Partner Revenue Operations: The Key to Success in The Partnership Economy
The rules of the game have changed.
Enterprises recognize traditional sales are no longer enough to drive revenue. At this critical juncture where the competition is fierce, the need to differentiate a must and the strategies teams employ - complex. What separates successful organizations from the rest is their ability to leverage the network effect, word-of-mouth, referrals — using every relationship to uncover new opportunities and ultimately grow the business.
Bruce Cleveland, one of the foremost experts in enterprise applications, writes about the critical role of Partnerships in his article and related white paper The power of partnerships. He shares how he built a billion-dollar partner program as the Head of Alliances at Siebel, one of the main catalysts behind their acquisition by Oracle in 2005. A strategy he most recently redeployed at C3.AI en route to a successful IPO.
As partnerships, marketplaces and ecosystem-led growth become a core part of an organization’s GoToMarket strategy, the need to build operations processes to support a partner-based sale becomes essential. The level of orchestration and operational maturity required increases significantly when the sale involves multiple partners operating in different roles.
The Chief Analyst at Canalys, one of the leading industry voices on all things partnerships, confirms the essential role operational excellence plays in successful partner programs. He states:
“Today, to be competitive, a well-designed partner strategy and program along with highly efficient partner operations is mission-critical for companies of all sizes in all industries" Jay McBain
New partner-based commerce motions require a new breed of applications
The existing set of CRM, PRM, Billing and ERP applications work well to facilitate the sale - direct, with and through channels and partners.
Post-sale revenue sharing, referral fees, rebates and incentives management and associated requirements for partner-based commerce need a new breed of applications - Partner Revenue Operations.
A solution that creates a system of intelligence with purpose-built business processes and workflows to break down the functional silos between marketing, partner, sales and finance teams.
What is Partner Revenue Operations, who needs it and why?
Partner teams tasked with building relationships and driving sales instead find themselves spending a significant amount of time burdened by administrative tasks. Often this means managing incentives and commissions in spreadsheets and data entry to keep siloed systems in sync.
SalesOps and RevOps responsible for managing the customer lifecycle spend time bridging the gap between systems with manual processes to calculate partner rebates, revenue shares, commissions and market development funds.
Finance teams tasked with revenue management and financial reporting instead compromise with an operational framework mainly based on spreadsheets and manual processes to address critical cash flow management, governance and overall operational oversight.
What is a PRO solution?
An enterprise application that must address 3 keys areas:
Track & Manage Partner Obligations
An application for partner teams to intuitively set up and manage dynamic agreements for co-sell, re-sell, referral and solution delivery amongst others. Agreements based on any metric including touch-points, product adoption, usage and consumption metrics, duration milestones, not just order volumes and sales amounts. True ability to mirror and implement the range and complexity of partners, relationships, products and services.
Operationalize Partner Obligations
An application designed with intelligent, no-touch processes engineered to automatically analyze and process multi-dimensional campaign, sales and financial data. Purpose-built business processes and workflows that seamlessly scale to address the deal flow velocity and the volume of transactional data associated with partner-based commerce. Governance and operational excellence built-in to reduce any compliance and audit risk while inherently improving accuracy.
Provide a Holistic View of Partner-based Commerce
A real-time, accurate view of cash flow that your finance teams and executives can trust. A comprehensive view of all fees, revenue and obligations that sales, internal partner teams and your partners can rely on.
Winners in the Partnership Economy
Much like the AI phenomenon, the momentum and traction behind ecosystem led growth is only increasing.
Winners going forward will be organizations who are able to tap into the network effect that partnerships offer. This goes well beyond just signing-up new partners. What organizations will need is operational maturity to mirror and manage the complex range of partner agreements in this new motion. The winners will be the ones that can 'Measure, monitor and manage the contribution of a fluid number of partners playing a number of roles in each transaction'. Aspects Jared Fuller and Isaac Morehouse highlight as part of the Nearbound strategy.