How to Use PRMs to Manage Your Affiliate Network
     Over the past several decades we have seen the rise of affiliate networks in 
     parallel with the rise of software for partner relationship management or 
     PRM, which can be a highly effective platform for managing such networks. 
     Affiliate networks have existed for centuries, starting with early evangelists 
     in almost every religion who spread the holy word from one part of the world 
     to another. Over the last few decades we’ve seen the rise of commercial 
     affiliates where, in exchange for promoting a company’s product or brand, 
     the affiliates earn a commission. In this article, we will discuss how PRM 
     software can help recruitment, onboarding, training, payment and 
     management of an affiliate network.
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                                            How to Use PRMs to Manage Your Affiliate Network
                                                The purpose of an affiliate network is not to sell a product through it, but 
                                                rather promote a product or service to a targeted base of end-users or 
                                                buyers. Most affiliate networks focus on a product or on a brand selling 
                                                multiple products. A classic example is Amazon’s—yes, the #1 etailer in the 
                                                world—affiliate network. If you sign up for Amazon’s affiliate network, which 
                                                you can learn about on many free YouTube videos, you will see that 
                                                Amazon very likely uses a home-grown PRM tool to enroll, onboard, train, 
                                                enable and pay its affiliates.
                                                Traditionally, consumer brands have relied heavily on affiliate networks, 
                                                whereas industrial brands or products have tended to flow through 
                                                organizations that are referred to as agents, resellers, value added 
                                                resellers, wholesalers, distributors, and similar labels. The primary 
                                                difference between an affiliate and a reseller is that the latter actually sells a 
                                                product (physically or digitally) to its customer base, while the former 
                                                focuses primarily on promotion, generating awareness of a brand or its 
                                                associated products.
    © ZINFI Technologies Inc. All Rights Reserved.
                                            How to Use PRMs to Manage Your Affiliate Network
     Partner relationship management or PRM software traditionally has focused 
     on managing resellers, because management of resellers require a lot more 
     capabilities to manage segmented or profile-based access, training, 
     lead generation, enablement, payment, and so on. Simple 
     affiliate management software, on the other hand, tends to have very limited 
     capabilities  because all the affiliate management software needs to do is to 
     sign  up affiliates, track referrals and pay partners. While it’s true that for  a 
     business like Amazon, affiliate marketing can be highly complex, the vast 
     majority of affiliate networks do not require sophisticated PRM software 
     capabilities.
     As the world rapidly evolves, driven by various macro forces like climate 
     change, geopolitics and financial crises, delivery channels also evolve 
     rapidly across almost all verticals. As a result, we have now started to see 
     hybrid channels in which vendors not only need to manage a multiple 
     affiliates across many countries, but also manage their reseller base. In the 
     past, a business selling through the channel tended to select automation 
     either for affiliates or for resellers, but not both. However, with the rise of the 
     hybrid partner network with affiliate, reseller and perhaps other types of 
     channels, there has been rush towards procuring PRM software.
    © ZINFI Technologies Inc. All Rights Reserved.
                                            How to Use PRMs to Manage Your Affiliate Network
                                                We at ZINFI, a leader in PRM software, have started to see this change 
                                                over the past few years. More and more of our customers across multiple 
                                                verticals are now asking for a PRM platform to manage their affiliate 
                                                networks, but at the same time these customers are also using the same 
                                                platform to manage their reseller base. The prior model was to have two 
                                                sets of software: one for affiliate management and another for reseller 
                                                management (or agent management, etc.). With a 
                                                Unified Channel Management platform like ZINFI, however, today’s 
                                                organizations can manage both activities seamlessly using a single tool.
                                                In this hybrid scenario, PRM software must be able to provide granular 
                                                profiling, so that vendors can easily configure access settings for different 
                                                types of customers—for example, onboarding an affiliate partner through 
                                                one set of steps while onboarding an agent or a reseller through another set 
                                                of distinctly different steps. Training and other necessary enablement 
                                                content can also be differentiated by customer profile types and configured 
                                                for access accordingly. Partner performance can be tracked not only by 
                                                profile type, but also analyzed over time to identify specific areas for 
                                                improvement.
    © ZINFI Technologies Inc. All Rights Reserved.
                                            How to Use PRMs to Manage Your Affiliate Network
     The unprecedented flexibility that PRM software provides today was 
     unthinkable just a few years ago. Today, however, the cloud has arrived, 
     and that has made it possible for platforms like ZINFI’s Unified Channel 
     Management SaaS solution to address an increasingly broad range of 
     business challenges, including effective management of affiliate and hybrid 
     channel networks.
    © ZINFI Technologies Inc. All Rights Reserved.