Using Technology to Manage Your Sales Channels: The Tech Stack

Many manufacturers of products have both an internal sales team and use outside salespeople.  Most often called Channel Partners these non-employee sales forces often come in the shape of distributors, manufacturers representatives, and resellers.  

A manufacturer’s representative is most often selling many different products. Manufacturers must compete for channel partner attention and the way to get attention is through incentives and product knowledge training.   There are several different platforms that can be used to manage the Channel Partner relationship.   At the top of the TECH STACK is a platform called a Partner Relationship Management System (PRM).  An example of a PRM is a platform called ImPartner. Often the manufacturers inside sales department uses a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics to manage leads and opportunities.  But the top PRM’s do a lot more than just integrate with the CRM, they generally provide a plethora of features to help manage the Channel Partner Relationship.  First and foremost is providing a branded sub platform for each sales channel.  Here the manufacturer will present incentive programs and educational programs.  Providing outside salespeople with product knowledge is most important so some manufacturers invest solely on a learning platform.  Certifying that each salesperson knows the product via testing is an important feature.   Some manufacturers also turn to a learning management system (LMS) for communicating with partners.    

It helps if this learning platform is purposely built for managing and educating channel partners.  Learning analyst John Leh has written extensively about the Channel Partner LMS, and calls it the extended LMS.  John Leh is a big proponent of using a separate learning platform for distributors, resellers, franchisees, and other non-employees.  He cautions against trying to use a system built for human resource compliance training of employees.