Partner onboarding is critical to any successful affiliate or referral marketing program. It sets the stage for the relationships you’ll build with your partners, and it can directly impact the success of your marketing efforts. 

However, the process of onboarding partners is not without its challenges. In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, it’s crucial for businesses to identify these challenges and employ best practices to overcome them effectively. 

Spoiler: automating partner onboarding can solve most of the challenges you are currently facing.

Building strong relationships with your partners can help you maximize the value of your business network. And this foundation must be built on effective partner onboarding, also known as a channel partner or vendor onboarding.

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In this post, we’ll explore the common obstacles faced during the partner onboarding process and share proven strategies to streamline the experience, ensuring a strong foundation for your marketing partnerships.

 So, let’s get started!

What is Partner Onboarding?

Partner onboarding is a comprehensive process that involves collecting, verifying, and combining essential data and documentation, with the primary objective of seamlessly integrating an external partner into your existing enterprise data ecosystem. 

This process lays the foundation for establishing a mutually beneficial business relationship with vendors, suppliers, or other stakeholders. A meticulous approach to partner onboarding fosters trust, transparency, and collaboration between parties, enabling them to align their goals and objectives effectively. 

By streamlining this integration, businesses can facilitate smoother communication, optimize workflows, and enhance overall efficiency, ultimately leading to a more productive and profitable partnership.

When implemented correctly, it can help you simplify partner management and conduct business operations with that company competently. Both parties must establish an efficient data exchange and communication method to ensure timely collaboration and smooth administration of co-related tasks and projects.

A solid B2B partner onboarding process assists in avoiding fraudulent vendors by ensuring that all your partners meet your quality standards. The risk is reduced by establishing data governance, compliance, and validation processes.

According to an Ovum survey, approximately 40% of businesses require at least a month to onboard a new partner. Manually crafting individual workflows and data pipelines can be challenging if your company has hundreds or thousands of partners.

On the other hand, the survey emphasizes that having a consolidated partner onboarding approach can reduce complexity, allowing you to onboard vendors and suppliers more quickly and see a positive impact on your business performance.

The Advantages of Partner Onboarding

CSO Insights states that approximately 63.5% of businesses believe their partners contribute to their annual channel sales revenue. To achieve your expected partnership performance levels, you must implement a well-structured partner onboarding program to collect and analyze partner data required to meet your business objectives.

However, many businesses overlook the importance of a structured partner onboarding process because they underestimate its benefits. 

However, in reality, it can have a positive impact on your company’s performance because of the following reasons:

Governance & Compliance

Partner onboarding ensures your partners understand and follow all internal and external policies. No need to worry about paperwork when onboarding a new partner using an automated data integration tool. You can perform automated checks against third-party databases to confirm the vendor’s existence and authenticity.

Lowers Transactional Burden

A B2B partner onboarding solution relieves your in-house teams of transactional work. Your internal users are no longer responsible for data collection and entry.

Partners can use a data integration platform to extract data from those sources, align formatting with your internal systems, and consolidate data without feeds using an automated process.

Increases Productivity & Collaborative Efforts

Using an automated partner onboarding solution allows you to quickly request, obtain, corroborate, and accept data from potential partners. This is because it eliminates the need for a dedicated IT person to maintain and repair broken pipelines, as well as the need for manually coding individual data pipelines for each vendor.

As a result, by gathering and managing partner information and files in a streamlined data management framework, you can speed, organize, and simplify your onboarding procedures.

Challenges Associated with Partner Onboarding

According to an IBM report (which we mentioned earlier), more than 70% of businesses report that their IT staff cannot support the volume of vendors that their company must onboard and manage.

Effective channel partner onboarding can aid in developing partner engagement, revenue growth, and attrition reduction. On the other hand, failure to start off on the right foot with new partners can cause many to leave quickly, wasting your efforts, time, and resources.

The following are some critical challenges associated with channel partner onboarding:

Onboarding Partners Manually

Many businesses develop inefficient manual onboarding processes that burden IT, teams. This is due to the fact that your IT team must develop manual procedures for extracting, validating, and standardizing partner data. 

These processes are prone to failure if the partner modifies how input is formatted or switches to a different platform. Data validation checks that fail due to variations in incoming data can also cause problems.

Difficult Legacy Infrastructure

Many enterprises typically add customizations and manual processes on top of their legacy systems as their partner network grows. In essence, legacy systems are unsuitable for connecting with disparate sources and necessitate using middleware to integrate data, as well as significant coding efforts. 

This results in an overly complex environment that necessitates the use of IT to manage incoming data and monitor critical metrics for vendor performance evaluation.

Backlogs for Onboarding

When vendors change the source data, such as partner contracts, contact information, rights, roles, or connectivity requirements, the dataflows usually break because the source formatting has changed. The data flow must be manually corrected and adjusted to the new source formatting. 

Identifying where the breaks occur is also a time-consuming task. Your employees must call and email IT to inquire why the process is taking so long, further slowing the process.

As this chain of problems begins, it creates onboarding backlogs that disrupt the ongoing exchange of information, resulting in order processing delays and poor customer service.

Best Practices for Partner Onboarding

Partner onboarding best practices can be found anywhere on the web, but it all comes down to your individual company and needs. An organized approach to partner onboarding assists businesses in reducing workflow complexity, onboarding partners quickly, and achieving better business outcomes. The following are some effective approaches to partner onboarding:

Make the new partner onboarding process more automated.

To address the challenges of manual partner onboarding, enterprises build data pipelines using a purpose-built data integration tool to ingest, validate, and manage all incoming vendor data and files.

Businesses can create an automated partner data onboarding framework to integrate all new vendors and suppliers without writing lengthy SQL scripts using an end-to-end business integration platform. Because of the native connectivity to data sources, this saves the business from challenging and diverse integrations.

Reduce partner onboarding time to hours rather than weeks.

Furthermore, these tools aid in developing self-sustaining, effective onboarding processes. It provides timely insights for customer success while cutting onboarding times down to hours rather than days or weeks.

Improve visibility and transparency.

Visibility is critical during the partner onboarding process because it lays the groundwork for data insight that will drive your efficiency for years. You should maintain high transparency throughout the onboarding process to maintain healthy and successful relationships with your partners.

For example, monitoring, reporting, and alert notifications provide data visibility. It is an excellent way to inform all critical stakeholders and ensure optimal business planning. Through self-service vendor portals, a data integration tool provides near real-time visibility, allowing instant monitoring and reporting on:

  • shipment status
  • payment cycles
  • inventory information
  • production schedules.

Integration Made Easier

Using an enterprise-grade data integration solution, your IT staff may integrate various partner systems, such as cloud databases, web apps, and other online platforms, into the business utilizing APIs. 

You no longer need to manually connect with each vendor, which results in a faster time to revenue.

According to IBM, automated solutions can reduce partner onboarding time by 75%. As a result, your business can get accurate, timely insights from partner data collected across the enterprise, improving cash flow and producing more working capital quickly.

Scaleo can help you automate partner onboarding.

Onboarding new partners quickly and efficiently is an important skill that portrays your company as a business in order to build a strong partnership. A powerful data integration tool can help you interact with your key partners more quickly than your competitors.

Scaleo is a partner marketing software platform that offers a complete set of tools to extract, transform, and integrate partner data. 

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Its easy-to-use, robust environment enables businesses to build repeatable, customized partner programs with automated onboarding processes in a matter of hours, thanks to native connectivity to popular data sources and process orchestration capabilities.

As a result, your company will be able to easily address challenges associated with onboarding new partners, accelerate time-to-insights, and achieve a higher return on investment (ROI).

Conclusion

Automating the onboarding process of your affiliate program is crucial for efficiently managing your partnerships and streamlining communication. By using Scaleo partner software, you can optimize your partner onboarding process, save valuable time, and foster stronger business relationships. 

Embracing automation with Scaleo will help you focus on your core business objectives while ensuring your affiliate program continues to grow and thrive.

Try it free for 14 days. No credit card is required!

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What are the elements of SaaS customer onboarding?

Effective SaaS customer onboarding includes clear welcome and setup guidance, comprehensive training resources like tutorials and webinars, and reliable support systems. It’s crucial to personalize the onboarding process to each user’s needs and provide regular updates and feedback opportunities. Tracking user progress and analyzing performance metrics are also key to continuously improving the onboarding experience.

How much can you save with HR onboarding software?

The amount saved with HR onboarding software varies depending on the size of the organization and the complexity of its onboarding processes. Generally, companies can experience significant cost reductions in administrative tasks, time savings for HR staff, and improved employee retention rates. This can translate into thousands of dollars annually, especially for larger organizations with high employee turnover rates.

How to improve onboarding for my SaaS business?

To improve onboarding for your SaaS business, focus on simplifying and personalizing the user experience. Start with a streamlined sign-up process and provide clear, concise tutorials or guides. Implement an intuitive UI/UX design to enhance user interaction. Regularly gather user feedback to refine and adapt the onboarding process to better meet customer needs. Additionally, offering responsive customer support can significantly improve the overall onboarding experience.

What are good tools for onboarding new customers?

To improve onboarding for your SaaS business, focus on simplifying and personalizing the user experience. Start with a streamlined sign-up process and provide clear, concise tutorials or guides. Implement an intuitive UI/UX design to enhance user interaction. Regularly gather user feedback to refine and adapt the onboarding process to meet customer needs better. Additionally, offering responsive customer support can significantly improve the overall onboarding experience.

Last Updated on December 5, 2023

Author

Elizabeth is a Senior Content Manager at Scaleo. Currently enjoying the life in Prague and sharing professional affiliate marketing tips. She's been in the online marketing business since 2006 and gladly shares all her insights and ideas on this blog.