Enhancing Partner Onboarding With PRM

What Is Partner Onboarding?

Partner onboarding is the first step in setting up a PRM program. It is essential to set up with complete partner profile with correct classification and structure to enable the partner program to operate efficiently. Organizations invest time and resources to scan the right partners, market the program benefits, and recruit them to the partner network. Partner onboarding consists of a few essential steps:

• Identifying and validating partners who are qualified to be the right channel partner for the brand
• Assessing and validating the potential to fit the long-term partner strategy of the organization
• Collecting profile information to ensure audit compliance
• Proof of documentation for KYC qualification
• Completing necessary contracts and legal documentation to comply with regulatory or industry-specific requirements

A robust B2B partner onboarding process helps all partners comply with the required quality standards to join a PRM program. To initiate a PRM program, you will require following details for the onboarding process:

• Partner eligibility
• Partner profile
• Program requirements
• Program benefits
• Program terms and conditions

Challenges Faced During Partner Onboarding

Many organizations do not have structured and organized processes to onboard partners to join a PRM program. This creates subsequent operational and management challenges for the PRM program. Organizations face one or more of the following issues while onboarding partners:

• Unclean Partner data
• Data comes from multiple sources
• Partner details are outdated.

Besides data-related issues, it is essential to ensure the partner registers the right contacts in the partner account. They include partner account owners, administrators, sales, marketing, and support staff of the partner organization.

Managing a large partner base geographically spread can be a complex process.

Partners expect the onboarding experience to be easy and quick. They prefer it to be automated, their privacy respected, and they can personalize their preferences, e.g., frequency of communications, mode of contacts, and type of content they like.

PRM Enhances Partner Onboarding

A well-designed PRM program can help manage these onboarding activities at scale using tools and services to ensure that only clean and qualified partners are onboarded to the PRM program. This saves time and effort for both the organization and partners and helps improve the partner experience and satisfaction. In addition, the partner onboarding process establishes the initial trust level by assuring that the organization will manage and maintain the long-term privacy and security of the relationship the partner has opted for. Partner onboarding is a continuous process. Therefore, it is essential to establish clear KPIs of onboarding activity from time to time. PRM programs can incorporate these KPIs to help track and measure onboarding performance.