Introducing Portal 2.0

More advanced vendors and manufacturers are achieving improved partner communication and sales and marketing reporting by implementing Portal 2.0, according to SiriusDecisions. The brief, titled: The Evolution to Partner Portal 2.0, revealed that these technologies “offer a mutual benefit to both vendors and partners” in the following key areas:

1. Creating demand: Tools to select and execute marketing campaigns. Marketing libraries also are being utilized by best-in-class organizations.

2. Driving adoption: The business requirements for the portals, such as ensuring content assets are easily accessible for organizations. However, the issues is organizations have their own CRM systems, or simply don’t make the systems a priority
3. Assisting buyers: Help partners create leads and make finding partners easier. For example, utilizing partners showcases, “where to buy” functionality and relevancy rankings and customer reviews to drive end-users to suitable solutions.

4. Influencing partner behavior: Leveraging points, and other rewards to step beyond standard incentive management, and improve sales results among partners.

5. Managing opportunities: Pipeline reporting and lead distribution, tracking, scoring and deal registration, and integration with marketing automation platforms.

6. Building knowledge: Aligns content and process by making content accessible to partners based on their target audiences, specific pain points, and specific stages of the buyers journey.

“One of our recommended planning assumptions for 2013 is that suppliers are putting an ever-increasing emphasis on the portal, but as a result, these portals have become cumbersome and suffer from a lack of adoption from channel partners,” Gonzalez said. “One way companies are dealing with this is to create a portal wrapper approach, when one application creates the front-door to other applications, such as opportunity management, MDF management and even access to marketing repository. That’s the leading best practice.”

• adoption
• brief
• buyers journey
• CRM
• demand generation
• marketing education
• opportunity managment
• partner behavior
• partner relationship management
• portal 2.0
• PRM
• SiriusDecisions