Reshare® Partner Relationship Management

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) is a business strategy coupled with a software application, and it is usually aimed at improving sales and productivity between companies and their trading partners.

Generally speaking, indirect channels exist to serve partners and customers that have traditionally been too expensive to work through direct channels. Web-centric, partner-/customer-facing, e-Business/CRM technologies are removing the information-distribution-related cost barriers that have in part justified the existence of indirect channels in the first place.

That is not to stay the entities within the indirect channels will be disintermediated, or otherwise eliminated. This transformation will not affect every vertical sector similarly, nor happen overnight.

But selling organizations increasingly will leverage sell-side e-Business/CRM technologies to sell directly through traditional indirect channel organizations. This collaborative, multi-tiered network-selling model will transform traditional, linear "sell direct" and "sell indirect" models.

"It all comes down to who you define as a customer," Gartner (NYSE: IT) vice president of customer relationship management Rob Desisto told CRMDaily.com in an April 2002 interview.

Louis Columbus, senior analyst with AMR Research (NYSE: AMRR) says PRM has been relegated to the background because many companies tend to discount or ignore the problems with their channel partners "rather than addressing them head on."

Partnership relationships pose problems that are not easy to address. There are many solutions to the majority of DRM challenges, the most robust of which is offered by Reshare® through our Distribution Relationship Management™ Technology

A PRM application or strategy is deployed outside the four walls of the enterprise and usually has to take into account conflicting and competing interests of the channel partners -- and their competition -- for mind share and market share.

It is easy to see why companies have started to take an interest in PRM applications. AMR Research reports that dealers, agents, resellers and brokers -­ in other words, the businesses acting in the indirect sales channel -- represent between 40 and 70 percent of many companies' revenues.

In a report authored by Columbus, AMR says that two early adopters, Cisco and Maytag, have experienced substantial ROI (return on investment) and other benefits from deploying a PRM application.

For Maytag, sales now are exceeding expectation by some 35 percent and the average online sale is more than US$1,000 ­ double that of its offline stores.

As for Cisco, its order error rate has been reduced from 40 to 8 percent and its productivity has increased 15 percent across the company.

Companies are prioritizing IT investments on software that enables their indirect sales and distribution channels, not only to operate more cost-effectively, but also to be better aligned with corporate-wide enterprise selling strategies.

Global competitive advantage is now defined by competing value chains - and not by company-versus-company competition. For many innovative selling organizations, PRM software represents strategic solutions that meet the crucial requirement to integrate the demand chain into the global value chain.

The embrace of PRM also reflects the acceptance of the Internet as both a complementary channel of distribution and an enabling technology for process improvement for "traditional" customer-facing business processes.