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.

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.