Introduction
Some best practices for a deal registration in a partner program are:
- Determine objectives for your business
- Highlight the benefits of your deal registration
- Onboard partners without too many tedious steps
- Keep your deal registration flow user-friendly
- Bring it together in one seamless system
Involving the internal sales team in achieving business objectives and managing deal registrations can help streamline processes and reduce conflicts.
… and they all enhance your business development efforts!
Setting up a successful deal registration program as part of a partner program delivers multiple benefits to your business. It builds trust and increases partner loyalty, enhances collaboration, eliminates conflicts, allows you to measure progress, and creates a seamless partner ecosystem.
One of the most challenging elements is implementing your deal registration process to ensure maximum benefits to you and your partners. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Each company is unique and their deal registration requirements should reflect this.
Clear guidelines are essential in setting objectives and KPIs for partners, ensuring transparency and fairness.
To deliver a successful program, there are 5 best practices to follow:
1. Determine Objectives for Your Business
It is important to set everything up for partners to support your goals, but do you have a clear vision of your company’s opportunities and objectives?
“Without a plan, even the most brilliant business can get lost. You need to have goals, create milestones and have a strategy in place to set yourself up for success.” Yogi Berra
Supporting companies to achieve goals through smart objectives and measurable KPIs is the foundation for dealing with registration programs. A tailored
A business plan allows you to optimize your sales strategy and achieve your key results through integrated sales objectives. Incentive programs can also play a crucial role in motivating partners to achieve these objectives.
You can apply key targets by setting up objectives on your deal registration platform to facilitate how partners register deals. These can be deals declared and won, revenue generated, or any custom objectives you want to achieve. Rewarding partners for meeting these targets can significantly enhance their motivation and performance.
Lead generation is crucial for your sales process. As part of your business strategy, you can also optimize lead generation by setting performance measures around things like webinars hosted or trade shows attended to ensure partners use every opportunity to capture leads.
By determining your company's key goals and opportunities, you can set clear objectives and KPIs. This gives partners visibility over their lead requests and performance, allowing them to achieve their goals with the best possible outcome while maintaining visibility on key acquisition channels. Vendors play a critical role in managing and communicating the benefits of the reward program, ensuring transparency and trust.
2. Highlight the Benefits of Your Deal Registration
While partners may understand the value of deal registration within their own sales process, do they know the benefits that come with your partner program?
A best practice in deal registration is to set up rewards or discounts that motivate your partners to generate more revenue for your business. Leverage financial incentives and price protection to drive excitement, build further trust and respect, and help deliver optimal results from partners. During the onboarding process, partners can quickly submit their deal registrations through an online portal, ensuring a smooth and efficient registration process.
Whatever business you’re in, companies center around people. By investing in them, they will invest back into your company, be more productive, and produce higher results.
Use an automated Reward Program to help manage commissions based on a fixed amount or percentage of deals your partners secure. A reward program can keep your partner motivated because they can track their earned commission and payments through one platform.
To ensure the reward program is an effective tool, communicate the benefits, how much they can earn, and what they need to do to be rewarded. Partner users play a crucial role in managing deal registrations and onboarding, as they have specific responsibilities and permissions to create, edit, or view deal registrations based on their role and company affiliation.
Here's a little tip: Check out your competitors’ reward programs… Can you offer partners something more attractive? If so, make sure you mention this in your marketing!
3. Make Partner Onboarding a Breeze
With trust and loyalty being one of the biggest benefits of deal registration, good onboarding needs to be established from the get-go. Start by doing your research on your ideal partner companies and gain an understanding of what their key business interests are.
Approach the onboarding process by considering their needs, not just your own.
Onboarding is a vital part of setting your partners up for success and to make them ready to sell your product. Many partnerships fail because companies haven’t clearly defined goals and processes behind their onboarding experience as well as for the deal registration requirements.
By setting up a structured onboarding for new partners—one that focuses on what they need to start acquiring results—you are enabling partners to transition into operation mode quickly!
Knowing that companies won’t have the time or operational support to onboard their partners, Kiflo has built-in Partner Onboarding as part of all programs you create in the suite, where you can manage the progress of your partners and have full visibility over their onboarding.
4. Keep Your Deal Registration Flow User-Friendly
Your partners are managing numerous deals, messages, and leads every day. Keeping things simple is key to having engaged partners that will constantly update their deal status.
Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platforms should be 2 things:
- Easy to use
- Focused on leads and deals
Creating deals, entering information, and tracking progress doesn’t need to be overcomplicated.
Your partners can't justify a huge amount of time spent on updating their progress; it just won't cut it for them. When things are simple to use, your partners will be happy to send over more leads and register more deals, as long as they have flexibility in the program to do so.
An effective deal registration platform should help manage the status of a deal and support the collaboration between you and the partner. Use a Partner Portal to provide the latest information and tools to manage their leads and deals, and increase partner engagement.
5. Bring it Together in One Seamle3. Make Partner Onboarding a Breeze
Trust and loyalty are among the biggest benefits of deal registration, so good onboarding needs to be established from the start. Start by researching your ideal partner companies and gaining an understanding of their key business interests, including their focus on new business.
Approach the onboarding process by considering their needs, not just your own.
Onboarding is vital to setting your partners up for success and making them ready to sell your product. Many partnerships fail because companies haven’t clearly defined the goals and processes behind their onboarding experience and deal registration requirements. Tracking deal registration status is crucial for managing deals effectively, as it helps understand the specific actions that different roles can take based on the current status of a deal registration.
By setting up a structured onboarding for new partners—one that focuses on what they need to start acquiring results—you are enabling partners to transition into operation mode quickly!
Knowing that companies won’t have the time or operational support to onboard their partners, Kiflo has built-in Partner Onboarding as part of all programs you create in the suite, where you can manage the progress of your partners and have full visibility over their onboarding. The sales team plays a crucial role in supporting and managing deal registrations, ensuring that partners are well-integrated and competitive dynamics are effectively managed.
4. Keep Your Deal Registration Flow User-Friendly
Your partners manage numerous deals, messages, and leads every day. Keeping things simple is key to having engaged partners who constantly update their deal status.
Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platforms should be 2 things:
- Easy to use
- Focused on leads and deals
Creating deals, entering information, and tracking progress doesn’t need to be overcomplicated. Visibility into the sales pipeline is crucial for effective deal management, as it allows for better forecasting and productivity.
Your partners can’t justify spending a lot of time updating their progress; it just won’t cut it for them. When things are simple to use, your partners will be happy to send over more leads and register more deals, as long as they have flexibility in the program to do so.
An effective deal registration platform should help manage a deal's status and support collaboration between you and the partner. Use a Partner Portal to provide the latest information and tools to manage leads and discounts and increase partner engagement. Additionally, specifying edit access for roles like Partner Sales Representatives and Partner Sales Managers is crucial for efficiently managing deal registrations within the system.
5. Bring it Together in One Seamless System
From partner onboarding, deal management, and reward programs, there’s much to think about with partner management. The key is to bring it all together in one, easy-to-use system. Offering a variety of capabilities for your partners is great. However, if the features don’t talk to each other, you won’t be able to effectively manage and track your outcomes.
For example, by setting up your deal registration you can ensure your deals are being treated by the right partner, securing the lead for him to avoid any channel conflicts, and with the internal ability for you to accept or refuse the deal. This protects partner leads, enhances vendor visibility into the sales pipeline, and streamlines administrative processes for a better partner experience. Once the partner receives approval, off they go to pursue the deal. Integrating these Deal Management features lets you get all the data on that deal and its progress.
Once the deal is complete, after the approval process, the reward program feature will automatically reward the partner based on the commission amount you set, without you having to lift a finger. It’s all about creating a deal registration process flow, where all of your features, people, and partners work together seamlessly and better enable your company to scale. Transparent and fair criteria in the deal registration process are crucial to maintaining partner trust and reducing channel conflict.
Deal Registration Supports Your Business Goals
Applying deal registration best practices leads to a seamless partner program, a system designed to drive positive financial outcomes and grow your business network.
With a partner relationship management platform like Kiflo, you can build partner confidence and loyalty, set up successful ongoing relationships, create harmony between partners, and keep your sales objectives and targets on track. Don't wait—book a demo now.
