Partner Portal Best Practices To Improve The Experience

By: Ellen Linkenhoker, Channel Partner Solutions Leader

Is your partner portal experience as good as it could be? Revitalize your partner portals, and partners will thank you with increased engagement and business with the brand.

There’s no shortage of partner portals in the world of channel programs. It often seems like every core channel framework piece has its own dedicated portal, whether it’s for Channel Management (PRM), Channel Marketing (TCMA, Asset Management), Learning & Training (LMS) or Incentives (CIM).

And yet, two-thirds of partners report they are disappointed with the portals they use most often, especially with the lack of personalization.

Are your partner portals personalized to make them easy to use and relevant to specific roles?

If your portals are one-size-fits-most solutions, chances are the partners they’re supposed to be helping find the portals to be pain points instead of solutions.

If your portals are already personalized, you can still improve them to capture and maintain partner mindshare. And an improved experience will make for happier partners who want to work with you. Digging into both industry research and our findings from client work, we’ve identified some best practices for partner portals that promote a positive partner experience.

Enhance the Channel Partner Experience With Partner Portal Best Practices

We recommend shifting from basic partner portals to customizable partner engagement hubs, which focus on partners’ needs. The best practices for any partner portal can be grouped into three key categories:

1. Integration and SSO

2. Communication and Progress Tracking

3. Support and Recognition

Here’s how the three categories work together in an effective partner engagement hub.

1INTEGRATION & SSO

One of the best first actions to create customizable partner engagement hubs is to pull together elements of various portals for a better user experience. Start by thinking about hierarchy and where you want partners to connect to the brand and partner program. Decide where they should enter the portal and make that the homepage (or the main portal access point).

Consider segmenting by role because each partner type might not need (or even want) the same info on the homepage. Decide if it works best to give different types of roles special access to their most used tools. Here’s an example you could follow with your own role types or personas:

Main Portal Access Point

> Revenue

> Sales Goals

Sales Reps

> Personal Income

> Customer Impact

Marketing Roles

Service & Support

> Brand

> Marketing

> Implementation

> Support

> Service

The hard part about strictly segmenting portals by role is that sometimes a partner needs to access elements from other areas. You can make connecting simpler through a single sign-on (SSO) and widgets on the homepage. Then partners can quickly move between landing pages and get where they need to go.

Adding widgets to homepages and creating an SSO can only go so far though. Multiple widgets, for example, can become difficult to use (especially in SaaS implementations, which are good at bringing forward particular functions but not so good at sharing space when channel tech elements stack together). This is where a specialized partner portal, such as a partner engagement hub or partner experience platform (PXP), comes in handy.

What is a Partner Experience Platform (PXP)?

A partner experience platform (PXP) is a portal that aggregates all the technology and resources channel partners need to be successful.

> Agreements

> Planning

> Rebates

> Incentives (SPIFs, Promotions, Contests)

> Support Materials

> Training

> MDF

> Marketing Assets TCMA Portal

> Product & Service Information

> Training

> Certification

Learning & Readiness Portal

It is often personalized to specific audiences and designed to empower them in their roles through elements like SSO and user-friendly interfaces. A partner engagement hub is similar to a PXP, but it also focuses on building a better partner experience.

By focusing on the partner experience, a partner engagement hub allows you to take the best pieces from every portal and pull them together (with true SSO) to make customizable homepages that are relevant and useful for all partners, even the roles inside those organizations that support your joint go-to-market (GTM) strategies.

We helped one of our Fortune 100 insurance clients consolidate their disparate channel technologies into one portal with SSO.

This engagement hub was used across three distinct audiences (and could even be scaled for more). With all information in one place, the agents and internal support teams gained the ability to have an overall view of program progress, to track ongoing certification and education efforts, and to redeem earned points and marketing credits.

As you make changes, conduct user testing in the hub to ensure the right elements are front and center for each role, partner type and region (global preferences matter a lot when improving the partner experience).