Partner Portal and Lead Management: Two Peas in a Pod

For organizations selling through the channel, it is essential to make sure the indirect sales force—i.e., channel partners—has the tools it needs to drive revenue growth. To accomplish this, vendors that depend on partners to drive sales growth must provide lead management capabilities via their partner portal.

Partner portals have been around since the dawn of Internet—almost 30 years ago. Lead management became a core focus for most vendors around the same time. However, the tools necessary for dynamic lead management within the partner portal haven’t been available for channel-based organizations until recently.

While there has been a proliferation of various lead management capabilities for direct sales, those same capabilities have been relatively limited for partner-based sales. Many vendors have made considerable investments in developing their partner portal, but until recently most haven’t bothered to look for integrated solutions where lead management is an integral part of the partner portal. That scenario is changing rapidly, however.

A few years ago, partner relationship management (PRM) software providers like ZINFI began to introduce fully integrated lead management and partner portal capabilities whereby a vendor can set up a fully dynamic lead generation and management program.

While lead management has been a core capability for years for most CRM vendors, so far very few PRM vendors have been able to master this capability. ZINFI has broken this barrier. It has introduced purpose-built, easy-to-use lead management capabilities that fully integrate with all the necessary features of a partner portal. And this includes seamless integration with major CRM providers like Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and Zoho.

Any state-of-the-art partner portal today offers features for documents management, asset management, marketing campaigns, incentives and various other components related to a channel program. However, if the partner portal is to be a true destination site for the partner base, it must also offer lead management capabilities that are fully integrated with these other software modules.

We see it every day: Organizations deploying state-of-the-art partner portals with integrated lead management capabilities are benefiting significantly from the impact of this integrated usage model. Their partners are able not only to efficiently process leads  vendors provide but also generate demand on their own—and vendors are able to easily keep track of the entire process.