Reseller management software for VAR and reseller programs that recruits resellers too

The best reseller management software is the one built for the stage your program is stuck at. If you already have 40 signed resellers and the pain is deal conflicts, a deal-registration-first PRM such as Channeltivity or Kiflo fits. If you have five resellers and need fifty, a recruiting-first tool fits better, because no amount of portal polish fixes an empty channel.

Most vendors overbuy here. They license a full PRM with tiers, MDF and certification tracks before the program has enough resellers to use any of it, and then pay an annual contract for a portal nobody logs into.

You find resellers by working backward from your best customers: list the agencies, MSPs, consultancies and VARs those customers already buy from, then rank them by how much of your target market they already serve. That is the research the Partnerships agent does, with the reasons shown for every match.

Directories and partner marketplaces give you a list of companies that want to resell something. They rarely tell you which of them already sells to the buyers you want, which is the only thing that predicts whether a reseller will close deals. Our guide on how to recruit channel partners covers the outreach side.

Reseller management is one use of partner relationship management (PRM). A PRM covers every partner type: referral partners, affiliates, technology partners, agencies and resellers. Reseller management narrows that to partners who buy or sell your product on to their own customers, so deal registration, territory and margin matter more than links and coupons.

If your program mixes resellers with referral and integration partners, a general partner relationship management software platform keeps all of them in one place.

Published prices run from $25 per partner member a month (Salesforce Partner Cloud) through $399 a month for 25 partners (Kiflo) to $1,450 a month plus a setup fee (ZINFI), and several vendors publish nothing at all. Partnerships is flat from $47 a month.

The headline number is rarely the bill. Ask what the price is metered on (partner count, partner user, module or seat), because a reseller program that grows from 25 to 80 partners can double its PRM cost on a per-partner plan. The full partnership management software comparison lists every vendor and its metering unit.

Yes, once two resellers can reach the same customer. Deal registration lets a reseller claim an opportunity before working it, so you can protect the reseller who found the deal and avoid two partners discounting against each other.

For a program under about 20 resellers, a deal log per partner with the account, amount and status is usually enough. Above that, formal approval rules and incentives start to pay off; see deal registration incentive software for how vendors reward early registration.

It can for the first handful of resellers, usually in a spreadsheet and a shared inbox. The spreadsheet breaks when you need to answer two questions at quarter end: which reseller sourced which deal, and which accounts two resellers are both chasing.

The cheaper fix is not a large PRM contract. It is a flat-priced tool that keeps the reseller list, the deals and the account overlap in one place, and grows with the program instead of charging per partner from day one.