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Redefining the Partner Experience — Now

Webinfinity: Redefining the Partner Experience — Now | 2

If You’re Relying on Yesterday’s PRM Technology, You’re Already Losing the Game

PRM systems have always been cumbersome and at least slightly inadequate. Even today — as the demand for PRM is growing and technology is advancing at seemingly breakneck speed in every other corner of our lives — PRM is at best failing to meet its potential in one or more critical ways. All of this is especially true for the technology industry, which arguably operates the most complex channel and partner ecosystem in the business universe.

For example, no PRM system until now has come close to doing for strategic business-to-business content marketing and engagement what has been achieved in the world of business-to-consumer content marketing.

Traditional approaches to PRM — and that means everything up to this point — no longer meet the standard of good design. Companies, their customers, and their partners have come to expect simple and elegant digital experiences from every online experience.

Their partner experience should be no exception.

No one has ever loved partner relationship management (PRM) systems. They’ve never really worked the way each person in the chain really wished they would. They’ve always been something of a necessary evil.


So why have partner experiences lagged?Because until now, no company had the magical mix of technological vision combined with deep consulting, rich understanding of the total content matrix, and design-led solutions in the PRM and partner space.

Webinfinity believes it’s time to stop thinking about PRM and start thinking about the partner experience and what that means from a content-driven perspective of the channel environment. It’s time a company creatively and keenly focused its technology on taming and illuminating what PRM has really become: digital experiences driven by interactions across myriad systems and content sources — structured and unstructured alike.

That’s the new vision of PRM. The new world of PRM. And now, it’s here.


While the Demand for PRM Grows, the Market Lacks a LeaderPRM has already shifted toward a digital experience platform market — and it’s a market that’s growing and coming into focus.

“Digital experience vendors recognize the need for a broad, well-integrated set of capabilities and have gone on a spending spree to either buy or build this out. Vendors hope to expand their relationships within an account and become ‘sticky’ to stakeholders across technology, marketing, and business roles.”

— The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015

Forrester goes on to state that while Adobe stands out for its integration efforts, Acquia, Demandware, and Salesforce shine with their cloud strategies. Meanwhile, Episerver, IBM, Oracle, and SAP are “rationalizing their portfolios.”

SECTION 1: THE MARKET IS GROWING, BUT PRM REMAINS BROKEN


Regardless of what you call this technology, how you compare its features, or how you measure any vendor’s differentiators, one fact is crystal clear: It’s a market with a technology that is still emerging, still taking shape. We agree with how Gartner explains this, based on its research:

“Whether called digital experience platforms, customer experience platforms, or user experience platforms, the technology for creating effective, high-fidelity user experiences across a breadth of services and across channels and devices continues to emerge. And the sites and apps created by a UXP can be deployed across multiple channels and devices. … By 2017, the user experience platform market will have fully emerged.”

— Market Guide for User Experience Platforms, Gartner, 2015

For example, business-to-consumer content marketing has seen tremendous growth, adoption, and success. But for businesses-to-business marketing — and especially with channel partners — companies have lagged in adopting even the most foundational requirements for content marketing success.

Research by SiriusDecisions says poor content management is a “silent killer” of sales opportunities.1

1 https://www.highspot.com/resource/fixing-the-sales-content-problem/

https://www.highspot.com/resource/fixing-the-sales-content-problem/

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“The partner experience is the exact same principal as the customer experience,” says Curtis Bingham, executive director of the Chief Customer Officer Council. “Companies need to change their attitude and behavior toward their partners so that they treat them as well as they do customers. If there is no partner engagement, the company has limited ability to influence the customer experience at the far end.”2

• SiriusDecisions and other research firms have notedthat B2B organizations have been unable to measurethe process by which their content is created and theperformance of that content after it’s activated.

• Forrester’s research has shown that bad partnerexperiences will negatively impact any company’scompetitiveness, and fragmented and inefficient PRMsystems will degrade efficiency.

All of that paints a harsh reality when you consider that even the best PRM vendors lead only in some areas while lagging in others, and no vendor has best-of-breed offerings in all six of what Forrester considers a PRM’s core building blocks.

Channel-based companies, and especially those in the technology sector, meanwhile, continue to suffer from:

Fragmented and inefficient systems

Poor content management

Solutions that are difficult to scale

Bad partner experiences that impact competitiveness

Lack of effective measurements and metrics to optimize performance

Even Today’s Best PRM Solutions Are Broken and Hurting You

SECTION 2: EVEN THE CURRENT GENERATION IS WEAK

Even if you’re using one of today’s best PRM solutions, you’re relying on outdated technology and suffering as a result. Don’t take our word for it.

2 http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/brand-deliver-partners-critical-customer-experience-01659334#FkrQbhBDyIp1w2fW.97

http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/brand-deliver-partners-critical-customer-experience-01659334#tZhVcudW2yjS8hgP.97

http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/brand-deliver-partners-critical-customer-experience-01659334#tZhVcudW2yjS8hgP.97


Adobe’s integrated platform … mostly supports

marketing.

Impartner … features a legacy user experience.

Allbound … suffers from weak core functionality.

SAP hybris … has a raft of

not-yet-mature products.

IBM’s portfolio rationalization … lacks shared

urgency.

Relayware … is fatally fragmented.

Sitecore … is not yet battle-tested.

Salesforce … requries infinite customization

and needs more integration.

Oracle’s integration …

hinges on cloud.

Demandware’s cloud and partner strategies … have pricing that limits

relevance.

Acquia’s platform … lacks

breadth.

FORRESTER’S 2015 ASSESSMENT OF THE TOP PLAYERS IN THE GAME

What’s the common denominator all of those vendors lack? What’s the one glaringly absent element that would make you say, “Yes, that’s it!”

The catalyst for disrupting this market in a way that benefits any company whose lifeblood depends on partner relationships and management is simply this:

People expect simple and elegant digital experiences in every aspect of their lives. Their partner experience should be no exception. Traditional approaches to PRM do not meet the new standards of invisible integration and quality design that people have come to expect in the rest of their online lives.


Disrupting the PRM Market: A Single Digital FabricIt’s time to redefine the partner experience through solution-driven technology and channel-led consulting experiences that weave PRM systems and content together in a single digital fabric. Nothing less than that will shift things in a way that addresses what companies, analysts, and partners all say is missing — even from today’s best PRM technology.

Imagine a PRM that disrupts the market rather than simply offering one more variation on an increasingly confusing theme. Imagine a PRM that:

• Creates an experience of a “single pane of glass” for the entire user community

• Presents all of a company’s systems, all of its content, from any channel, any source — unadulterated

• Provides a scalable, best-in-class, next-generation partner and user experience right out of the box

• Leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure: enterprise-grade technology proven by some of the world’s largest companies

• Coexists with any system of record, including Salesforce

SECTION 3: GAME CHANGER


An advantageous market disrupter will offer a user experience that places the digital universe in proper order. It will simplify and enhance digital experiences by weaving user interactions across multiple systems and content — structured and unstructured alike — in a single digital fabric.

A platform that dramatically changes the game will not be a traditional PRM in any way. It won’t merely rip and replace legacy systems. It will create an elegant user experience that integrates and enhances a company’s existing PRM assets, from system-of-record software to any type of content.

IMAGINE LIVING WITH YOUR CURRENT PRM FUNCTIONALITY AND REFINING IT OVER TIME. THAT CONCEPT ALONE WOULD REPRESENT A WHOLE NEW INFRASTRUCTURE.

The critical difference between a valid market disrupter and anything in the market today will be its integration of multiple systems and content sources in a single digital layer, developed by a team that combines technology insight with years of consulting expertise to solve the most complex channel puzzles.

The unique results and business benefits are obvious: a better partner experience for everyone in the partnership with measurable results, ongoing support and refinement, and a commitment to long-term success. That’s Webinfinity.

UNIFORM TAGGING MODEL

UNSTRUCTUREDDATA

VideoPDF

WordExcel

STRUCTUREDDATA

Partner Data

Contact Data

Leads

Opportunities

PRM FUNCTIONS

Business Planning

MDF

Partner Marketing

Partner Education


The Creative Disrupter RevealedWebinfinity may seem new to the PRM scene. As a company it is. But its founders are not. Webinfinity was born from 17 years of PRM-related domain expertise and technology innovation. It has created a new SaaS platform built from the ground up to support its founders’ next-generation vision of PRM: a single digital fabric for every piece and type of content and every PRM function.

SECTION 4: WEBINFINITY

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3The Uniform Tagging Model™ also makes it possible for Webinfinity to integrate with systems of record in a way that enables bidirectional updates. Users can operate within any system of record — Salesforce, for example — “in the background,” without leaving the Webinfinity platform.

SYSTEM OF RECORD INTEGRATION


By applying a User Experience Platform model developed out of channel consulting and design experience, Webinfinity is years ahead of its PRM competitors. It is a vanguard User Experience Platform — and the only one dedicated exclusively to PRM.

It’s a unique approach to PRM that gives partner programs years of competitive advantage based on three key innovations:

Webinfinity has developed a method to analyze and create usable intelligence from the vast wealth of unstructured data available on the web, without custom coding and complex data models. This allows Webinfinity customers to move at the speed of their business. It enables everyone in their channel ecosystem to be more effective and make decisions faster. Our technology abstracts structured and unstructured content alike through our Uniform Tagging Model™. This allows Webinfinity to interact with any type of content in a single interface and present it through a single pane of glass.

Just as in life, each Webinfinity experience is unique. Each experience is based on the unique needs and preferences of the specific user. The Uniform Tagging Model™ enables publishers and users to curate and refine elegant user experiences, eliminating the frustration of fruitless searches and multiple systems with their clunky, outdated user interfaces.

TAGS

ROLE-DRIVEN INTERFACE


91% 89% 85% 83% 80%

With deep roots in solving channel and partner experience challenges, Webinfinity has built an implementation and service methodology that supports each customer for rapid near-term results, provides measurable success over the long haul, and gives them flexibility to build out their platform as their needs and capacity grow.

Webinfinity measures everything and conducts Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with every client. We assess performance and offer suggested refinements that either we perform or help the client do themselves.

Turning the corner on the PRM path starts with getting content distribution right. That’s why Webinfinity technology places a content-centric approach at the center of all of a client’s PRM functions and methodologies. Then they’re empowered to realize the vision of a single digital fabric for all their PRM functions.

More Than Technology Dropped on the Doorstep

PARTNER EXPERIENCE SATISFACTION RATINGS*

delivers business value

easy to find what you need

easy-to-use, easy-to-understand

navigation

“extremely useful” self-service

features

next-generation user experience a “big” improvement

* Aggregated Webinfinity user satisfaction surveys


The Future of PRM: Already in Use by Industry-leading CompaniesBecause of its world-class software and best-practice consulting and support services, Webinfinity is trusted by some of the world’s leading technology companies that depend on great partner relationships.

SECTION 5: CLIENTS

Publicly traded, FY 2016 revenues:

$4 billion Publicly traded, FY 2016 revenues:

$5.5 billion Publicly traded, FY 2015 revenues:

$1.05 billion


The New Order: Where the Rubber Meets the RoadFrom CA Technologies to Verizon to Firmenich, when you strip away all of the technological talk, Webinfinity has redefined the user experience in a way that gives companies — especially technology companies — five key benefits.

SECTION 6: FEATURES AND BENEFITS

1Requiring no code, no customization, and no technical expertise, you can easily deploy Webinfinity in a fraction of the time of its competitors, yet with an unparalleled partner and user experience.

FAST DEPLOYMENT

2By aggregating and augmenting existing systems, Webinfinity clearly delivers its own ROI, while critically maximizing investments in existing platforms.

MEASURABLE ROI

3Weaving together all of a customer’s systems and content sources, Webinfinity creates a “single pane of glass” experience for the user community — regardless of the speed or complexity of any back-office growth and evolution.

EASY, ASSURED SCALABILITY

4Built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, with enterprise-grade technology proven by some of the world’s largest companies, Webinfinity provides a best-in-class, next-generation partner and user experience right out of the box.

READY TO RUN

5Based on transaction volumes — not on punitive user licenses or heavy implementation costs — Webinfinity pricing is simple to understand and scale, based on measurable success.

FAIR PRICING


Webinfinity redefines the partner experience by weaving systems and content together

into a single digital fabric.

It’s born from and delivered with incredibly deep channel knowledge and experience, to drive greater revenue, increased productivity,

maximized deal flow, and enhanced partner satisfaction.

About Webinfinity

Webinfinity redefines the partner experience by weaving together systems and content in a single digital fabric. Traditional approaches to PRM no longer meet the standards of good design. People expect simple and elegant digital experiences in every aspect of their lives. Their partner experience should be no exception. Headquartered in Huntington, N.Y., we’re online at www.webinfinity.com.

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