Why Partner Relationship Management Software Shouldnt Be Relegated To Crm

Partner Relationship Management software (or PRM) is the tool which promotes strategies that companies employ in order to communicate and organize the interaction with its channel for indirect sales. These comprise of distributors, original equipment manufacturers or OEMs, and value added resellers or VARs. These strategies are all about figuring out the right way to manage the lifecycles of partner relationships, looking for other new potential joint ventures, allocating funds, distributing leads, monitoring the productivity of joint business ventures. In the end, what these strategies hope to achieve is a smoother, and a strong relationship that benefits both the parent company and its cloud. These strategies were not only created for the benefit of the parent company; after all, pleasing the end users or customers is the final goal of any company. So how does this differentiate itself against Customer Relationship Management software or CRM? So far, the two sound alike aside from the fact that the former deals with partnerships.

CRM is a much more of an umbrella term and it is a collection of strategies that are all aimed at guiding a company’s interaction with the sales or service issues of its customers. Just before the year 2000, there have been many businesses that were investing and buying automatic CRM software that promises a much faster and easier customer management.

Just by looking at these general definitions of the two, it is no wonder why a lot of those in the business think that PRM should belong under the primary heading of CRM. People think this way since both PRM and CRM are all geared towards increasing a company’s productivity in order to keep its customer’s contented. With such a definition, the extension of customer management will inevitably annex application concerning partner management automation of direct as well as indirect processes of selling.

However, this is an idea that is mostly espoused by customer relationship management software vendors. In such a framework, it is obvious that these are the only vendors that will gain business.

However, the fact is that partner relationship management software is now being called as a company-specific tool and method, something that customer management cannot do. There is a great deal of difference between one business entity and another and their methods of managing their channel resellers will also be strikingly different. There can therefore be no ready-made solution for all software system that can be applied to each and every company. CRM software does not have the specific applications and flexibility to incorporate lead organization, end user plans, communications, and profiling partners. Neither does it have any real good history in successful handling of channel.

A company’s channel clouds are an individual entity. The main shift of focus is from the effective return of profit by satisfying the customer end user to the question of organizing the relationship with one’s pipelines in order to create efficiency. Partner relationship management software is the only one that can take care of such specificity since the basic structure of CRM cannot appropriate such functions.