Two Leading Practices For Partner Portal Management

Two important leading practices for partner portal management are the strategic concern for the 80/20/80 rule and the doing the pre-work. These are important for the development and management of channels and trade promotions.

Do the Pre-Work
What exactly is the pre-work? Simply put, it is the measurement of the factors and elements that will affect one's business before one proceeds with actions and transactions to start that engine. One can think of
construction in this process, workers will have to measure materials twice before they cut it so that they can avoid wasteful mistakes. Thus, one should measure the capabilities of the competition, the dimensions of the market, and the reliability of the channel partners. This information will help one execute one's plans perfectly.

What are the things one should focus on in the pre-work? First of all, the major events happening in the market should be known. One should also know how the current program holds itself against the competing ones or other similar programs and how can the parent company uses be improved in light of this. Finally, one should ask what segments make up the pipeline portal network and how effective these segments are individually. Researching this requires time and teamwork. The executive management, the staff in the field, the sales people, and also the company partner portals themselves should be involved.

Doing pre-work should also involve a study of current laws as well as the other resources and factors that will be involved or that will affect any actions and plans that have to do with managing the channel cloud. Developing one's cloud will inevitably be affected by many details that might not be easy to spot. The financial department or the CPA of the company would also be a good resource for advice regarding these things since all the accounting expenses and transactions as well as the revenue trends will have to be considered when doing some refocusing on the expenditure allocation for the company programs.


The 80/20/80 Rule
This rule, for those who are not aware, means that eighty percent of the company's revenue is created by a mere twenty percent of the company's partners who themselves spend eighty percent of the accumulated funds from the MDF. This rule has a big impact on one's business. It basically shows one that not all of the company's pipelines produce the same results and some might be lagging behind rapidly.

Because of this, one should not give each and every segment the very same programs since some programs may be wasteful for some channels that produce less. Not all programs will fit since not all segments are equals. The best thing to do is to have each of them get trade promotion programs or a combination of them that would really fit their level of productivity. And of course, to know which partner portal is getting producing and which are not, one should do the pre-work as was already mentioned in the first part above. Thus, these two leading practices are intertwined.