Channel Partner Portal
Because your channel partner portal serves as the entry point for partners to access content and tools to grow their business, it’s critical that it meet all your needs.
Channeltivity’s partner portal software has everything you need to run a successful channel. Our flexible platform can be easily customized to reflect your brand, populated with content, and configured with the correct permissions. The result is a self-service portal where channel partners can access content, training, and sales and marketing tools to grow their business selling your products.
What does Our Partner Portal Software Include?
Channeltivity’s partner portal is the main way your partners access all the modules that are part of our partner relationship management software. In addition, it includes content management tools to create personalized pages and dashboards, customize the branding and UI of your portal, and securely embed external applications. Powerful administration controls allow you to manage user access and permissions.
Gateway to Channel Management
All the partner-facing components of your channel program are accessed through the partner portal included in our software. These partner relationship management modules include deal registration, training & certification, lead distribution, joint marketing fund management to name a few (full list here).
Portal Content Management
Channeltivity’s content management tools make it easy to create compelling, personalized partner experiences. Our platform makes it easy to organize and share content on pages and through our separate library and co-branded collateral modules.
User-Friendly Page Builder
Use our drag-and-drop page builder to create pages using a library of predefined and customizable widgets. Whether you’re designing your ideal partner portal home page or building dashboards or promotional pages, our widgets give you the power and flexibility to create what you want. And if your needs exceed the dozens of pre-built widgets, you can build your own using HTML and JavaScript.
Personalized Content
Greet your partners by name and present them with custom-tailored content when they log into your portal. You can personalize page content with messages that pull from the partner’s profile and display any field or data. Setting permissions for individual widgets allows creating dynamic pages that show different content depending on who’s viewing the page.
Partner Portal Design
As a representation of your company, the partner portal needs to reflect your brand style guide, logo, and color scheme. In Channeltivity, you can customize the look and feel, adding your logo, adjusting global colors used throughout the portal, and inserting design elements to the header and login page.
User Administration and Partner Profile Management
As the administrator of your portal, you have control over your partners and their data. Define profile fields, partner regions, groups and permissions. Invite new partners to access your portal and analyze activity using our built-in reporting tools.
Powerful Permissions
Channeltivity’s access permissions functionality is straightforward, yet powerful and scalable, allowing you to adjust access controls based on your partner program needs.
Self-Service
Channeltivity’s partner portal is full of features to make managing large channel programs a breeze. Users can request accounts, reset their own passwords, and invite their colleagues themselves, minimizing administrative overhead. Channeltivity also reduces time wasted sending out materials that may or may not be relevant to your partners. With a self-service portal solution, your partners are empowered to quickly find the information they need, giving you back valuable time to focus on more strategically working with partners to grow your business.
Secure Embedding and Integrating of External Apps
Integrate your in-house software into your Channeltivity partner portal with easy embedding and integration capabilities. Support for the popular single sign-on standard SAML and well-documented API and iframe embedding functionality makes it easy to present partners a unified portal experience.
What Sets our Portal Apart?
There are many partner portal solutions out there and they each have their benefits and drawbacks. Channeltivity stands out in three areas:
Easily Configurable
Our partner portal software can be set up and configured by a non-technical person. While we include implementation calls to walk you through the settings and advise you on best practices, it’s perfectly possible for channel managers to set up and properly configure Channeltivity. In fact, many times customers have already configured everything before our implementation call. And our friendly support team is always there to help if needed.
Personalized Experience
Channeltivity makes it easy to personalize the portal experience for each partner and each user, making a winning first impression. Create stronger relationships by customizing your channel portal with your partner’s logo, and content specific to their program, geography, or role.
Efficient Management
We really like software that makes our job easy and we think channel managers do as well. Our user interface is straightforward and easy to use, designed for getting lots done in little time. High tech companies have been using our partner portals since 2007 to run their channel programs, and we’ve been able to implement a lot of time-saving and helpful functionality in that time.
What is Key Functionality Found in Partner Portals?
The main purpose of a partner portal is to make it easy for your resellers to get what they need to sell your product. As a result, the most important functionality is geared to achieve this purpose.
Key partner portal functionality can be grouped into the following three buckets:
- Partner Enablement, including training, certification and joint business planning
- Channel Marketing, including sharing content (in a library, or co-branded marketing materials) , MDF, and email marketing
- Channel Sales, including deal registration, referrals, and lead distribution (also with distributors)
The details of what you need depend on your company, channel strategy, program maturity and partner base.
Another important element is being able to integrate your partner portal with your CRM, like HubSpot or Salesforce. Keeping your data up-to-date and synchronized saves tons of time and allows for better reporting.
Am I Ready For a Portal?
There’s no easy answer for every situation, but here are few thoughts:
- If you have a successful, growing channel program and are falling behind responding to partner requests, then YES. You probably needed a partner portal months ago.
- If you have a partner program that’s in its early stages, then your portal readiness depends a lot on your company’s commitment to the channel. Partner programs require investment. It takes effort to bring on new partners and train them, create program guides and marketing materials, and process deal registrations and MDF requests. A partner portal can help you manage and automate some of the work of running a partner program. But there needs to be an organization-wide commitment to the channel to be successful. Setting up a partner portal is not enough. Read more about staffing your program.
- If you’re launching a new program, do you get your partner portal and everything ready before you sign your first partner? Or do you workshop your channel processes with a few select partners until you figure out what works and then bring on a portal to scale? You’ll need to weigh the pros and cons with your team.
How Do You Pick a Partner Portal?
We’ve been working on this question for a while and have a number of handy resources for you, each with a brief summary:
- Checklist for Buying a Channel Partner Portal Software Solution → Everything to think about when purchasing a partner portal.
- What Is a Self-Service PRM? → Make sure your partner portal is easy to manage and doesn’t require lots of manpower to update.
- PRM cost: What you may be missing → Similar to the previous article, but viewed through the lens of costs.