Partner Communities & Portals - You Might Be Missing Something BIG

A partner community can be a critical piece of your alliance or partner strategy. Many companies share with partners training, company news, sales materials, events, support, and (often most importantly) leads and pipeline information. This visibility is often partner specific, so while all your partners may be able to see sales collateral, each individual partner may have different leads, dashboards, and support access.

The problem with the majority of the partner communities I've seen is that they do NOT live inside the customer community. This is a major issue, because to be a truly customer-centric company, you should be bringing your employees, partners, prospects, influencers, and advocates together to support your customers. This is especially important for partners as they bring so much knowledge about our products and their use cases to the conversation.

This is also a BIG win for our partners, as it often helps them source new deals with our customers in a non-salesy way. By sharing their expertise and experiences, your customers can pair up with partners in a better way.

An ideal configuration would be a customer community that creates visibility to your employee community/intranet as well as your partner portal. In this situation, the customer would not see these areas, using profiles to manage this, and would only be visible to the appropriate group.

At Apttus we take this approach, which creates:

• Employees and Partners regularly log into the system providing feedback, answering questions, and providing support to customers.
• Sales reps log into the community to gain access to their sales materials, which also ensures they know how to log in so they can share with prospects and customers.
• Employee social sharing and gamification leverage the same system as our customers and partners, just with views that are unique to the type of user (partner, employee, or customer). This allows any Apttus employee or partner to help a customer with how to use this tool because they also use the same one.

Often this approach is hard for organizations because of internal silos as well as marketing (or other team's) not taking a customer first approach. This is also hard for companies, as many of the partner community options can't embed into the customer community directly (most not all). By removing these limitations, we're saying our customers are #1.