Onboarding is one of the most important steps of the channel partner relationship. This primary phase is all about making first impressions – and you never get a second chance to make first impressions. A weakened or scattered onboarding management system devalues and dismantles business’s partner relationships even before beginning. Companies that are still hobbling along manual, error-prone, cumbersome onboarding processes have to suffer from numerous pitfalls such as partner disengagement, deteriorated partner performance, dissatisfied end customers, and lost time, money, and effort invested in recruiting the partner.
A centralized approach to trading partner onboarding and management can help enterprises build strong relationships with their trading partners. It acts as an aid in making the onboarding process more comprehensive, thus minimizing partner’s service delivery time and maximizing their ongoing engagement and productivity.
A structured approach to partner onboarding helps organizations reduce complexity, onboard partners much faster, and reap significantly better business outcomes.
Old is not always gold
Well-renowned research firm Ovum found that about 40% of businesses consume more than a period of a month to onboard a new trading partner.
With the number of partners increasing exponentially each day, onboarding has become even more difficult. Many companies rely on manual processes and B2B/EDI connections to support the growing partner ecosystem – morphing into a highly complex environment. This approach needs IT squads to connect each partner manually to multiple applications, resulting in inefficient, redundant processes. Changes to this complex network calls for a lot of execution time, resulting in onboarding backlogs, lack of visibility into trading partner relationships, and time-consuming errors.
Organizations with such ineffective onboarding processes in place need to address the situation right away – their integration capabilities need to be upgraded.
Key Upgrades to Partner Onboarding Capability
We’ve uncovered major capabilities to success shared by best-in-class channel suppliers that have proven effective in transforming partner relationships, accelerating partner ramp times, and accelerating first-year revenue production.
Pre-built Templates:
This capability enables business users to establish valuable business data connections with their partners without IT intervention. This core feature helps in reducing onboarding time by 75 percent, and enables enterprises to trade with their new partners faster, improving cash flow and generating more working capital. Further, it allows businesses to go after new markets and customers more aggressively by being easier to do business with.
Pre-built templates allow businesses to reuse their partner profiles and automate data migration processes. To add, since this capability supports all types of data formats, structured and unstructured both, enterprises can generate and customize myriad integration projects, allowing them to quickly build out even more complex transformation initiatives in a short span of time.
Pre-Built Application Connectors:
QuickBooks, Salesforce,NetSuite, SharePoint,MS Dynamics CRM, HubSpot,Shopify, Marketo, Big Commerce, etc., the Pre-built application connectors for the most sought-after cloud applications allow businesses to create data connections and exchange information directly with these applications. Having a single integration platform embedded with these pre-built connectors in place supports all the advanced protocols, including, FTP, SFTP,
AS2, JMS and more, one needs to assist a trading partner. Hence, the need for enterprises to invest in costly software to support different protocols is no longer necessary.
Customized Dashboards:
Creating and maintaining successful partner relationships requires transparency throughout the onboarding process. Monitoring dashboards delivers real-time information that helps everyone know the challenges affecting revenue-driving business relationships. This helps minimize business disruption and enables companies to manage partner agreements proactively. It enables businesses to view the exchanged information along with historical logs in real-time. Hence, if a company wishes to verify partner data exchanged earlier, they can do so without any problems or errors.
In addition, this comprehensive reporting tool offers faster issue resolution which is essential in building strong relationships with trading partners.
Single Integration Platform
Decentralized partner onboarding approaches are not equipped to support all the trading partners in parallel. In fact, it requires a new piece of software or module to be installed every time the company tries to tie up with a new trading partner. With a preloaded and preconfigured single platform, firms can access the advanced protocols to provide full support to all the trading partners. It helps them become easier to do business with and delights their customers with an impeccable onboarding experience.
To conclude, enterprises who need to create new revenue channels and expedite growth need to opt a single data integration platform to simplify their onboarding processes and create a colossal partner ecosystem.