What is a Partner Ecosystem Platform?
A Partner Ecosystem Platform is a SaaS product that allows you to manage, track, and share data with your partner ecosystem. A good PEP will typically also include tools to attribute revenue to your partners, track EQLs, and keep your data secure.
Features of Partner Ecosystem Platforms
Account Mapping
Most partner relationships begin with Account Mapping. Account Mapping is taking your list of customers or potential customers and finding relationships to your partner's lists. Without a PEP, this process is done manually by exchanging spreadsheets. This poses several issues:
- Not secure. Creating a spreadsheet of customers and sending it via email exposes valuable and personal data with no safeguard as to who sees it.
- Out of date. The moment the spreadsheet is created, the data is out of date.
- Ineffective. Mapping two spreadsheets is incredibly time-consuming and tedious. In extreme circumstances, it can be someone's full-time job to manage and map partner spreadsheets.
Data Collaboration
One of the primary features of a Partner Ecosystem Platform is Data Collaboration, the secure exchanging of customer, lead, opportunity information between two or more partners. Overlaps of these lists can be actioned by savvy partner managers and made into several types of campaigns.
The process of keeping these datasets secure requires Data Escrow.
Data Escrow
Partnership managers often suffer from the "prisoner's dilemma": While an equal exchange of information may be beneficial to both parties, neither side is incentivized to share first. Data Escrow acts as a third party, receiving data from both sides and only surfacing overlapping (aka actionable) information — assuring that each side only sees information that is helpful without exposing entire data sets.
CRM integration
To assure your data is up-to-date, a good Partner Ecosystem Platform will connect to any "source of truth" for your organization, and that usually means a CRM like Salesforce.
Free Partner Ecosystem Platform Accounts:
Crossbeam is a leading PEP. Create an account today for free: by visiting getcrossbeam.com