The Power of Partner Automation Tools for Business Growth
The challenge: maintaining revenue growth with limited resources. In today's uncertain economic climate, companies are facing budget cuts, hiring freezes, and staff reductions. The IT department is under pressure to reduce licensing costs and overall spend, making it difficult to maintain revenue growth with limited resources. So, how do you grow revenue for the business with shrinking resources? The answer comes to partner automation tools, as I’ll explore in this post.
In this post, I’ll cover:
- How to leverage partnerships for growth
- The benefits of partner automation tools
- Best practices for successful partner programs
The solution: Leveraging partnerships
Enter the partner: the trusted local expert who can help companies expand their reach and drive sales. Partnerships have long been a cornerstone of business growth, and in times of economic uncertainty, they are more important than ever.
According to Jay McBain, channel resilience continues to shine through market uncertainty, indicating that indirect sales continue to play a huge role in business growth. In his recent example shared on LinkedIn, he highlights the direction Tupperware has made to ignite an indirect sales strategy to alleviate its shortcomings. It’s evident that in the end partner programs remain more cost-effective and productive than a direct sales team alone.
But—adding a partner program alone won’t scale, enable, and motivate partners with the same resource constraints and it doesn’t make sense to just hire more channel account managers (CAMs) or marketing team members.
So, how do you leverage partnerships effectively in these circumstances?
The benefits of partner automation tools
Enter partner automation tools, the ultimate sidekick to your partners. Automation is here to stay, and it continues to be a competitive driver that allows you and your partners to accomplish the most important tasks at hand.
According to Forbes, salespeople spend only about 35% of their time on actual selling activities. The rest is spent on non-sales activities, such as administrative tasks. Why would you have your highest-valued talent doing administrative work when their time could be better spent recruiting and enabling your top priority partners?
Automated partner management tools help with administrative tasks like deal registration, training, and incentives, freeing up your partners to focus on building relationships and closing deals. By automating these tasks, your CAMs can spend more time on strategic growth initiatives, maximizing the value of their time and expertise.
Realizing results: Best practices for successful partner programs
Partner automation tools can uplevel long-tail partners by 5%, 10%, or even 20%, which can have a significant impact on a company's bottom line. And as a result, ROI on these tools can be 3X, 5X, or even as much as 15x in a short period of time.
Industry experts agree that partner automation tools are essential for companies looking to scale their partner programs and grow their revenue.
As companies look for ways to maximize their sales potential, partnering with local organizations can be a game-changer. As someone who works with the industry’s best partnership teams and partner programs, I look forward to continuing to share the best practices that these top-level organizations are implementing to realize these big results.
At Impartner, our goal is not to give you a platform or a tool but to provide you with the outcomes listed above. Book a demo today if you’d like to learn more about how you can better utilize your limited time, resources, and dollars to supercharge growth.