners to install costly client/server systems for each supplier or application, most suppliers now offer partners access to a variety of partner-facing applications—from order entry to product collateral, to quote generation—through a secure browser-based interface. Partner extranets are the precursors to today’s partner portals. The only real difference between a partner extranet and a partner portal is the relative ease of deploying and managing partner-facing information and applications using a portal platform, and the concomitant ease of administering role-based access and entitlement permissions.

PARTNER INTEGRATION—INTEGRATION WITH PARTNERS’ SYSTEMS. Larger or more sophisticated partner organizations (such as car dealerships, hotel chains, and groups of financial advisors) typically have their own internal systems that they use to manage their businesses and to keep track of their own customers. These partners invariably want their suppliers’ information and applications to be integrated into the tools they already use to do their jobs. They don’t want to have to log on separately to their own internal systems, then log on to a distributor’s or supplier’s extranet, and try to cut and paste information between the two .

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