ZINFI Technologies, Inc.

What are the core capabilities that any best-of-breed partner relationship management (PRM) platform must have? In this podcast, we discuss five key phases of the partner management lifecycle that a robust PRM platform can bring together to help your partner program succeed: partner recruitment, partner onboarding, partner training, partner marketing and partner incentives management. Focusing on...

Have you thought of using your customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage your partner network? In this video, we explain why that approach is a bad idea that will result in poor functionality and little or no ROI. Partner relationship management has a number of core requirements that today’s CRM systems simply don’t offer. These include modules for partner recruitment, engagement and...

Macro, micro or what? 2023 will be a challenging but exciting year for partner relationship management, and while many forces are at play, it is clear a few major trends are accelerating. However, before we deep dive into the top 10 trends for partner relationship management in 2023, let’s take a moment and look at the broader macroeconomic context that we all have to live in, and what it means to...

What is an affiliate? An “affiliate” is an individual or organization that does not report to you but represents you in the marketplace. In most cases, an affiliate tends to be associated with marketing activities, but some affiliates also provide services. In this article, we will explore some strategies for selecting software for onboarding affiliate marketing partners. Essentially, Affiliate Ma...

In a post-pandemic work environment, marketing is finally returning to its physical roots. As we come out of our caves and ditch our masks, it is becoming normal again to attend events and tradeshows. Partners have traditionally marketed in a way that depends heavily on events, and the last few years have been tough for companies trying to get their partners engaged with digital tools. In this art...

Because ecosystem partners are diverse, onboarding them with your channel marketing management platform can be challenging. A systematic approach to onboarding not only increases partner engagement, but also reduces costs. In this podcast, we explore five key steps for onboarding in the context of through-channel marketing automation (TCMA), including: target the right partners, align your program...

Affiliate marketing essentially refers to an activity where a third party – a person or an organization – promotes your brand to their connections or networks or audiences. Affiliate marketing management software allows you to automate the process of recruiting, engaging, enabling and managing such a marketing partner. In this article, we will explore what affiliate marketing management software i...

Partner Management Software (PMS) is a strategic technology infrastructure designed to automate and structure the end-to-end management of an indirect go-to-market model. It handles diverse partner types—from resellers to affiliates—to reduce operating costs and accelerate time to revenue. By facilitating structured onboarding and continual enablement, a best-in-class PMS platform can exponentiall...

Partner Management Software (PMS) is a unified platform that automates the recruitment, onboarding, and ongoing management of diverse channel partners, including transacting resellers and non-transacting affiliates. It is essential for modernizing go-to-market strategies by providing personalized engagement workflows. A core function is the utilization of dynamic business analytics to tie partner...

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software provides a centralized platform to automate and streamline commission payments. This technology ensures accuracy, transparency, and efficiency in compensating your channel partners. Managing a partner ecosystem involves many complex financial arrangements with your partners. Paying commissions on time and accurately is crucial for maintaining partner...

More and more companies are marketing and selling through the channel to increase reach and velocity of product distribution. With that said, implementing this sales approach is a very complex undertaking, and it’s easy to get off track. Here are the 5 core partner relationship management best practices to help you scale. Know Your Partners Before you can put together a solid partner relationship...

The concept of a channel has existed since the Stone Age–when one person bartered with another. While technology has evolved rapidly over the past few thousand years, for many companies the state of their channel maturity still resembles antiquated methods that stifle growth. Based on our engagement with thousands of channel partners worldwide and our evaluation of how vendors deploy channel manag...

Channel Management is the structured process of recruiting, enabling, transacting with, and motivating external distribution partners to sell a vendor’s products or services. It is essential for driving predictable, profitable growth by efficiently scaling reach into new markets and lowering selling costs. The entire channel partner lifecycle is based on five core, sequential phases: recruit...

The discipline that embodies the principles and tactics of managing channel partners is called partner relationship management (PRM) or channel relationship management. At the foundation of channel management, you’ll find partners. Partners fuel channel marketing, sales, and service efforts–their success is directly correlated to the overall channel’s success. While finding ways to manage them eff...

A lot has changed around the world in all aspects of our life over the past 18 months, and that includes how lead management works in a distributed partner network. Before we delve into what has changed, what will change further and how to prepare for it, let me take a moment to describe what channel lead management is: If you are selling through a channel then you have one or more types of partne...

Salesforce is an amazing company led by its founder and CEO Marc Benioff. What started as a CRM-focused SaaS company has evolved over the past several decades into a business process automation ecosystem. Salesforce’s core strategy is to provide a few core applications around customer relationship management (CRM), service management and marketing, and allow independent service providers to connec...

Partner relationship management (PRM) tools have existed for more than a decade right now. Although early in the 2000s there were a few companies trying to build applications to manage a distributor channel, the actual proliferation of PRM software didn’t really happen until about five years ago. The primary focus for PRM tools is automating workflows between a vendor and a partner to make it easy...

Partner relationship management (PRM) tools are gaining traction across multiple verticals. While PRM tool adoption started predominantly in the technology segment, over the past few years other verticals—including manufacturing, finance, insurance, real estate, franchising and others—have adopted various versions of partner relationship management (PRM) tools. However, despite the rapid growth of...

In this age of digital and remote work, partner training has moved online via partner relationship management (PRM) tools. Gone are the days when you used to travel for roadshows or have the partners fly into a training center for hands-on instruction. Whether you are dealing with hardware, software or service, a lot can be done online. Yes, certain trainings do require face-to-face engagement to...

More and more vendors are focused on an indirect sales (channel) model. Beyond the initial stages of fulfilment and support engagement, a major activity for these vendors is lead management. Channel marketing software can be a big help when it comes to lead generation and management. In this article, we will explore a variety of lead generation and management techniques that companies can pursue u...

The world has been on a rapid digitization trend over the past few decades, but 2020 rocket-fueled the adoption of many digital platforms starting with tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other types of collaboration software. Leading channel marketing software platforms have always been at the center of channel collaboration, because you can use them to seamlessly digitize workflow and content s...

Organizations selling through the channel always worry about one primary thing: driving more sales at a lower cost. The entire purpose of a channel organization is to extend reach to every part of a market where the product or service has value, ideally piggy-backing on other organizations that already have invested in generating demand and capturing it through their sales and delivery teams. A ma...

Over the past 40 years the world has been speeding up the pace of digital adoption. While it may seem like Amazon was founded yesterday, it was actually founded in 1994—about 25 years ago. Microsoft was founded a couple of decades earlier than Amazon, in 1975, and Oracle was founded in 1977. About a decade earlier than Microsoft, Intel was founded in 1968. I think you get the point: The advent of...

It has been almost two decades since customer relationship management (CRM) applications began to be adopted as a powerful way to automate sales processes. Meanwhile, we have also seen marketing automation grow rapidly over the past 10 years or so to augment the CRM process experience for direct sales teams. However, the rise of partner relationship management (PRM) SaaS applications like ZINFI’s...

Connecting HubSpot with a Partner Relationship Management platform unifies your sales data. This integration streamlines channel operations for significant growth and efficiency. It provides a single source of truth for both direct and indirect sales efforts. Key Takeaways Integrating a CRM and a PRM system eliminates harmful data silos within your company. It creates a unified view of all custome...