“Kiflo has been a game changer for our partner engagement.”
The International Development Academy (IDA) provides a comprehensive academy experience for aspiring youth soccer players. With locations in the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, and the United States, determined student-athletes of all levels can experience individualized soccer and educational pathways at professional-grade sports facilities and schools.
IDA’s partner programs focus on collaborating with:
- High schools, colleges, and universities within the USA and abroad
- Education agencies
- Brand ambassadors
- Football businesses
- Football agents
- Clubs and federations
- Private International Academies
These partners are chosen because they all operate differently within the market, and have unique access to IDA’s target markets. By designing the program in this way, Rick and his team can collaborate effectively with multiple channels within the industry, ensuring both the students' and the Academy’s success.
PRMs are not the most common thing in the sports business industry., as it is typically more common in the SaaS industry. But Rick’s journey to a PRM platform started a decade ago when he took over a partner program for a very large company, which manually managed 200 to 300 partners with email and traditional CRM.
Rick realized immediately that the limited internal systems in place—especially for a program of that size—weren’t cutting it. When he started with IDA, he vowed he would never do that kind of manual management again.
"I started the partner program from scratch. So, the first thing I said was, we're going to do this thing the right way, and we're going to lay the right foundation. We need all of these things in place if we're going to scale and grow properly."
Rick focused on the following strategy when first moving the partner program to Kiflo’s platform:
- Build succinct programs and tiers
- Execute the integration between Kiflo and HubSpot with the help of Kiflo’s partner, CoMantis
- Set up affiliate links and rewards
- Train partners on how to use the partner portal
- Establish an effective partner onboarding program
- Create plug-and-play partner marketing assets and strategies
“I didn't really know PRM existed until honestly jumping into this new role and doing some research. I found programs that are like $25,000, $30,000 a year for the big box companies. I eventually landed on Kiflo because it was better suited and priced for startups. The rest is history because the more I learned and the more I tried, the more it felt right and easy to build something tailored to our needs.”
Kiflo’s customizable features have allowed Rick to build IDA’s partner program in a way that works best for his company's specific needs and industry.
Here’s how:
Organizing Partnership Structures
“Being able to give our partners the proper care based on the specific partner types has been a game changer. Some partnerships are focused on referrals and need certain tools and resources. Other partnerships require more comprehensive support like sales and marketing support, full training, integration with their digital platforms, etc. The ability to adapt to the needs of a specific partner allows us to maintain a partner-centric model, which is a big differentiator for us in the sports and education industry."
Increased Partner Engagement
“With Kiflo’s capabilities, I can follow up with a partner and say, ‘Hey, this was your performance this month,’ or “Hey, how are you doing? It's been a couple of weeks. Just want to let you know you’ve had 100 people use your affiliate link in the last couple of weeks. Great job. What are you doing? What are you doing differently?’"
“Having that kind of access to partner engagement is rare in our industry unless you're looking at HubSpot marketing, but no one managing a partner system is typically a marketing person at heart or by profession, at least in our space. So, that data is beneficial for increasing engagement. You guys bring that to the table for us, and it's been tremendous.”
