All You Need to Know About Dynamics 365 Partner Portal

Most businesses have partners with whom they take major business decisions, invest together, build strategies, etc. To do all this smoothly, one must communicate properly and efficiently. Misunderstandings can ruin the strategy or the bond between partners, ultimately affecting the business.

Dynamics 365 partner portal is an incredible solution that helps businesses achieve neat communication and be on the same page. Vendors, installers, and other parties can be on the same page and easily access the communication, business insights, etc. 

In this blog, we will know every detail you need to know about the partner portal. So, let’s begin with the basics:

What is a Partner Portal?

As the name says, a partner portal is made to manage business partners. It is a one-stop solution for all businesses dealing with partners. Its main purpose is to help partners stay on the same page.

The partner portal comprises tools that enable partners to:

• Strategize marketing programs
• Educate the team about new additions, current trends, or customer demands
• Generate high revenue
• Make more sales, etc.

With a partner portal, you can even enable an outside company to access certain information to boost productivity. Here the outside company must have a connection with the central business to access the information.

The partner portal plays a significant role in Partner Relationship Management (PRM). A partner portal is meant only for managing business operations. It is protected with passwords and two-factor authentication to keep users and their data secure.

You can customize a partner portal to get the desired features and security options to smoothen your communication and engagement with partner/s.

Why Use a Partner Portal?

The main reason to use a partner portal is to use it as a bridge between a business and its affiliates. A partner portal can be used for multiple purposes like promotions, sales, record maintenance, public relations, etc. One of the advantages of a partner portal is that you and your affiliates can use it from any device convenient to you from anywhere.

Many companies use partner software to archive information, store it, spread it, etc. With the power to enhance employee relationships, affiliate communication, and stakeholder trust, the partner portal is the tool that makes it very easy to work with partners.

After knowing the ‘what’s’ and ‘why’s’ of a partner portal, let’s determine what advantages you can get from Partner portals.

Chief Advantages of a Partner Portal

Enhanced Collaboration

This Is the main advantage of partner portals. It enhances communication and collaboration between partners. It gives a central system to carry out communications on all things smoothly. You will save a lot of time that could have been wasted during an email conversation and waiting for a reply.

Easy to Access

With an easy-to-access partner portal, channel partners can access the resources anytime. And as on-demand resources are available, there will be no delay in synchronizing any channel partner’s sales or communication cycle.

Partner Focused

Personalization is the best way to enhance partners’ experience on your portal and make operations easy for them to manage. You can automatically tailor the content to your partner’s activities, engagement, usage, interests, etc., with the Dynamics 365 portal. And if you provide the best services to them, more partners will be willing to work with you and invest in your business.

Document Management

With a partner portal, you can store, maintain, and manage all sales, partnerships, and product-related documents with central access. You can enable security features like MFA and role-based access to save them from data breaches. 

Mobile Responsive

As you know, mobile phones are an essential part of human lives now as it is the most convenient way to perform any digital activity. With a mobile responsive partner portal, you and your partner can access and track the activities easily via your smartphones anywhere you want.

Easy KPIs Measuring

A partner portal is an excellent tool for gaining accurate and instant key insights. It helps you to comprehend your across-the-board performance by assisting you to recognize the departments like sales, partner engagement performance, etc., where you are succeeding along with the ones that need modification. You can track these metrics and note down the areas that need more investments as per your partner’s sales cycle.

Unified Dashboard

Partner portal functions as a single point of access for partners. You can easily retrieve and receive data or information of any kind, assign investments, evaluate leads, decide goals, etc., with a click.

 eLearning and Training

Increasing the learning curve is important, and partner portals help enhance the learning curve for employees and partners via real-time video training. It even streamlines pre-sales and post-sales with a certificate for people who attended the training sessions to increase enthusiasm.

Now the question is, what will you need to avail these benefits? The right features. Here I have mentioned some ‘must-have features to leverage the above benefits through your partner portal:

‘Must-have’ Features of a Partner Portal

Database Management

This is the most prominent feature that you must have for a partner portal solution. It will help you fetch more leads in the database. Later, it will integrate them with the workflow even if you don’t have a CRM.

Role-based Access

With role-based access, you can secure sensitive data from being available without permission. You can give limited access to data and even edit the authorities of the person with access. For example, you may just want some partners to view the document and restrict them from making any changes; then, you can restrict them from editing by defining their access rights.

Purchase & Invoicing

With this feature, you can easily enable, edit, and manage specific discounts for partners. It generates POs, invoices, etc., to keep the records for later insights.

Asset Repository

You can easily access the asset repository from the partner portal. This will enable you to store all the marketing and sales material for your business partners.

Potential Challenges with Partner Portal Implementation

Although partner portals come with incredible benefits that can help your business to grow without any hurdles. But when it comes to implementing the partner portal, it can get a bit tricky. Here, you need to be careful about the purpose you have developed a partner portal and for which purpose you are using it. 

For example, if you have developed the partner software to manage the sales cycle but are using it for product updates. This way, you cannot get all the benefits of the partner portal, and you will find it tricky to use its features too. And you will never be able to use the partner portal fully if you don’t use it for the right purpose.

You may face some issues while using partner portal like:

• Process mapping 
• Content change
• Multimedia migration
• Deployment issues
• UI/UX design
• Database Management & Integration

Here, the good thing is that you can avoid mistakes, customize the partner portal, and never face such challenges. You just need a leading company to customize the partner portal for your business.

Wrapping Up

If you have a large-scale business or are just starting, having a partner portal can benefit you. You can  enhance communication and collaboration with your partners. Here’s how:

• First, list the challenges you and your partners are facing
• Secondly, communicate with a portal development company
• Third, list out the features you need in your portal
• Fourth, get personalized demo
• Finally avail yourself of the portal benefits and strengthened partner relationship.

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