Partner Portals 101: Drive Loyalty & Sales With Gamification

In the modern business world, companies must work together to provide the best products and services. Multiple organizations typically need information from a single common collaborator, and a partner portal is a solution that brings together vendors, installers, and other third parties in one easy-to-access place.

We’ll discuss everything you need to know about partner portals and how you can implement gamification to enhance the partner portal experience, drive loyalty, and increase sales.

Related: Collaborative Workshops With Gamification 

What Is a Partner Portal?

Partner portals are web-based apps that act as one-stop shops for companies that do business with each other by connecting existing partners. These portals contain a variety of content and tools that the partners need to educate their teams, create marketing programs, build revenue, and more. Essentially, a partner portal provides outside companies with existing connections to a central business with access to information it can use to be more productive and align its products and services with a common goal.

How Do You Create a Great Partner Portal?

The secret to creating a successful partner portal is making it a site that your partners want to visit—and not just to get information. You need to take a partner-first approach, ensure everything is organized for easy navigation, and find ways to make it engaging, like through gamification, which we’ll cover below.

What Content Should Be In Your Partner Portal?

You can include any content in your partner portal, as long as you can apply it to an existing relationship between a company and its partners. Any content that helps your partners perform better or provides information that’s unavailable to the general public has a place in every partner portal.

You’ll typically find content like:

• Service memos
• Registration and approvals
• Measuring and reporting tools
• Promotions and discounts
• Onboarding and recruitment information
• Knowledge bases
• Motivational, educational, or competitive games

Partner portals should also include ways to connect with sales and support teams for additional assistance—many partners get frustrated when there’s a lack of support. Your portal needs to greet your partners at the front door and make their journey easy and seamless.

Partner portals also should not be static objects. They should grow, change, and gain additional content along with the supplier-partner relationship. For example, your partner portal might start as a simple content library, and over time, you might add educational courses through your LMS, games to unite, train, and raise awareness, deal management systems, marketing tools, etc.

How to Enhance the Partner Portal Experience Using Gamification

 

Your partners are all motivated in different ways. For example, it might be about financial gain for some or social reward for others. Most often, it’s a mixture of those two. Before we get into the tips to enhance your partner portal experience through gamification, let’s make sure we understand the term.

Related: Gamification—Everything You Need to Know

At a fundamental level, gamification is about motivation that’s driven by crowd recognition, which we first saw during the introduction of gaming within social media. The central premise is that we all want to know where we stand amongst our peers. We want something to show for our personal progress.

Today, gamification is about mapping gameplay in a way that rewards and reinforces effective business activities, both in the short and long term.

1. Tap Into the Natural Competitive Spirit

Applied to a partner portal, gamification taps into the competitive spirit of the channel to help sales professionals elevate their performance. With achievement notifications and leaderboards, you can keep your partners continuously striving for more. You can also share when partners complete a positive action, like registering a deal, downloading collateral, passing a new training course, etc.

Your partner portal should:

• Enable partners to compete against each other
• Drive positive selling behaviors
• Encourage engagement in mundane but crucial activities
• Provide immediate feedback and praise to partners from yourself, vendors, and peers.
• Recognize your partners at thought leaders

2. Align Goals With Gamification

Partner portal gamification consists of elements like:

•  Game mechanics that use badges, points, leaderboards, etc.
• Digital engagement that allows for interaction with smartphones, computers, wearables, and other digital devices
• Behavioral goals that motivate people  to drive innovation, develop skills, or change behaviors
• Experience design that creates a journey for partners through gameplay, storylines, etc.

When you align organizational goals with player goals, your organization achieves its objectives as its partners achieve theirs. This alignment is critical to successfully employing gamification in a partner portal.

 

3. Gamify Any Channel

You can gamify any channel in a partner portal, including:

• Self-profiling
• Training
• Onboarding and recruitment
• Incentives
• Community engagement
• Survey participation
• Joint sales and marketing
• Portal or mobile app usage

Upon completing actions in the partner portal, a workflow should trigger to notify other partners and collate the associated awards. This directly relates to tip number one, where we see that our partner portal should enable competition between partners, drive positive selling behaviors, etc.

 

4. Combine Partner Scoring & Gamification

Almost every organization scores its incoming leads and is familiar with scorecarding. Partner scoring is similar—it associates points with behaviors to motivate channel partners.

While traditional incentives focus more on monetary rewards, partner scoring offers social rewards in exchange for behaviors that span the lifecycle of each partner. As a result, gamification helps extend partner motivation to every partner in every stage.

We can break down partner scoring and gamification into four stages:

• Onboarding: Portal invitation, login, etc.
• Enablement: Passing courses, quizzes, etc.
• Motivation: Lead and deal registration, content download, discussion participation, etc.
• Growth: Revenue, partner tier, MDF activities , business plan submissions, products sold, etc.

Related: Metaverse Technologies for Business 

Add Gamification to Your Partner Portal Strategy

 

If your organization is looking for ways to increase engagement and productivity within its partner portal, gamification might be the solution it needs. Gamification can help provide your partners with a better environment to get more done faster than ever before.

Want to see how gamification can enhance your partner portal strategy to drive loyalty and sales while increasing partner engagement? Book your demo with our gamification experts to see how we can enhance your partner portal.