Foundation Network have built and deployed some of the industry’s best and most successful partner portals. We don’t write content – our customers are the best at doing that – but we do advise them on best practice in partner portal design and functionality to offer the best possible online partner service and support. Here are some tips that our customers have found useful:
Portal Accessibility
Browser Testing
Partner portals should be compatible with the four most common browsers: Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 3 and Opera 8 and increasingly, they will be accessed by mobile devices so compatibility should ideally be ensured with mobile browsers as well.
Text Browser Compatibility
Text-based browsers support much more limited functionality and some forms or functionality will not look right or work properly. Make sure that yours do.
Window Size
Many partners will want to access the portal using a laptop with a correspondingly small screen. The portal’s window size should be flexible and designed to fit well in the most frequently used laptop screen format of 1024 x 768 pixels.
Color Blindness
Portals should be tested under the constraints of a filter designed to emulate color blindness. This very common condition can make many websites very difficult to navigate.
Navigation
It is essential that partners can easily access the information and tools they need with the minimum number of clicks from the home page. It is critical that the site structure is well thought out and that everything is navigable through no more that 2-3 clicks and is clearly signposted from the home page navigation.
Use of Frames
If possible, avoid using frames. Some people have difficulty navigating within frames, either because the frames are confusing or because the software they are using simply cannot read frames.
When using frames, always offer meaningful NOFRAMES content for those people who cannot read framed information. Use NOFRAMES properly – “upgrade your browser” is of no help to someone using (through choice or necessity) the most up-to-date version of a browser that simply doesn’t handle frames. The NOFRAMES section should contain meaningful content with links to the other pages in your site, so that they can be accessed without frames.
If you must use Frames, ensure that each frame has a sensible TITLE (in addition to the NAME) which gives a clear indication of the content to be found in that frame.
Portal Functionality
Sitemap
While sitemaps are not of vital importance to a portal site, they do improve the user experience particularly where there are navigation issues.
Search
It is important that a partner can easily mine the wealth of information contained in your portal so a good search function is essential. Incorporate a high performance search engine with both basic and advanced search capability – we use Verity in our sites and be mindful of the presentation of search results.
Contact Us and Contact Information
Make sure that partners have the means to contact you through the portal and provide a means to communicate with specific people, roles or departments. It is very effective to incorporate the names and contact details of those people in your organization – account managers, partner marketing team members, technical support team members and operations people who are actually assigned to the relevant partner. This can be achieved by incorporating their details into partner profiles in your database that sits behind the portal.
‘Remember Me’ Functionality
The portal should contain a remember-me option on the log-in screen to prevents them from having to enter their access details every time they visit the portal. This makes the future login process much quicker and easier and addresses a common complaint that partners have regarding having to remember multiple ID’s and passwords for the plethora of vendor sites they use.
Printable Version and Exportable Content
Define and incorporate a specific print-style-sheet to ensure that pages are printed correctly. The printed pages should not contain the portal navigation which is usually not required when printing a portal page. The ability to export content for incorporation within presentations or proposals for example should also be considered.
Partner Relationship Management Functionality
Self-Profiling
In order to maintain data quality in your database and improve the targeting and quality of your communication, offer partners access and editing rights to their profile data so that they can maintain themselves. Make this easily accessible to them from the homepage or as part of the navigation.
Lead Management
Coupling your marketing, lead generation and sales activities with automated lead distribution via the portal streamlines the process and delivers leads directly to the channel sales people best placed to close them. Additionally, if you provide a means for partners to update lead status themselves online, they can keep you up to date and let you know when sales are worn or lost. This also ensures that you can monitor performance and ensure that closers receive more leads.
Deal Registration
Essentially, lead management in reverse, deal registration capabilities allow partners to register their own sales leads via your portal in exchange for some benefit or reward. If their leads can be seamlessly deposited into your integrated sales pipeline and managed online is exactly the same way as your own leads, the process is streamlined, kept constantly up to date and partners can be rewarded for deals upon closure.
Online Learning and Certification
Face to face sales and marketing training is typically not practicable or cost effective these days but in its wake has been left a void. Some vendors have made attempts to stretch legacy internal learning management systems to support online partner training but this presents a number of problems not least the creation of yet another portal for partners to use and one more database to keep up to date. Leading partner portals integrate e-learning with online testing and certification management to deliver a full range of partner training programs including technical and pre-sales and manage the entire process from content management through delivery and the management of complex accreditation mapping and scoring. This ensures that partners need only log in to one portal and all of their information is maintained up to date within the same database.
Marketing Tools and Management of Marketing Funding
Many portals offer partners the opportunity to download marketing materials, brochures and presentations and a number of software or services companies have in recent years offered plug-ins to facilitate online customized or co-branded marketing material creation. Best practice partner portals integrate all of these capabilities but additionally they facilitate full marketing collaboration between vendor and partner. This can include the facility to accrue and manage MDF accounts, claim funds and make redemptions against approved marketing campaigns all enabled by integration with the partner database and other enterprise systems at the back end.
Incentives Programs
Loyalty programs and incentive campaigns are another program component often outsourced to third parties by vendors. Again, this results in multiple portals or websites, manual processes, inconsistent data and poor partner satisfaction. High performance partner portals
Special Bid Support
Another process renowned for being at times painfully slow, bureaucratic and inefficient is the process of managing special pricing or bid support. Leading portals automate this process by managing product catalogues and pricing, bid requests, hierarchical approvals and imposing roles and controls. This once again enables partners to use the portal as a one-stop-shop and enjoy a much more convenient, efficient and speedy experience in supporting you in business development.
Partner Locator
Link your corporate website to your relationship management system’s database to provide an intuitive partner locator function that enables customers to match their needs to the most appropriate partner. Complete the loop by notifying the relevant partner immediately by delivering a lead with the customer’s information to ensure that the opportunity is followed through. These “soft” leads are often less well qualified but much appreciated by partners.
Content
Product Services Catalogue / Product and Services Collateral
There should be an abundance of “channelized” product or service information. By this we mean generic material that has been written specifically for a channel audience rather than for customers. It’s aim should be to assist the partner in selling, marketing and supporting rather than persuasion to purchase. Information must be available in a variety of forms including audio visual, textual and graphical and it must wherever possible be available for download in formats that can be used by the partner in their own documents, proposals and collateral.
Price lists
In addition to comprehensive and up to date product information fed from the latest integrated product catalog, portals should offer relevant partners online access to their own price lists
Amount of Text on Page and Page Download Size
Avoid over filling pages with too much text and reduce as much as possible the need for partners to scroll down to see content. Use fonts and font colors that are easy on the eye. Keep text columns too wide to make them easier to read and balance your desire to impress with audio visual content including Flash with minimizing page load times.
Persuasion Elements
Improve stickiness and the desire to explore the site and make use of its functionality by using persuasion elements and calls to action on every page.
User Specific Content
Partners will be drawn to the portal and spend more time visiting it if they sense that the content is tailored to their specific interests or needs. Ensure that your content management system or PRM system can present content based upon visitor profiles and that profiles are fully populated with personal content preferences.
Partner Registration
Registration Process
Make the registration process easy to use and as brief as possible minimizing the number of screens and feels that the partner has to populate. Additional information can always be gathered later but a lengthy process can cause abandonment and the partner may never return.
Approvals Process
Automate the approvals process by using your relationship management system. Ensure timely responses to the applicant and keep them updated throughout.
Registration Incentives
Registration can be a chore for the partner. Incentivize them to go through the process if you can and entice them in by allowing them to sample the capabilities and benefits of your portal.
Security
HTTPS
Most portals currently at least offer a secure connection on the registration forms and the pages on which profile data can be updated. However, if your portal offers PRM functionality including access to confidential financial data or tools capable of managing financial activities, it is essential that you consider HTTPS at least for the relevant pages.
Password Strength
Avoid including username and password in any activation mails sent to applicants as these may make it possible for this information to be intercepted. The activation email which users receive after signing up. Also, you should allow users to change your issued password and specify their own to the highest level of complexity.
Legal
Disclaimer / Privacy Statement / Terms and Conditions
Websites that store and collect user information are required by law (data protection act) to inform their visitors about the usage of this data. Requesting partners to accept the terms and conditions for usage of the portal could prevent issues caused by inaccuracy of provided data and/or misuse of confidential information on the portal. With this in mind, ensure that the privacy statement and the portal terms and conditions are accessible before a user has logged on to the portal and when registering for an account to access the portal the partner should be forced to accept your terms and conditions for usage.
Summary
Partner Portals used to be password protected websites that were often little more than repositories for out of date product information. Corporate websites have typically seen the bulk of vendor’s investment over the years and consequently many of our prospective clients complain of falling hits and a general lack of interest on the part of partners towards their portals.
Today, vendors are recognizing the importance of ensuring that their partners are as well informed as their own staff and that they are provided with tools, resources and information to an equal standard. Consequently, we have begun to see a desire amongst vendors to dramatically improve not only the content of portals but also making them “self-service” sales and marketing assets for partners. In so doing they have recognized the importance indeed the necessity of deploying their partner portal not on a separate content management system but upon an integrated partner relationship management platform.
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