You can see your Leads and Opportunities but can your Partners?

By Todd Fleming

Senior Consultant, Microsoft Business Solutions

BroadPoint Technologies

In the past couple of years we have worked with companies that sell their products directly and also through a Partner Channel. There are many challenges to overcome when you are faced with this business model. Some of the complaints I hear often are that when you provide Leads to your Partners you don't hear about them again until they place an order. This makes it difficult or impossible to do any accurate sales forecasting. Another common complaint is that the company has little to no exposure in the interactions of Leads and Opportunities once they are turned over to Partners.

The ability for Partners to update Lead and Opportunity information and associate calls and tasks with Leads and Opportunities in your company's CRM solution provides valuable data to the company which can be mined using common Business Intelligence and Reporting tools. Lead response time is another concern. If your process for getting Leads and Opportunities to your Partners is a manual one then this could take a while from the time a Lead expresses an interest until the time the Lead is followed up on. In most industries the response time is a critical factor in determining the lead conversion rate. If it takes too long to follow-up on a Lead your competitor may beat you to the deal.

Partner Portal for Sales

The solution we developed for a customer using Microsoft Dynamics CRM provided the following features:

• Two security roles for Portal Users - Executive and Portal User
  
  • Executive can see all Leads and Opportunities assigned to a company (Partner). Executive user assigns Leads and Opportunities to Partner employee (Portal Users)
    
  • Portal User can see and manage all Leads and Opportunities Assigned to them (Partner employee)
    
• Security is controlled in Microsoft Dynamics CRM - User Name, Password, Security Level and ability to inactivate a login
  
• Ability within Dynamics CRM to login as a specific Portal User to see exactly what they would see when they login
  
• Allows Leads in Dynamics CRM to be assigned to Partners
  
• Allows Opportunities in Dynamics CRM to be assigned to Partners
  
• Allows Lead contact data to be edited via Partner Portal which is then updated in Dynamics CRM
  
• Allows Opportunity data to be edited via Partner Portal which is then updated in Dynamics CRM
  
• Allows Phone Calls and Tasks to be created via Partner Portal for Leads and Opportunities which is then updated in Dynamics CRM
  
• Allows Leads to be marked as "won" via Partner Portal. A list of Leads marked won is displayed in Dynamics CRM and once internally reviewed and approved they are converted to Opportunities and then displayed in the Partner Portal
  
• Allows Leads to be exported from Portal if proper security is assigned. This can be controlled on a Partner by Partner basis.
  
• Allows for filtered views in Dynamics CRM to display all Leads and Opportunities assigned to Partners
  
• Leads and Opportunities owned by Partners can be exported from Dynamics CRM and sent as an Excel attachment if the Partner decides not to use the Portal
  

Some of the features we have considered adding include

• Adding a last login date to the Portal User record that tracks when the user last logged into the Portal in order to produce a Portal Usage report
  
• Dashboard Reports for Leads and Opportunities
  
• Partner point system. Partner's that close the most Leads get assigned the most Leads.
  

Technology used:

.Net web service (C#), ASP .Net front end templates, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK

Required Licenses
Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM External Connector License