Choosing a PRM or Tracking Setup (Sunir Shah, CEO of AppBind)
** If you are not interested in cookie-based 'affiliate' tracking links in your program (there are good reasons why not to bother with these as Sunir mentions), and you are on a tight budget for this program, check out our Airtable PRM - it's very simple, but has what you need to get the job done:
https://airtable.com/embed/shrW96BNcmE87rBBx?backgroundColor=purple
Password: partnerprograms
Intro:
Instructor: Sunir Shah, CEO of AppBind and President of the Cloud Software Association
Takeaways
- What justifies using a PRM vs an Affiliate Tracking-Only vs CRM (UTM-based) solution
- Issues and expenses around channel conflict and payouts
- Who we suggest looking into for various budgets/needs
- Pros and cons of each tool we reviewed
Greatest hits
- Working with sales: Channel conflict with sales, CRM integration
- Referral links, landing pages, lead registration portals, mobile referral link tracking
- Multiple commission structures for multiple partner programs
- Payouts
- Globalization: language localization, payouts, taxes
- Partner enablement
- Email them
- Integrate with your ESP
- Collateral storage
- Reselling
- Billing
- Provisioning
- Account management
- Account transfer
- Access to partner network. Who are they? How big? What marketing opportunities?
Potential issues if you do not use a third party to track partners:
IF YOU DO NOT INVEST ENOUGH CAUTION:
E.g. payouts = overpaying partners because of the lack of tracking
- Highly-complex systems over multiple partner types
- No central attribution system
- Double commission
- Excel user errors
- Being pressured into compensating two partners for the same client
- Pull a report > send to finance >> payouts. No checks/balances and huge disconnect between
IF YOU OVER-INVEST
Anxiety of your bosses over finances...
Anxiety from your agencies over your team trying to force them into your expensive system...
Crawl, Walk Run Partner Management Stack
- Use your CRM + Sheets + UTMs
- Affiliate tracking - leaddyno, tapfiliate, ambassador
- PRM with referral links, commissions, payouts - PartnerStack, PartnerPortal.io, Allbound, Impact.
- Scaling to enterprise (adding brand/integration and co-selling partners) - Workspan, AppDirect, Crossbeam, Allbound…