Partners Provide an Earful on Vendor Partner Portals

The vast majority of partners believe partner portals are table stakes for a vendor program, and new Canalys polls highlight what partners want and don’t want in portals.

New Canalys Candefero polls gauge partners’ portal preferences, including what they love and hate on portals. Canalys estimates there are more than 35,000 portals that are live.

Jay McBain, chief analyst at Canalys, an Informa company, said the majority of partner portal activity is deal management and sales enablement. Support appears to be the biggest weakness in terms of usage.

“Interesting that generative AI is now second on the wish list behind competitive intelligence,” he said. “It seems like AI could do both of these things really well. Instead of published battle cards that find their way to the competition anyway, a more dynamic AI-led chatbot talking through an exact customer deal and digging into specific vendor/partner-combined advantages would be a new killer feature.”

Partner Portal Preferences

When asked which areas of partner portals would they use more if they were improved, partners cited marketing (32%), sales and presales tools (22%), technical training (18%), deal management (17%) and partner program guides (13%).

Canalys' Jay McBain

“A special note on marketing,” McBain said. “Partners are not looking for the stale ‘brochure with logo’ of the past. They are looking for dynamic co-marketing features around email, social, search, syndicated content and yes, generative AI.”

Related:Flexera Revamps Partner Program in Preparation for 2025

Courtesy: Canalys

When asked which partner portal feature they use the least, partners cited support (27%), deal management (22%), pre-sales and sales enablement (18%), marketing resources and funds (17%), and training and development (16%).

In terms of what they would like to see via a partner portal, partners cited competing product comparisons (30%), a generative AI engine to answer questions and provide needed information (19%), simplified pricing (18%), a customer life-cycle management tool (18%) and faster quotes (15%).

“As the end of the cookie approaches (end of third-party data), partners will pick up the majority of first 28 moments (on average) in the customer buying cycle,” McBain said. “From early e-books and podcasts, to consulting gigs, design and architecture work, and then finally configure/price/quote, better data sharing between multi-partners, multi-vendors and even multi-distributors will be another killer feature moving forward.”

Courtesy: Canalys

Overall, the most valuable benefit for partners is being recognized and paid across the customer life cycle — before, during and after the transaction, he said.

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“Wonder why Cisco announced their new 360 Program this week?” McBain said. “Wonder why there is a rush to a points-based systems and not gold/silver/bronze? Partners demand it.”