PRM Channel Best-Practices Blog

The overarching best practice in deal registration is to design your process with partners’ interests in mind, and they’ll register deals without too much prompting from you. If a partner’s relationship with your company and product is serving them, they’ll register deals.

What is Deal Registration?

First, what is deal registration and why should you make it part of your channel management process? It is most often used to manage possible channel conflict by having partners or VARs (value added resellers) tells you about a lead and they get ‘first dibs’ on it versus another channel partner. Usually the partner has a set amount of time to close the deal before it opened to other partners again.

Reward Partners for Doing the Things That Positively Affect Your Business
Partners are most interested in closing business and so preferred pricing is great. But don’t stop there. You can look at it as the layers in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The base is, “Protect the partner’s deal and give them preferred pricing.” For that they’ll register.

Then add value, another layer, by encouraging collaboration between vendor and partner. If partners have to wait a day to get the pricing, or they’re not getting the information they need quickly, that puts a deal at risk; We all know time kills all deals.

You can make deal registration an engagement tool by providing what they need in real-time. Also help your partners keep more deals alive by implementing reminders and alerts in your PRM – available in Channeltivity — to keep them on top of their pending deals. Start thinking about the process from the partner’s point of view: What you can do and what systems you can implement to make it easier for them to close.

Information has value: The better you can see what’s in your pipeline, the better you can forecast, the more productive your channel will be.

Remove Friction from the Process
If it’s hard for partners to register deals, you’ve created a big deterrent to people bothering with deal registration. If you’re not getting the throughput you want, the first questions to consider are, “Have we given them good reason to register our deals?” and “How can we make this task of registering deals go more easily for partners?”

Determine the Value of Visibility
Incentives are critical. You need the visibility into the sales pipeline that deal registration delivers. So think about what value you place on that visibility. Without it, you don’t know what your revenues are, and you have no warning on whether you’re going to make or break your quarter.

The information has value: The better you can see what’s in your pipeline, the better you can forecast, the more productive your channel will be. Incentives enable you to buy this valuable visibility from partners. The question is: how will you compensate them?

Create the Right Incentives and Disincentives as Appropriate
In other words, provide the right carrots and minimize the sticks. The faster partners can satisfy your requirements, get in and get out, the more likely they are to bother with it – and to feed you good data. Streamline the process by requiring only the essential info and ensuring your deal registration form is glitch-free.

And don’t forget about the carrots. Create the right incentives and disincentives as appropriate, for example:

• “Your deal is not protected if it’s not registered”

• “Get extra points for registering”

• “Approved deal registration = better discounts”

You won’t find any VARs who like registering deals, but they do recognize the value. You can further reinforce that value for them by making sure the system feeds back their information clearly and accurately.