The Breakout Technology That Allowed A $14B Manufacturer To Build A Holy Grail

“That meant having one system channel partners could access where everything they need to be successful was at their fingertips with secure authentication.”

As the pure-play global leader in the fast-growing PRM market, Impartner’s priority is the success of our customers. Among the list of Impartner’s world-class customers lies manufacturing leader Ingersoll Rand. We were delighted to be joined by Ingersoll Rand’s Director, Marketing Technology and Operations, Liz Cope, at Dreamforce 18’, where she spoke about how using Impartner PRM technology allowed Ingersoll Rand to offer a differentiating partner experience. We are excited to share her post from Dreamforce on our blog. You can also view the live webcast from Dreamforce 18’ here.

Holy Grail Partner Management: Streamlining Partner Business Processes with PRM

Liz Cope, Director, Marketing Technology and Operations at Ingersoll Rand

I spoke at Dreamforce last week on Partner Relationship Management technology – PRM – covering, “The Breakout Technology That Allowed a $14B Manufacturer to Build a Holy Grail,” sharing my experience deploying partner-focused tech. Candidly, three years ago, I didn’t know much about partner management technology. Because, let’s face it, the martech space is saturated with solutions designed to improve the performance of just about everything. As a career marketer and channel chief, I was hunting for that secret sauce for channel sales enablement, and I knew our team needed a technology to help grow our brand through our partners – that “holy grail” for partner engagement.

Knowing that micro-movements improve the whole, I consulted with our channel partners and team and got very specific about the go-dos, and admittedly, they were pretty fundamental. Our team needed a SaaS that had an engaging UI for partners and included Lead Management, Asset Management, Marketing Automation, and multi-lingual capabilities as well as solid back-end analytics. Additionally, they wanted a view of our partners that was more than just their revenue performance – I wanted to get to their personas. Our partners wanted us to make it easier for them to do business with us.

Identifying the feature set we needed was only half the battle.

I needed to find a solution that operated seamlessly from start to finish, and was CRM integration-ready but not CRM dependent, or required an army of developers or IT to implement and manage.

I also had to reduce the complexity of doing business with us for our partners and #enablethesale. That meant having one system channel partners could access where everything they need to be successful was at their fingertips with secure authentication.

Understand the buying experience of your leads

And I had to deliver a lead management platform that optimized the investments we were making generating demand. Leads generate significant new business for our partners. But, we had no way to track partner engagement with those leads or measure the buying experience of our end-user. Over 70% of our leads were new customers. Would they be repeat customers? A large risk in my mind was the buyer experience after the lead left our hands and was dispositioned to our partners.

#PurposedBasedTechnology

I discovered PRM and the ability to deploy an out-of-the-box structure to support our channel in their effort to be as effective as possible while centralizing the day-to-day management of the marketing team.

There are many PRM solutions, but for this situation, I implemented the SaaS from Impartner since their product fit the purpose and the budget. The platform came complete with a leads dashboard that provided our channel with a comprehensive view of their performance, as well as alerts and reminders to help keep the momentum going. In 2017 we saw a 200% increase in our pipeline influence goals and exceeded 2018 goals by mid-year. Partner engagement with the program hovers around 74% globally.

It also featured an asset library that serves as a one-stop-shop for partners to find collateral and tools to help them represent our brands with accuracy, and better communicate and sell the benefits of our products to their customers. At the time of this post, we’re seeing metrics like a 10% compounded monthly increase for asset views and downloads, month over month increase of partner logins, and steady increases in partner web activity.

At the end of the day, our partners are busy solving major manufacturing problems. They need to be able to count on us to help them execute and serve the customer quickly. To serve our partners and our customers, we depend on our PRM. And because we’re using the right technology for the purpose, we are building, faster than ever, towards transcendent partner management.