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CRM Vendor NetSuite Still Plugging Away At PRM
TMCnet Contributing Editor
NetSuite, Inc., a vendor of on-demand business software suites, has announced the "wide usage" of NetSuite for Partner Relationship Management (PRM), by such companies as Opal Telecom, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Carphone Warehouse Group plc and key UK resellers.
NetSuite deserves some kudos for this, for being one of the few high-profile CRM vendors also trying to keep a high profile in the significantly smaller PRM market.
Partner Relationship Management is basically CRM for businesses dealing with each other, it lets partners to do things like jointly manage leads and customers with their parent organization -- including lead registration, opportunity management, order management (entering orders, invoicing and billing).
Tools like NetSuite's have such features as Market Direct Fund (MDF) management, e-mail campaigns and customer service inquiries through a Dashboard with business intelligence and publishing capabilities.
With PRM tools, Opal Telecom's 150-plus partners can now manage and forecast opportunities as they work them through the sales cycle, providing forecast visibility to Opal Telecom's Dealer Channel sales group against their established quotas.
"Previous to NetSuite, our Dealer Channel sales team -- with about 150 resellers -- operated by way of a paper-based system," said Andy French, Head of Information Systems at Opal Telecom. "PRM capabilities have helped us streamline the process for our Dealer Channel sales teams, with opportunities feeding the forecast, so we now have complete visibility into our forecast for Dealer Channel sales."
There really aren't many other vendors in this space -- that well-known industry observer, CBRO's Staff Writer, has reported recently that the just-acquired PRM vendor Click Commerce "has grown, but remains a small player overall, with revenue of $59 million last year."
Acquisition by a manufacturer (Click Commerce was bought out by Illinois Tool Works) instead of a fellow software vendor, is "a mark of the depth of the problems vendors in the sector are facing as the market for independent supply chain management (SCM) and partner relationship management (PRM) solutions dries up," faithful scribe Staff Writer observes correctly.
The cornerstone of NetSuite's and similar PRM products is the collaborative web of processes for end-to-end business management that it enables. PRM capabilities extend those processes to provide a platform for collaboration among the extended enterprise of partner channels. Because the opportunities are managed directly in the same system as their other sales, marketing, service and finance operations, they get visibility into partner pipelines and forecasts.
Redundant day-to-day partner support is eliminated since partners can now access much of what they need to know simply by logging into the self-service portal. Customers can determine the effectiveness of joint marketing campaigns, and set up and run incentive compensation plans with as much complexity and levels as required.
The neat trick to all this is the company providing this partner access doesn't have to do anything special to enable the self-service portal. There's no complex data to be imported or exported, no tricky XML or Web services to be written. All that's required is a simple point and click graphical user interface to define what data and application functionality a specific partner has rights to view and edit, and the partners can be online.
PRM came out in the late 1990s, early 2000s, but never really took off the way some hoped it would. Nevertheless it remains a good idea, workable in places. Just don't bet the ranch on it.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.
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