Next week (July 27th) is the capstone broadcast for hawkeye’s webinar series on the Data-Driven Organization. As the organizer for our webinars, I thought it would be fun to try something new this time so we’re taking questions during registration and the entire webinar is being built around submitted questions and registrants’ areas of interest. The original plan was to have two experts available to field questions. I’ve been receiving so many interesting (and diverse!) queries this week that I’ve reached out to a couple other subject matter experts and now have a panel of four SMEs for the webinar.
If you have a question you need answered this is really a great chance to get four experts focused on your issue. The panelists are Greg Osenga, Dave Hafermann, Deb Broderson, and Vaughn Aust and collectively they have a wealth of experience in the channel including analytics, ROI, data integrity, CRM/PRM, MDF, and rewards/incentives.
And, yes, I know this sounds like a shameless plug for our webinar (big blog no-no), but really, I just want to be sure I have lots of questions to keep this panel really busy for an hour! If you have a question you want to get answered, just register here or if you’ve already registered and thought of something else, feel free to drop me an email at tdelphia@hawkeyeww.com.
Last week I participated in a webinar with Dave Hafermann where we talked about CRM/PRM integration. Dave and I have worked together on several CRM/PRM projects – I focus on work with the marketing team and business processes and Dave drives the technical bits. We’ve distilled our experiences into a 4 step process shown in the diagram.
I wanted to revisit the sustain part of the diagram in this blog post. hawkeye has worked with several clients on CRM/PRM engagements and we are normally brought it somewhere around the “Design” phase. Of course, I work closely with my contacts to encourage a strongly shared channel vision and for the most part, clients are unable to secure funding for a process of this magnitude to begin the Design and Implementation stages until c-level executives have reached some meeting of the minds and agreed on a channel program vision.
But where I often see companies struggle is after the integration has taken place. It seems like we feel the hard part in this process is completing the technical implementation – deciding on a thorough roadmap with achievable goals along the way, and then achieving that vision. Really though, the biggest challenge turns out to be sustaining the solution once built. In our experiences with clients, these are the activities that matter most in sustaining your solution:
- Create ownership at every level of the organization. This was a theme in our presentation and that’s because without it, the quality and continuity of your PRM solution is going to suffer.
- Have a single owner/champion for the PRM infrastructure. Because IT has an endless list of company-wide, urgent priorities to juggle, it’s best that this be someone from the Business team. Plus, the business team is going to understand the dynamics of the channel. The ideal ownership arrangement is to have a business-side owner with a strong IT champion (on the inside) – your perfect partnership.
- Establish a PRM governance office consisting of Business and IT members. This is essentially a steering committee for your solution that reviews and prioritizes ongoing investment requests.
- Establish clear PRM process controls, UAT policy, and release cycles. Your solution will (should!) be constantly evolving and you need to ensure that everyone knows the process. This helps avoid any unrealistic expectations and should reduce friction with IT.
- Provide skills training and build it into job descriptions AND compensation plans. The reality is that for most people, PRM does not come naturally. Yup, that includes marketing people! People in the best position to add valuable information to the system to be trained on the system – Sales and Account Management are key here.
- Establish PRM success metrics and build in a means of collecting necessary data to report on performance. A good place to start is with the factors that contributed to the vision and vision goals established at the outset. Make sure this information can be collected consistently and analysed over time.
- Establish data quality metrics and owners for the metrics. You need to have formal procedures for collecting, maintaining and updating data – and these all need to comply with data privacy and opt-ins at the country level. Don’t forget processes for receiving data from other internal sources like Finance.
- Establish PRM Administration policy, access controls and security. Your CRM/PRM integration helped you reach a single source of truth – knowledge – of your channel program and data. With all this great data now available, you need to be sure that not only will everyone have the data they need to complete tasks, but there need to be clear access levels and processes to ensure data integrity and limit misuse of data. And don’t forget to factor in data privacy and compliance needs here as well.
- Communicate, communicate, communicate. I can’t say it enough – you have to continue to communicate with all your constituents and stakeholders to keep your CRM/PRM solution viable.
Do you have items to add to this list based on your experiences in a CRM/PRM integration project? Alternatively I love to hear your experiences – how did you and your organization manage (or not) to keep things going after implementation? Let me know!
In 2007, Amazon Consulting’s CEO Diane Krakora wrote an article declaring “The Demise of PRM As We Know It.” Her article sealed the fate at that time of a shift in attention from PRM to CRM solutions and the literature was virtually silent on the merits of PRM for a time.
Google Trends is by no means a scientific research tool (tracking, as it does, searches and frequency in internet content of the words for which you seek trend information).* However, it does provide some interesting food for thought when you can trend words or acronyms with fairly specific meaning…like “PRM” and “CRM.”
The Google Trends view for PRM vs. CRM popularity shows that indeed, at the time of Krakora’s article, PRM had essentially flat-lined as far as interest expressed online.
Source: http://google.com/trends; pulled June 2011.
Source: http://google.com/trends; pulled June 2011
Some interesting things happened in 2008 though. One of those things was increasing talk of a recession. (“Recession” is shown separately because the volume of mentions for it is so huge, that when trended in the same graph with CRM and PRM, it compresses the scale so much that we are unable to see what is happening with PRM and CRM). The second thing that happened – that leads us to our topic of PRM – is that about the time that “recession” entered the news, interest in CRM greatly perked up, and interest in PRM returned in mid-2008. Many businesses saw the gathering thunderclouds and quickly realized that they needed the information from their CRM and PRM systems to provide them with the insight target their efforts to effective partners and segments to keep business – if not strong, then at least maintained – through the rough waters ahead.
With the incredible belt-tightening that accompanied several years of global recession, many companies “made do” with existing PRM and CRM solutions – bolting together existing data repositories and occasionally expanding efforts to add, say, a cloud solution like Salesforce’s cost effective CRM solution. Companies are now experiencing somewhat more expanded budgets and are looking at existing systems for managing their customers and partners. Integration is a key tool to melding your internal PRM system with cloud-based CRM platform for cost effective-solutions that link together data across your company’s business units.
Integration can be a messy and difficult process though. I’m currently working with Dave Hafermann, our resident PRM/CRM guru (and Chuck Norris fan) and Ian Hutchieson, our Managing Director in the UK on webinar content for later this month. In the webinar, they will talk about things to keep in mind as you begin your own integration journey like why you should integrate your PRM and CRM solutions, some of the challenges you may face, and suggestions for designing and implementing an integrated solution.
*For an intriguing example of the limitations of Google Trends, try trending “Cloud” – any incidence of the word “cloud” trends whether it is the new iCloud or a cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland!
Are you sure you know what motivates your resellers?
Every company selling through an indirect channel wants to achieve greater partner mind share. What makes the resellers want to sell more AND achieve the ROI that you need for your programs? Incentives! When used appropriately they: Read more…
As temperatures cool down and the leaves begin to change, it’s apparent that summer is coming to an end. Hopefully we’ve all had an opportunity to reflect about the year thus far, and contemplate channel priorities for the second half of 2010. Getting away from the daily minutia and asking yourself some basic questions may help you focus and re-prioritize for the rest of the year.
So grab your laptop and compose some basic questions for your channel teams: Read more…
