12 Best PRM Software to Scale SaaS Business

PRM (Partner Relationship Management) software makes it easy for businesses to manage transactions, communication, and collaboration with sales partners like dealers, resellers, affiliates, and referral partners.

PRM software features vary by vendor. But the best PRM software applications support most of the aspects of partner engagement — onboarding, training, sharing marketing material, management of deal registrations, leads, and affiliate links, management of commissions and incentives, tracking of metrics, and analytics.

The Geekflare team has researched and evaluated dozens of PRM software applications based on their features, ease of use, pricing, and ROI. We have listed their pros, cons, best-fit customer segments, and most effective use cases. Here are the best PRM software to scale SaaS business.

• PartnerStack – Best for SaaS Growth
• Referral Rock – Best for Referral Programs
• MindMatrix – Best for Channel Enablement
• Zinfi – Best for Unified PRM & PMM
• Kademi – AI-powered Chatbot to Assist Partners
• Affise – Best to Scale Affiliate Marketing Campaigns
• Impartner – Best for Comprehensive Channel Management
• Salesforce PRM – Best for Salesforce Users
• Zift Solutions – Best for TCMA (Through Channel Marketing Automation)
• Allbound – Best for Mid-Market Scalability
• Partnerize – Best for Partnership Automation
• Crossbeam – Best for Small Businesses
• Show moreShow less

PartnerStack

PartnerStack positions itself as a “partner ecosystem platform” on top of being a PRM tool. It is designed to delight partners, which is the best way to promote vendor success through partner channel sales.

PartnerStack maintains a vast partner network specializing in B2B sales. The network includes all types of partners: affiliate, referral, and reseller partners. That means it can help get your partner program up and running quickly if you are just starting out on partner sales channels.

Vendors that are veterans in using channel partners can scale fast by promoting their program among the network and adding new channels.

PartnerStack includes a built-in learning management system (LMS) that lets vendors easily create courses for partners and track their progress. Vendors can also share co-brandable assets — PDFs and social media content — with their partners and measure the success of the co-branded campaigns.

PartnerStack automates partner sale attribution and tracking with a great set of features: unique referral links, custom forms for deal registration, manual and automated lead sharing, and integrations to most of the popular CRMs.

Vendors can customize the commission structure and rules for partners. Partners are automatically paid on time monthly with a single invoice to the vendor. In addition, PartnerStack allows partners to manage their withdrawals.

Both vendors and partners benefit from the analytics and detailed reporting on revenue, and lead and deal pipelines.

PartnerStack sports a neat and helpful partner portal that enables partners to manage all their partnerships in a single place. It includes detailed reporting of their performance, revenue, and customer activity.

PartnerStack Pricing

Vendors need to fill a form to get a quote.  Partners can sign up for free and apply to be included in the partner network.

Explore PartnerStack

Referral Rock

Referral Rock is tailor-made for building and managing referral programs through fan customers and “brand ambassadors”. Brand ambassadors could be customers, influencers, partners, or even employees. 

Its features are minimal and specific to this use case: landing pages for referral partner sign-ups and referred customers, ready-made branded messages for sharing, setting up reward rules, a portal for referral partners, and analytics. 

It expects you to integrate Referral Rock to your existing systems — CRM, marketing tools, payment channels — for doing everything else, like referral tracking, payouts, and program scaling. Referral Rock runs in the background to support referral tracking and payouts. 

Given its focus use case, Referral Rock is primarily targeted at small and medium B2C businesses of all types, not just online businesses.

Referral Rock Pricing

Referral Rock has a free plan so that you can get a feel of it before deciding. The details of the paid plans are given below.

A $400 one-time onboarding fee is charged for monthly plans. Custom plans are available for high-volume customers.

Explore Referral Rock

MindMatrix

MindMatrix has created a comprehensive and powerful platform, branded “Bridge”, for sales success. It enables the entire sales ecosystem, covering channel partners, direct sales teams, and ISV / technology partners.

The platform is loaded with features to facilitate (and to a great extent, automate) every step of sales and marketing in the customer journey. Vendors can hand-hold partners throughout the cycle from prospecting to closure while maintaining tight control of the messaging, branding, pricing, and partner performance tracking.

The level of enablement and support for partners and sales teams possible with the Bridge platform is its key differentiator and value-add.  

Bridge boasts top-drawer features for enabling partners:  

• PRM: Partner recruitment, onboarding, training (LMS), deal registration to prevent channel conflict, lead management (upload, scoring, routing, tracking), asset management (web, email, social, videos, ads, brochures, flyers), incentives management, analytics, a comprehensive partner portal that consolidates everything in a single pane of glass
• Channel Marketing: Social and web content syndication, co-branding, video personalization (like adding partner logo and contact information), MDF management
• Sales and Marketing Enablement: Playbooks mapping out the sales and marketing journey in detail, asset sharing for each stage of the cycle, e-contract signing, CPQ (Configure Price Quote) engine for quote generation, visibility into lead interaction with the brand  

Many of these features are useful for enabling in-house sales and marketing teams as well.

Bridge supports integrations with CRMs and other business software through SAML, oAuth & API integrations.

The following are some noteworthy features of its business model.

• Free, customized, and integrated POC for trial before buying decision
• 100% customization based on business needs
• Free, unlimited, ongoing service and support
• Consumption-based pricing model
• Full deployment in 30 days

MindMatrix Pricing

Contact MindMatrix for pricing.

Explore MindMatrix

Zinfi

Zinfi is an all-inclusive Unified Partner Management platform, bringing together all aspects of partner management under a single, user-friendly portal. It has adopted a “mobile first” strategy, ensuring that the entire UPM functionality is easily accessible on mobile devices.

Zinfi includes an extensive set of features for partner management. 

• Simplified and secure admin capabilities for user / group management, access control, and record rollback / change
• CMS for easy portal creation and dynamic content management
• Easy workflow creation for partner programs 
• Contract management: Contract set-up and upload, contract signee management, contract expiration management, contract compliance reporting
• Asset management: Asset library, content preview, and download, bulk upload and download, visibility configuration, advanced search, set up favorites, recommend related content, co-branding
• Integrated LMS: Interoperability with all SCORM, xAPI, AICC, and cmi5 learning content and course libraries, certifications management, course completion tracking, assessments management
• Marketing: Co-brandable email templates, test mailing lists, drip campaigns, bounce checker, detailed performance reporting, multitouch campaign management, social syndication management
• Sales: Lead upload, lead scoring, lead distribution, lead tracking, CRM integration, lead campaign history, deal registration, CPQ (Configure Price Quote) management, PO upload, invoice generation
• Incentives: Commission program set-up, sales tracking and commission calculation, support for multiple currencies and languages, MDF management, rewards management

Zinfi Pricing

Contact Zinfi for pricing.

Explore Zinfi

Kademi

Kademi is a sleek, modular, and flexible partner management platform with an AI-powered chatbot to assist partners. It allows customers to customize the feature set based on their business needs and pay only for what they need. It also offers a pre-configured “starter” plan for businesses new to channel sales.

Kademi excels in delivering a great partner experience through the partner portal. It impresses with its modern UI/UX that adapts seamlessly to various screen sizes. The portal’s appearance, layout, and content can be customized easily without any coding.

In addition, vendors can craft personalized journeys, content, and tools for partners based on their needs, roles, and strengths.

Kademi comes with specialized partner training software with which vendors can create courses, track training progress, and target courses at specific partner groups.

Kademi’s asset management module is very easy to use, making it a breeze to share and target sales and marketing assets with partners and track their usage and effectiveness.

There are also a few innovative features for partner enablement and engagement: support tickets, forums, and event management (get partners to sign up for events like webinars and workshops), apart from MDF programs.

Kademi comes bundled with the essential partner sales enablement tools: deal registration, lead referral forms, lead tracking, commission calculation, CRM integration, and automation of sales cycles.

It also supports a system to manage sales claims by partners when vendors can’t directly access sales data.

Kademi Pricing

The pre-configured “starter” plan costs $800 per month. It’s limited to referral sales and doesn’t include deal registration and CRM integration. It also comes with limitations on the number of partners (< 20).

Contact Kademi for configurable plans and pricing. Typical costs range between $1200 to $2000 per month.

Explore Kademi

Affise

Affise is a leader in affiliate marketing software. It is a great choice for ad networks, media buying teams, marketing agencies, and brands looking to optimize and scale affiliate marketing campaigns.

The Affise Performance platform has a singular focus on affiliate marketing and includes the following features.

• Mass actions: Tags automation, mass status changes, offer/affiliates list mass approval
• Fraud prevention: Click level anti-fraud, IP duplicates check, CR automation, time-to-action report
• Smart traffic monetization: Smart Links, traffic back, traffic distribution, full cycle impressions tracking
• Automation features: Offers schedule, click cap, conversion cap, click automation, invoice auto-generation
• Raw data export
• Tracking: Multiple tracking domains, advanced tracking capabilities, view-through attribution, promo codes tracking, QR codes tracking, parallel tracking 
• Targeting: GEO-targeting, device and OS targeting, personal targeting, ZIP-code targeting, additional tracking URLs
• Statistics: Advanced real-time statistics, events report
• Comprehensive API integrations
• Security: GDPR compliance & SOC 2 Certification

Affise Pricing

Affise offers three plans — Entry, Scale, and Custom. Contact Affise Sales for pricing.

Explore Affise

Impartner

Impartner is a leader and trendsetter in the PRM software space. It is a comprehensive and powerful platform, that offers four plans tailor-made for businesses in different stages of partner marketing growth — from early stages to enterprises optimizing and scaling world-class partner programs.

Here is a list of Impartner’s rich features.

• Suitable for every type of partner: Resellers, referral partners, ISVs / technology partners, dealers, distributors
• Lead management: Lead distribution based on multiple criteria, lead alarm clocks for response / claim and showing progress, multipartner lead collaboration, deal registration, CRM integration, lead tracking, support for all global currencies
• Partner business planning: Creation and tracking of KPIs for each partner, shared dashboard, built-in and custom KPIs, financial and non-financial KPIs
• Customized onboarding and training journeys for different partner segments
• Integrations: Native integrations for Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Pipedrive; custom integrations; real-time and bidirectional data flow, and mapping to any standard or custom CRM objects or fields
• Partner marketing automation: Channel marketing automation tools, hyper-personalization, hyper-targeting, content syndication across hyper-targeted microsites and banner ads, automated paid media campaigns on Google, Facebook redirected to the closest partner’s website, centralized content center for assets, co-branding of assets, ready-to-use (co-branded) email campaigns, social content syndication
• Partner analytics: Unlimited personalized dashboards, program- and partner-specific ROI, lead conversion rate, average deal size, registration rates, and velocity, revenue targets
• Content Management System (CMS)
• Training and certification: Creation and targeting of courses, lessons, quizzes, and certification programs, LMS integration
• Market Development Funds (MDF) management: Approval and payment automation, partner MDF requests, analytics, and data visibility 
• Referral partner program management including affiliates: Personalized referral links, unique reward rules by partner entity and/or their referral sources, automation of communication, tracking, and fulfillment, advanced analytics
• Partner portal that combines everything in a single pane of glass

Impartner Pricing

Contact Impartner for the pricing.

Explore Impartner

Salesforce PRM

Salesforce PRM might be the best PRM choice for you if you’re an ardent fan of Salesforce CRM and want something that resembles its look and feel, or your direct sales team is using Sales Cloud and you want to extend it to channel sales. In fact, some editions of Sales Cloud support PRM out of the box.

Salesforce PRM is built on Salesforce CRM, which takes a lot of burden off the implementation and set-up.

Though not exhaustive, Salesforce PRM’s features will satisfy the needs of most businesses. The features of Salesforce PRM are given below.

• Partner onboarding and enablement: Step-by-step in-app guidance for lead nurturing and conversion; serve up the best resources and assets to help ramp, develop, and mature partnerships
• Personalized partner experiences: Easy-to-use web templates and drag-and-drop tools to build the partner portal, page variations to target audiences based on selected criteria
• Partner marketing automation: Create and share marketing campaigns, guidelines, and assets; Salesforce CMS for content creation, management, and publication; co-branding
• Partner sales workflows: Lead scoring, lead routing, deal registration, CPQ, sharing CRM data including activity history, contacts, and communications with partners
• Incentives: Management of MDFs, rebates, loyalty rewards
• Analytics: Dashboards, sales pipeline inspection, lead and opportunity scoring
• Generative AI: Einstein AI chatbot for assisting partners

Salesforce PRM Pricing

Salesforce PRM monthly pricing is $10/login or $25/member with annual billing. Members are for frequent users. Logins are for infrequent users. Contact Salesforce for a quote.

Explore Salesforce PRM

Zift Solutions

ZiftONE Channel Platform from Zift Solutions is an end-to-end partner management solution. 

ZiftONE’s channel marketing features are highly rated in the industry. It enables vendors to manage all their to-, through-, and for-channel marketing materials in one place for the entire partner ecosystem.

Vendors can easily create emails, microsites (for partner websites), and portal posts (for to-channel marketing), without any coding. Partners can add their branding and directly send emails to customers from the partner portal.

ZiftONE facilitates social media syndication and co-branding of assets. The collateral library supports every type of asset. Additionally, Zift also offers support to vendors for creating emails, social media posts, and portal pages, with its staff writers.

Apart from this, ZiftONE has built-in features for partner onboarding, partner engagement, partner management, partner training, and, of course, channel sales.

• Partner onboarding: Customizable page templates, forms, and onboarding paths
• Partner engagement: Easily build partner portals without any coding, filter content by user and campaign, send key messages, campaigns, and collateral to specific partner segments
• Partner management: Business planning, partner-specific data and insights, segment partners based on performance metrics
• Partner training: Built-in LMS for course creation, targeting, and tracking, certifications, collateral library
• Channel sales: Deal registration, lead registration, lead distribution, lead tracking, pipeline visibility, analytics dashboards, CRM integration

ZiftONE Pricing

Contact Zift Solutions for pricing.

Explore Zift Solutions

Allbound

Allbound is a fully integrated PRM platform for managing and scaling partner programs smoothly and efficiently.  It is easy to use and sports a neat, intuitive UI. It comes with features that cater to every stage of a channel partner program.

• Partner engagement: Journey automation from onboarding to deal closure, automatic rule-based, personalized notifications, gamification, incentive management
• Partner enablement: Create customized learning paths for different partner segments, support for diverse content types including videos, optional LMS integration, progress tracking, certifications, playbooks
• Marketing: Easy and flexible co-branding options, advanced content management including access control, engagement analytics, detailed visibility into content properties, updates, and locations, MDF management
• Business planning: Personalized partner plans covering onboarding, co-marketing, training, and revenue targets, dashboard for transparent performance tracking
• Sales: Deal registration, CRM integration, pipeline insights and analytics, notifications for updates, rules-based lead distribution, multipartner lead distribution, partner locator

Allbound Pricing

Contact Allbound for pricing. Allbound also charges extra for integration and advanced engagement and support services.

Explore Allbound

Partnerize

Partnerize is a partner management software and services solution crafted for digital marketing partnerships like affiliates, ambassadors, influencers, content publishers, and coupons / vouchers / cashback.

It includes a partner marketplace or network for brands and partners to discover suitable matches and make direct connections. As a result, it enables brands to scale and diversify their partner programs quickly.

Partnerize makes it easy for brands to discover, activate, track, manage, measure, and pay digital partners through automation solutions.

• Discover and activate: Vast and diversified partner network of affiliates, ambassadors, influencers, content publishers, and coupons/vouchers/cashback partners, AI-powered recommendations, powerful filtering tools for identifying best matches, detailed partner profiles
• Track: First-party, server-to-server, batch, and mobile app tracking, or leverage e-commerce plugins; track, report, and commission on unlimited custom data points such as size, color, class of service, and destination
• Manage: Equitably reward partners that provide valuable touchpoints across the entire path to purchase, not just last-click partners, with transparent attribution functionality and spend allocation tools
• Measure: Full visibility into partner ecosystem performance and customer journey data, powerful visualization options, export data to third-party reporting tools of choice through integrations
• Pay: Evaluate transactions, generate invoices, automate payouts, support for over 60 currencies across 214 countries
• Protect: An “always on” fraud detection and automated compliance monitoring for trademark infringement
• Integrations: Easy-to-integrate API-first solution

Partnerize also offers services at various levels, from program activation to in-sourcing support to comprehensive program management, through its team of subject-matter experts.

Partnerize Pricing

Contact Partnerize for pricing.

Explore Partnerize

Crossbeam

Crossbeam is a unique, innovative platform to help vendors succeed through their partner ecosystem. It has a distinct set of features aimed at delivering business intelligence to drive revenue growth, optimize sales pipelines, and shorten sales cycles. 

Crossbeam is not a conventional PRM software per se. It is a tool to maximize the ROI from partnerships by smartly surfacing the data, people, and companies in the network that will accelerate and close the next deal.

Crossbeam works in four steps.

1. Onboard or find partners in the Crossbeam network.
2. Securely and mutually share data with partners by connecting Crossbeam with CRMs, Data Warehouses, Google Sheets, and CSV files.
3. Use Crossbeam to automatically identify mutual accounts called ‘overlaps’ between vendor and partners’ data. Crossbeam calls this “account mapping”.
4. Get insights to identify new leads, advance existing deals, and grow customer accounts.

Leveraging automated account mapping, sales reps can identify new leads from partner data, get intros to partners’ existing customers, or gather sales intelligence about the prospects from partners.

In addition, channel managers can distribute leads optimally based on account mapping data to maximize the chances of deal closing.

Moreover, partnership managers can prioritize tech partner programs based on real data like the highest number of mutual customers.

Crossbeam lacks many of the key features of conventional PRM software for partner engagement, enablement, co-marketing, and management. So, it is appropriate to integrate Crossbeam to a full-fledged PRM platform for best results. Then, leads identified for prioritization through Crossbeam can be pushed directly to the vendor’s PRM and CRM for effective management.

Crossbeam Pricing

Crossbeam has a free plan, which is great for checking out the tool before the purchase decision.

Below are the details of the paid plans. The plans are billed annually.

Explore Crossbeam

Best PRM Software Comparison Table

How to Choose the Best PRM Software

Remember, you’re trying to decide the best PRM software for your needs. Determine your answers to the following questions in mind while considering the options.

What are your key goals for your partner program in the short-, medium-, and long-term? Diversify and scale your leads? Improve conversions? Improve efficiency and reduce costs in running the program? Fill the gaps in your in-house sales team?

Here are a few tips to identify the features that suit your goals.

• If you are a newcomer to channel sales or looking to scale your program, a platform that gives you access to a partner network might be a good choice. 
• If you have a well-established program but want to optimize results, you should look at tools that offer features like business planning, playbooks, advanced analytics, flexible commissions and rewards, and CRM integration with custom objects.
• If you are looking to diversify and scale your leads, you can consider adding new channels to your program. In that case, look for tools that support a broad range of partner types.
• If you are considering reducing costs or filling gaps in your sales team, you might want to leverage the services offered by some vendors for content creation, program management, and strategy consultation with experts.
• If your target is to double down on efficiency, you should pay attention to fully integrated platforms with a comprehensive set of features.

What are the gaps and pain points in your current program?

The gaps and pain points that you face in your current program are good pointers towards the features that you should focus on while finalizing your PRM software choice.

What is your budget (money, skilled human resources)?

While planning the budget, account for human resources too — like IT support and training costs.

What types of partners are you looking for (e.g., affiliate, referral, reseller, distributor, tech partner)? 

The answer to this depends on the nature of your business and who your end customers are. 

E-commerce businesses typically work only with affiliates and referral partners. B2B SaaS companies might work with all types of partners. Traditional businesses may not need affiliates and tech partners.

Look for the tools that support all your partner types.  

Based on the above considerations, evaluate the features of the PRM software in our list (and any more choices you may have) to narrow down the options. Talk to their sales teams to discuss pricing, support, usage limits, and customization options.

Always ensure that your choice of PRM software satisfies the following needs for you and your partners.

• Ease of use and manageable learning curve
• Integrations to your existing tech stack (and your partners’ tech stack, as much as possible)
• Clean data integration — avoids data duplication and discrepancy across business tools
• Partner portal that combines everything in a single place
• Dependable support from the PRM software vendor
• Data security and privacy standards compliance
• PRM software that can scale along with your business

Benefits of PRM Software

PRM software offers the below benefits for vendors and partners.

• Efficiency: Eliminates manual bookkeeping, and data scattering across spreadsheets, emails, paper documents, and databases
• Scalability: Facilitates growth and diversification of the partner program
• Collaboration: Improves communication and data sharing between vendors and partners
• Brand consistency: Ensures consistency in messaging and branding through the sharing of marketing materials and co-branded assets
• Partner training: Builds partner capabilities cost-effectively, enables progress tracking and verification
• Analytics: Uncovers valuable insights into partner and program performance, and customer behavior and engagement

What Is the Difference Between PRM and CRM Software?

Below are the differences between PRM and CRM software.

PRM (partner relationship management) software are applications designed to organize and automate the business’ interactions with its partners like distributors, resellers, and affiliates. CRM (customer relationship management) software focuses on managing customers, who are not necessarily partners.

Common functions of PRM software include:

• partner onboarding and training
• sharing marketing material
• managing deal registrations, commissions and incentives
• tracking of metrics, and analytics.

CRM software focuses on customers and their touchpoints. An essential feature of CRM software is contact management, which involves building a detailed database of customers and prospects. This data is used to make data-driven decisions by sales, marketing, and customer success and support functions. 

PRM software includes features like affiliate tracking, lead tracking and sales metrics, whereas CRM software includes features for campaign management via email, SMS, social media, directly targeting customers.

There is some data overlap between PRM and CRM software, as customer-related data often needs to be exchanged between vendors and partners for sales collaboration. So, PRM software is often integrated with CRM software to avoid data duplication and discrepancy.