Impartner PRM Reviews

Impartner PRM are specialists in what it does. I never got to the point where I was using all of the tools. I would have loved to, but it was so rich. And it has a very good library system where all collateral can be held. You can set it up. Collateral and content are a big issue, but it manages it very well. However, the business has to provide the content. So that's part of the issue with companies, they're not prepared. They haven't created their partner strategy, and the business isn't ready to give a piece of the cake, so to speak, to a third party. Now that's nothing to do with Impartner. That's just partnering and sales culture.

I like Impartner PRM's deep understanding of partnering; the tool understands and the tool enables you to sign up partners very quickly and give them the tools and the access they require to do what they need to do. So it can take a partner all the way from forming an interest with an organization all the way through to selling, then reselling, and then managing their partners. 

It's very easy for you to introduce new products. It's a complete solution - it manages and gives access to the partners so that they can see and work with the internal sales teams for the organizations as well as the customers. So, as you're moving it through the pipeline, both the salesperson from the company and also the partner can see where it is in the pipeline, when it's likely to close, and any issues or problems. So, it enables the partnering organization and the technology company to work together very well. It's a very good communication tool.

So, it's through the Impartner portal of this tool. I have seen some improvements in communication with the partners. But it is heavily dependent on how it's set up, but it's very easy and quick to set up. However, it's very much dependent on the person setting it up knowing what they're doing.

It certainly has analytics. It can analyze training, for instance, whether or not the training is successful. Often, working with a CRM tool like Salesforce will analyze how long it takes partners to start to become successful and how long it takes to sign them up. Then, it can start looking at which products are being sold and where there are issues with products. So, the reporting part is very straightforward. 

But, the reporting is only as good as the system's setup and the discipline of partners who input data into it.  

The business using the tool must be well-prepared in terms of partner strategy.

The customer service and support are very good. On occasions, I got a technical support specialist working with me. To create the links with the CRM system was very straightforward. It was one day's work, which they didn't charge us for. That was to get us up and running. So they've got some straight out-of-the-box links that you can use, and it worked very well.

Positive

I've worked with Salesforce PRM and Oracle PRM for many years. I've been in the industry 20 years. So, for me, my preference is Impartner. Salesforce's focus, in my opinion, is around sales teams. Impartner is different in that they have built it from the ground up for partner, third-party selling.

So it's a very rich tool. It's got many different parts to it: marketing, the digital side, it can even cover legal. It's a very, very rich tool. With Impartner, you can easily get it up and running very quickly as opposed to Salesforce, which doesn't really function straight out of the box. It takes much longer to set up. It's going to take consulting time.

The thing is, with Impartner, if you come from a partnering background, it's got the tools that you want. It understands partnering within technology, but it could also be used for other types of industry partnering as well.

So, I would favor Impartner every time. Salesforce is fine, it's a huge, great big enterprise system, but Impartner actually works very well with Salesforce as well.

You can easily do it within six weeks, but - and this is the big but - you have to have done your upfront planning. You have to have your plan and your architecture. What I do is create a program.

And there is the other thing, people start working with partners and very often don't actually have the products ready to go to market and haven't considered how to reward partners. So price books have to be correct. It's a much more nuanced and intuitive process. 

The software can't do that for you, but it does enable you to reward partners. So the problem often isn't the software. The problem is the business has to understand and have a strategy around partners. Because if you don't have a strategy around partners and they haven't enabled their tools to be sold by partners, then you're simply not going to be successful.

I have seen 100% improvements in terms of money saving or time saving using this tool. If you set up the legal process within the system, for instance, the partner can come on and sign the standardized terms and conditions on the portal. You've got Adobe Sign. They sign up. They can then immediately get access to the sales processes and the sales collateral. It takes a partner to market much, much quicker.

As long as the company has prepared everything for the partner, you can enable them because Impartner has a training platform as well. It creates a partner journey so the partner comes on and starts the training. But again, that's all got to be there. If everything is there, then you can certainly expect that within three months, if the partner does its training, you can certainly expect to enable them to sell.

I have seen it take 18 months where partners have been trying to sign up and sell our products. Because the processes weren't in place, the legal documentation was all over the place, and we were still waiting 18 months just to get through the legal process. It was dreadful. With this tool, we saw a lot of time saving with this tool.

It was very inexpensive. It's in the cloud.  You get the first 100 user licenses, and you can set that up. This was about 18 months to 2 years ago, for around $22,000 to $23,000. So, there are no upfront costs. It's a monthly payment, so you can easily start or stop using it, unlike the high upfront costs of consultants coming in and analyzing your whole business. So you can switch it on, you can switch it off, rather than the great big upfront costs of consultants coming in, analyzing the whole business. 

Then, with Salesforce, it's not out of the box. It has to all be configured. And if you've got a weak CRM system and weak processes and systems, it gets more and more complicated because you then have to go back in and reengineer your sales processes to enable it. Whereas Impartner can fit alongside the CRM system and can work quite successfully.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I really liked using it because I had a sense that they understood the business.

I believe that Impartner PRM is useful for managing many partners, much like how Salesforce operates. When comparing Impartner PRM to Salesforce, it's worth noting that Salesforce offers a finite number of licenses. In contrast, Impartner PRM enables users to create unlimited users without any concern about running out of partner licenses. So, I think that's the best use case I could see with the solution. Impartner PRM is a dedicated platform for partner relationship management. In contrast, Salesforce communities or experience can serve as a general-purpose feature that can be used for customer support or partner portals. As such, Impartner PRM is a more focused solution for managing partner relationships.

In Impartner PRM, CMS stands out. However, it is important to note that Impartner has more control over it than the client. The other most advantageous feature of the solution is CRM Sync, which enables users to synchronize records between Impartner PRM and the CRM of their choice, be it Salesforce or Dynamics CRM. Another feature I appreciate is the modular form builder in CMS. This tool allows partners to access a window to register deals via the portal while unknowingly using our Salesforce or CRM system. So, whenever a user creates a new record, it is directly created in Salesforce or the CRM of their choice, without any intermediary software in Impartner PRM.

I have been working with Salesforce for many years, and I have noticed that Impartner PRM has several areas that could be improved. It is not entirely fair to compare Impartner PRM with Salesforce, as Salesforce has many more features. However, Impartner PRM needs to improve its CMS editor as they have a lot of control over the tool. So, if changes need to be made, users must reach out to them, and Impartner PRM can manage those changes on the back-end instead of requiring users to make changes from outside the tool. Additionally, I believe that the solution's workflows need improvement in terms of cross-object automation.

The ease of deployment of the solution in both the admin side, the internal user interface side, and the partner-facing interface is a feature that can be added to the solution's future releases. I believe that having the ability to easily build and make changes or implementations in a staging environment and then seamlessly deploy it to production is a must-have feature. The current process of building and testing on stage and then repeating the same process for production is time-consuming.

Since I have been using Impartner PRM since October, it has only been a few months. I don't know the version of the solution I am using, and I am not sure exactly where I can find it. Also, my company is a customer of the solution.

Based on my experience, I would say that Impartner PRM is about 70% stable. However, there are some instances when making changes to the CMS can be a bit clunky.

It is a scalable product.

I did contact the solutions technical support team, and based on my interactions with them, I would say that their support team is good. There were a few instances where I submitted a ticket, and it took Impartner PRM support a while to check on it. However, I believe that the reason for the delay may be due to the high volume of support tickets they receive. If the issue is urgent, they do work on it immediately. Otherwise, if I don't hear back, I can reach out to their CSM, and they will follow up with the support management team of Impartner PRM, especially if I have a very urgent ticket that needs to be looked into right away. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Although I was not part of the implementation team when our company started using Impartner PRM, I can say that from an experiential standpoint, it is easy to work on. Since the tool has already been built, all that is required is to tweak and improve it. However, one downside is that we cannot deploy changes from stage to production, which is a must-have feature for ease of implementation. With Salesforce, we can use change sets or other methods to deploy feature changes or any work done in Salesforce Sandbox to production. Currently, it is difficult to build and test in stages and then to manually rebuild it again in production and do the same tests. If we could deploy changes easily, we could ensure that all dependencies are validated properly and then test them again instead of building them from scratch.

Impartner PRM is deployed on the cloud, and I am unsure if it is on AWS or Azure.

I don't know the product's price. It is actually the project manager who knows about the product's pricing.

I would recommend that others interested in the solution use it because it provides a user-friendly setup process. It's easy to navigate through the setup process. Although the CMS editor is a bit clunky and has room for improvement, I would still recommend it because its setup process is easy.

Impartner PRM's admin site and the way it syncs with your chosen CRM is easy. Connecting it via OaaS and managing accounts and records is easy. However, there are a couple of downsides. Firstly, there is limited control over the partner-facing portal's CMS portal. They have more control over it. Secondly, their reporting features are not that good. I believe that it would be beneficial for the solution to give us more control over its CMS side. This would allow us, as clients, to customize the partner-facing portal to better suit our needs.

It would be helpful to have an improved reporting tool in the solution. While Impartner PRM is a good platform for managing partners, there is room for improvement. Therefore, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution is the backbone of our partner program which is infrastructure enablement. Partners use the solution to access training and marketing collateral like case studies, white papers, resource guides, training and marketing videos, production documentation, etc. 

The solution has helped us improve all across the board. Everything that we did before PRM was a one-off. We shared the content back and forth through emails. Whenever there was a scope for training or enablement, a mail would be sent on the same. The solution has helped us scale where partners could use opportunities to get trained on our services and products.

The solution is a one-stop shop for our partners to do business with us. The solution has helped us scale our partner programs. Our partners were able to register deals. There was also an asset library. The partners could register for events like thought leadership events and educational marketing events which could be either partner-specific or for the general public.

I would like to see some easy ways to retrieve reports, data analytics, etc. The solution needs to be more specific from the data reporting perspective. It would make it easier to drill down by specific partners.

It would be interesting to see some integrations and partnerships for the solution where they could make use of the account mapping tools.

I have been using the solution for four to five years. I am using the solution’s latest version.

I would rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten. I am the admin of the solution. There is also another admin who is reporting to me. Some of the partner managers and their operations teams also use the solution.

The solution’s customer service and support are good. I would rate them around an eight or nine.

Positive

The solution’s implementation depends on your organization’s sales operations and processes. I implemented it from scratch. It was in the half-implemented phase and I completed the rest. Some of the other things that I had implemented had been far too complex. You get a dedicated project manager to assist you during the solution’s onboarding process. They help us with the things that we are trying to solve.

We have seen ROI with the use of the solution. However, by looking at the number of deals that have been registered and closed on an annual basis, I think that the company should do a better job of getting more deals done. I think we are overpaying for the tool.

The solution’s pricing is higher compared to other competitor products.

We plan to increase the solution’s usage in the future for our partners. The tool offers unlimited user access. It depends mainly on how you negotiate the contract. We have seen an increase in partner activity and login rates after adopting the solution.

The solution makes your life easier from an admin operational perspective. It cuts down a lot of time-consuming admin work.