International PRM Deployment
Background
Company E is a British business specialising in equipment for large public venues such as arenas, concert halls and conference centres. They are a well established player in the sector, with buoyant international sales across Europe, Asia and the USA. Varega has been providing support to Company E for many years, having helped them to expand into several markets including France, Sweden and Russia, by growing an extensive network of distributors and resellers.
The Opportunity
Existing distributors and resellers constantly feed the sales pipeline with new opportunities. They are also natural prospects for any new product introduced by company E. Indeed, company E is extremely proactive in growing its exports, and regularly requests Varega’s support to prospect new territories and channels.
The Challenge
With an ever growing number of partners, contacts, and sales opportunities -each at a different stage of maturity- managing information is becoming increasingly important and resource intensive. Maintaining information systems can however be ineffective, time consuming and, if manually based, can lead to the loss or corruption of critical data.
Varega
The decision was taken to deploy a dedicated PRM (Partner Relationship Management) solution. Channeltivity was selected as a recognized leader in this field and best suited to provide a solution to our activities with Company E. After a full analysis of our business processes, Varega proceeded to import all data into the PRM solution, from the most basic company details to "live" info relating to ongoing opportunities. Thanks to Channeltivity's PRM flexibility and its user-friendliness, the whole process was quickly completed. We particularly benefited from the opportunity to customise fields, the system's speed and reliability and the back-up service provided by the Channeltivity Support Desk.
The Results
In less than 3 months, benefits were noticed: we eliminated the need for repeated updates and a great amount of time was saved. Thanks to build-in reports, tracing actions can be identified without requiring reviews, allowing them to be performed in a more in-depth manner. Moreover, statistics are automatically compiled, thus providing a continuous representation of the performance of the business.
The PRM has also proven to be an excellent communication tool. The Company E’s resellers, who have been given access to it, can view not only their own data but also the company's news and documentation, such as catalogues and price lists.
As the deployment coincided with a prospective campaign on a new territory, we were able to make full use of the distributor on-boarding set of functions. It proved ideal to manage the whole recruiting process, from initial market research to the signature of agreements, and covering such features as reseller evaluation (scorecards) or contact history.
PRM seems now a natural and indispensable tool of our activity, just like emails or Powerpoint.
