Sun Tzu once said, “If you know yourself and you know your enemy, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles”.
Sales and marketing professionals have a similar mantra: “if you know yourself and you know your prospects, you need not fear the result of a hundred outreach touchpoints.”
In a channel network, this is easier said than done. A channel manager has to work across different organizations. This means dealing with different CRMs and analytics tools. This means establishing lines of communication and collaboration with organizations that have different data security policies and hold responsibility for different contact databases.
Channel managers might wish they could unite all of their partners under a single system, but unfortunately for them, channel partners need to maintain working relations with multiple parent vendors at any given time. They do not have the flexibility to build their systems entirely around any single vendor. So, if a uniform set of standards is impossible, how can channel managers make sure that prospect information flows freely yet securely within the channel network?
One solution is to create a neutral space where all parties can meet and collaborate, even if they are using different toolsets. This is the approach that Mindmatrix takes with the “Bridge platform”.
As the name would suggest, the “Bridge platform” provides a single platform that each member of a channel network can access via a custom web portal and user interface. The platform is compatible with a wide variety of CRMs, meaning that your partners can manage and share contacts using the tools that work best for them.
Meanwhile, the Platform’s “Access” and “Permission” controls mean that prospect information is available to the people who need to see it, and invisible to the people who don’t. Better still, channel managers can tell the platform to automatically organize and share new leads to specific partners, based on whichever parameters they consider most relevant.
Now, this is where we really start to see some of the ways that the Bridge platform’s tools build off one another. The data from the platform’s reporting tools allow it to track a prospect’s every email open, social media like, or similar interaction.
With this information, it can reference user-set guidelines to rate prospect interest levels, and send alerts to partners when a prospect is ready for outreach. The platform can even draw upon its asset management tools to automatically find sales material to recommend. The end result is that channel partners know their prospects and therefore can make touchpoints with confidence.
Mindmatrix is the Leader in Enterprise Partner Enablement through Innovation, Automation, & Great User and Partner Experience. Our new Platform, Bridge 5.0, is a unified platform built to engage and enable your entire direct, channel, alliance partner ecosystem. Bridge takes the complexity out of selling by delivering PRM, Partner Marketing, Sales Enablement Tools, Alliance Collaboration & Marketplace in a single user interface.
