You don’t need IT to say “Howdy Partner”!

Businesses today heavily rely on partnerships and their collaborative functions in order to survive and succeed in an extremely competitive business environment. A robust partner channel forms the distribution network, crucial for the product and services of an enterprise. A strong partner network is vital to implementing successful sales and marketing strategy, since the distribution network lends massive scale to any fast growing company. Strategic partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, technology alliances and product pivoting add additional pressure on business decisions in this high-pressure environment.

Nearly 60 percent of partnerships fail due to the inability of enterprises to accurately govern, access and share sales activities across a partner ecosystem in a timely manner. This issue is exacerbated as the number of partners grows within the ecosystem and business teams try to manage this complexity by relying on manual processes and spreadsheets.

Business teams need the ability to spin-up a context-specific, collaborative pipeline management application, in real-time, so they can share information across their partners. App Overlays address this need. App Overlays allow line of business in partner organizations to collaboratively capture, visualize and exchange data in real-time and can be designed to bridge this growing gap between IT and business in the partnership model. It helps simplify data access and automation by breaking down operational silos. 

An App Overlay is a non-invasive approach to business automation. A UI- driven business process designer and an intuitive application designer serve as the core of this new breed of business technology offering; a simple way for businesses to take control over designing mission-critical applications, by circumventing IT bottlenecks, bureaucratic gridlocks and quickly adapting to changing business environment.While business users in partnerships have the freedom, self-reliance and ability to access, capture analyze and exchange data, IT can have total control over their data-sources and ensure security and operational efficiency.

App Overlays enable business users to successfully build mission-critical applications around partnership functions and offers an end-to-end self-serviceable model with key benefits that differ from a traditional B2B exchange to meet the needs of this partner economy such as:

• Real-time exchange of data and transparency between partners
• Advanced policy management
• Apply rules-based mapping of partner data to their respective data sources
• No need to transfer data physically to the overlay apps

 Partner-driven Business Development and Sales

Some of the key capabilities that help build a successful partner network include:  

• Gaining proactive visibility into your partner’s pipeline to catalyze “influence” sales activities
• Sharing information securely to build processes around SKU mapping and royalty distribution
• Conflict resolution around deals and commissions
• Optimizing and justifying a dynamic program spend

 Users can spin up mission critical apps and collaborate with their partners to gain visibility into their partner’s sales activities and design processes to automate influence sales, which accelerates the time to close and significantly shortens the sales cycle.

An overlay app can serve as an efficient biz ops technology for Partner Enablement teams to track their respective program-spend in real-time and optimize the entire MDF process. By allowing Partner Enablement professionals to track and monitor their channel partners' spending patterns, the platform helps companies to dynamically reallocate and optimize their resources based on the changing channel patterns, and accurately calculate and run reports on the ROI of the program-spend to C-level executives.

These use cases are just the tip of the iceberg for the potential of App Overlays for enterprises. Business users can extend the capabilities that these platforms offer for a wide range and variety of functions that help adapt to the rapidly changing business landscape.