PartnerScore CEO Dave Ward answers questions about the PartnerScore customers, their feedback and industry trends.

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Q Can you describe your customer base - who are they and what do they need from your service?

A PartnerScore’s customer base. So PartnerScore primarily operates, at the moment, with I.T. companies and companies in the Fin-Tech space, so we target these companies because they've got very important go to market plays for partners. Partnerships will make up a fairly large chunk of revenue for them and those companies want to manage those in a stable way. They want to remove risk and they want to grow them, so we deploy our services into those industries, in order to help those companies do that.

Ultimately, we're relevant to any business that has a go to market play through an indirect channel.

Q How does your platform benefit your clients commercially?

A So commercially there are two wins, really. There's revenue, obviously and then there's reducing friction from the operations side of things, which essentially either makes the partnership operate more effectively or reduces cost. In terms of revenue, what we aim to do with PartnerScore is to help clients create really engaged partner relationships, which always helps with identifying revenue opportunities, from the team that are closest to the opportunities on the ground.

Then from an operational point of view, what we've seen with PartnerScore, is the teams on the ground, often identify areas of friction or shortfall within a partnership and PartnerScore is a really effective way to highlight those issues. So, at a strategic level if a partnership leader is trying to redesign a partner program, they can work through some opportunities to improve the way that that program works - whether that would be around pricing or some operational elements.

Then from a day-to-day operational point of view, we have the ability on the platform to connect the different user groups. So, things like the partner manager or vendor alliance manager, those people are alerted to issues as they're reported by the teams. So what we find is it gets it gets those people on the front foot to tackle issues. If they're tackled early, they have less of an impact on the commercials, which is why, you know, the relationship is so important for commercial success.

Q What has the feedback been from your customers using the platform?

A Our customers have been very positive about the platform so far. We have clients now in Europe. We have clients in the US. We have clients in Australia and we're actually using the platform to track partnerships in all of those regions, plus Latin America. We've had really strong feedback that the data is really easy to you. Being able to understand the data set quickly and use it to drive decisions, is something that's really important to us and it's something that our clients have said that that, that it helps them do.

And the other thing they have said to us is they really like the interface. We've spent quite some time working out the experience for different users within the platform and the feedback so far has been that it's very helpful in bringing the partners on board as well as the partnership leaders or the program leaders, traditionally known as vendors. They've been positive in terms of the user experience around these different areas.

And then finally, we have clients using it as a measure of their partner experience at a global level. So, you've got clients that are going through partnerships or have lots of partnerships globally and they are looking for one single measure for the success of those partnerships that can be compared and can be benchmarked across regions and across different channels. We've had success there being listed as the provider of that of that metric.

It's a way to bring the organisation, as a whole, around a common measurement for success within the partnership space.

Q What trends do you see in the industry in the next 5 years?

A One of the biggest trends is that partnerships are becoming more important. Lots of companies now are looking to go to market through partnerships, so that's the first trend. It's also leading to larger partnerships - you've got more complex, complex partnerships and you're seeing those teams, especially since the pandemic where there's lots of remote working.

Now you've got quite large partner teams, potentially for the different sides of the partnership, working on these relationships and they're quite difficult to keep track of. So you're seeing disparate teams of people, that you can no longer walk around an office floor and just understand the sentiment of working with different vendors or different partners. So, that's kind of the first trend that that we see.

The second trend is obviously the move towards collecting more data and we see it now with our clients they’ve got lots and lots of different data sources. They've got data coming from various different platforms that measure all kinds of things commercial but also things like engagement in terms of logging into portals, etc.. So there is a trend to collect more data and there's obviously going to be a need to understand that data, which is also a challenge.

And then obviously, the final one, which you can’t ignore over the next five, ten, 15 years, is the move towards A.I. and using A.I. for decision making. I know from my own experience that, getting it right, making using it in the right way to make the right decisions is something that's quite complex. So I think we're going to see a move towards decision making with A.I. but needing to kind of get the balance right between looking at what A.I. is recommending you do, versus why you think you should do that.

People don't generally like to rely purely on an A.I. model, especially for something that's as important as a channel partnership, so there's going to be lots of work, I think, in the next five, ten, 15 years to really make that work successfully and make that work in a way that makes sense, for all the different businesses that are involved.