There’s no way to build a company alone. In the same way that founders could never reach their goals without sales, marketing, customer support, R&D, and HR teams, one company standing alone won’t get half as far as one that invests deeply in connecting with other companies in its space.
That’s why savvy companies invest in partnership teams and partner programs. Partner marketing teams can help create deals between companies to increase both of their reach with activities such as co-marketing, lead sharing, special offers, and more. Product partnership teams help create connections between complementary products — whether it’s integrations between products, add-ons, or to ultimately create a superior experience for customers.
Partner relationship management (PRM) is a key part of growth for scaling businesses in many industries, and teams who have built a partnership program know how quickly spreadsheets and manual outreach become too much to handle.
Partner teams seek out companies willing to collaborate, set bi-directional expectations between the company and the partnering organization, create contracts, and follow the performance of the partnership to make sure it’s still mutually beneficial.
It’s a lot of work, and often, the best partner teams are great at walking the line between being diplomatic and ensuring their company is getting what it was promised.
Some of the leading partner relationship management software options in the space, as rated by user reviews and market presence, include Impact.com, Impartner PRM, and Allbound PRM.
Partners are critical in growing your business. If you have a product that is complementary to another product, your teams can work to sell your products together — benefiting both parties and growing your reach.
Having great partnerships means leveraging the brand reach, marketing power, and sales teams of many other companies — and collaborating with them so both your companies can grow and scale together. Especially early on in a company’s journey, partners can be the key to massively expanding your customer base and securing the means to keep growing your business.
Let's take a look at these PRM software options to find one that helps you launch or expand your partner program. Before investing in a new PRM solution, make sure that the platform you choose integrates with your existing systems and tools — like your CRM and marketing software.
And look for an option that can grow with you as your program grows. You’ll notice that many of these PRM apps integrate seamlessly with HubSpot’s CRM Platform, so you can centralize your company’s data and create powerful customer experiences.
Crossbeam also helps you generate highly qualified overlapping leads without digging through spreadsheets, and you can co-market to common leads, prospects, and customers from right in HubSpot.
Best for: Companies looking to expand their reach at the top of the funnel and get actionable insights from their PRM platform — Crossbeam highlights which partnerships are the standouts and helps you track and attribute accurately when partnerships generate deals.
1,000+ companies have installed the Crossbeam integration with HubSpot — see what they think and learn more about the integration.
Reveal also helps teams identify new partner opportunities and add them to your ecosystem, taking some of the heavy networking lift off of your partnerships team.
Best for: Companies looking to get their partner ecosystem started and growing, and who want to be able to show proof of each partner-influenced deal easily.
Read customer reviews and take a deep dive into the features of the Reveal HubSpot integration.
Best for: Companies onboarding many partners at a time who want all partner collateral and data available in one place. Allbound offers unlimited users in the portal.
Using Kiflo with the HubSpot CRM, users can:
Best for: SMBs exploring several types of partnerships, from affiliate marketing and links to referral programs to reseller platforms, as well as traditional company partnerships. Kiflo is ideal for SMBs looking to create, streamline, or scale their partner programs, and is easy-to-use for teams with any level of technical expertise.
“Great platform, works super well and is built to work seamlessly with HubSpot,”Kiflo PRM and HubSpot user Travis Fish, an IT leader, says.
Best for: Retailers and B2B SaaS companies that need to manage the entire lifecycle of their partner ecosystems and require seamless integrations with CRMs like HubSpot.
PartnerStack allows users to manage different types of partner programs, including Referral, Affiliate, and Reseller, and provides access to 65,000+ partners in their marketplace.
Best for: B2B SaaS companies, as PartnerStack is the only PRM built specifically for this segment of businesses.
Channeltivity seeks to make partner management easy with a simple user interface, comes pre-configured with partner relationship best practices, and helps anyone get started right away without significant training. For HubSpot users, the Channeltivity integration with HubSpotis a flexible, powerful connection that you can set up in minutes to scale up partner marketing efforts in a more organized way.
Best for: Technology companies with a channel program looking for a quick solution to manage partners. Channeltivity is built for teams who want everyone to be able to view the details and performance of your partner relationship management work.
Partner Deals Portal is a powerful app built to work with HubSpot through a rich API integration, and you can set it up in a few hours. With this app, the HubSpot CRM can also act as your PRM, giving you the ability to use workflows, list segmentation, and other features to manage partner programs without using any additional tools.
Best for: Companies with existing PRMs who don’t want to switch to a new one but want to connect their partnership information to HubSpot. Or, channel partners who want to give partners access to their Deals portal only — giving them visibility into the entire pipeline, an easy-to-use registration portal, and all of your partner deal information.
Best for: Small, or early-stage growth companies and startups looking to build out their partnerships ecosystem at a lower budget.
One PartnerPortal.io and HubSpot user writes, “The integration is simple and quick - it has great promise. The platform is very easy to use and has clear UI/UX. Overall, it’s a fantastic value for the money. We’re using PP.io to manage all of our partners with our software company.”
About: Impartner PRM has more active partners than any PRM today and over 2.8 million active users. The data gathered from decades of experience with these disparate user cases has allowed Impartner to optimize each stage of the partner journey for an impressive diversity of companies.
Impartner is an out-of-the-box solution that automates onboarding with triggered workflows for partnership applications and approvals that can be customized to your specs. Impartner PRM’s Deal Registration solution builds partner trust and maximizes revenue creation, while Impartner Leads lets you intelligently assign and delegate leads and track closure rates and ROI. All partner deals and leads sync with your HubSpot CRM, and Impartner provides partner management best practices and channel expertise right in the product.
Partners can personalize and co-brand content and collateral that’s easily accessible by all, they can utilize Market Development Funds, and they can graduate to different tiers by improving performance. Your company can empower your partners through News on Demand, Social on Demand, and powerful through-channel-marketing-automation features, while at the same time monitoring key analytics with Impartner’s Business intelligence Engine.
Best for: Any company from startup to enterprise that wants a PRM platform that will grow with any level of complexity and facilitate all partner dynamics found within their unique partner ecosystem. As one of the most used PRMs for decades, Impartner PRM has the requisite infrastructure and customer support to expedite any company’s channel needs.
Best for: Companies and partner teams who conduct business indirectly via distribution or resale looking to get granular in their tracking and categorization of partner leads. Channelyze lets you name HubSpot deals based on deal value, transacting partner, end user name and deal type.
Best for: Companies who want to ensure data cleanliness and perfect attribution of lead sources.
Best for: Enterprise organizations managing large-scale partner programs.
Best for: Marketing teams growing various types of affiliate and referral programs, particularly SaaS organizations or e-commerce brands. With incentives for promoters, this tool offers ongoing engagement support for your program.
“[This integration] is very helpful and responsive to meet my needs. It tracks referrers of leads, provides an incentive, integrates the referral leads into my Deal Flow in HubSpot, and confirms the completion of the actions so the referrer can get their reward when the terms are met,”says Mike Alvarez, a mutual GrowthDrive and HubSpot user.
With actionable partner attribution data, the Everflow integration with HubSpot helps growth teams set up better partnership tracking, source analysis, and compensation structure that’s aligned to pipeline — no complicated manual work required.
Take a look at the guided B2B product demo from Everflowto see the integration in action.
Best for: Data-driven partnerships, international companies, and growing teams who need resources to help them scale. Everflow is designed for partner teams looking to generate more revenue from their partners and maximize growth within their ecosystem.
Traditionally, partner management involved a lot of spreadsheets, with hours spent poring over rows and rows of contacts looking for overlap between two companies’ prospects, leads, and customers.
PRM tools like the ones outlined above take that pain out of partner relationship management, leaving your teams to do the very human work of building relationships between teams at different companies, and building bridges so both companies can benefit from the reach of the other.
Choose which PRM is right for your business and learn how they integrate with HubSpot here.