The Top 3 “Must Haves” for Creating a Great Partner Portal

Corel’s Partner Program is made up of thousands of partnerships with organizations of all sizes and types, all around the world, to introduce customers to our industry-leading B2B products so they can be more successful.

A key enabler of our Partner Program is our partner portal. For most companies, a partner portal is simply an online resource where users can access things like basic sales and marketing materials.

But we’re not most companies.

During the spring of 2020, Corel embarked on a truly ambitious project: completely rebuilding our existing partner portal from scratch to accomplish two things:

• Provide centralized access to all partner resources for over two dozen products across Corel’s four main brands: CorelDRAW, MindManager, Parallels and WinZip.
• Create a portal that would be both simple yet comprehensive, so partners can locate whatever they need to engage with leads and close deals.

While this certainly wasn’t an easy project, we managed to pull the whole thing off–and we couldn’t be prouder of the end result!

Based on this experience, here are our top three “must have” elements for creating a truly great partner portal:

1. Make it easy to navigate. This first lesson is deceptively simple–after all, who wouldn’t want their portal to be easy to use? But when you need to provide access to dozens of documents and tools (for example, product comparison sheets, call scripts, marketing resources and online certifications), things can start to get a bit … complicated.
   To make sure our portal would be intuitive to both first- and long-time users, our first step was to meticulously map out the entire site structure to visualize the user experience. This helped ensure that all partners can instantly understand what part of the portal to click on to access what they need, and to get there in as few clicks as possible.
2. Ensure it contains all necessary–and up to date–resources. With so many brands and products within the Corel portfolio, we have a lot of information that partners need access to. To ensure anyone can easily find the latest version of the document or resource they need, we created a brand-new cloud file storage system.
   This file system contains all partner resources, clearly named and organized neatly into folders, and is linked to from the partner portal. This enables our team to easily add or update files without cluttering the portal interface or risk having outdated resources or broken links.
3. Enable self-service activities. Efficiency drives everything we do at Corel, so we knew it would be essential to give partners the ability to complete certain activities themselves within the portal (such as registering deals, viewing training materials and taking product certification exams).
   By customizing the built-in functionality of our partner portal website, we’re able to give our partners self-service capabilities that save them–and us–time by enabling them to perform key tasks on their own, without having to reach out to a member of our team.

Learn more about the Corel Partner Program and partner portal.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.