Impartner Software: Everything You Need to Transform Your Channel Into Your Most Strategic Asset

In today’s market, indirect sales represent nearly 75 percent of revenue in most companies. Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and Partnering Automation Solutions enable companies to manage the partner portfolio and manage risks. With its unique methodologies, strategies, and software-based capabilities, PRM is the next wave of innovative channel management while improving communication. The modern fast-growing companies are turning to PRM to optimize the performance of their partner ecosystems and crack open the black box of indirect sales, causing a veritable explosion of growth in the PRM market.

When it comes to PRM solutions, Impartner Software delivers the industry’s most advanced SaaS-based solutions. As the industry’s most award-winning PRM technology, Impartner develops one of the best turnkey solutions that can deploy a world-class Partner Portal in as few as 14 days. Velocity^™, the company’s highly engineered onboarding process is the secret behind this. With 7 million users worldwide signing into partner portals using Impartner technology, it is the world’s largest pure-play PRM software company. The firm helps businesses worldwide manage their partner relationships and accelerate revenue and profitability through indirect sales channels.

Let’s hear more about the company in an interview with the CEO, Mr. Joe Wang.

Brief us about Impartner’s journey on how it all started and the expedition so far.

Impartner was founded in 1997 by cloud visionary Craig Flynn, who saw the potential of SaaS solutions early on and was a critical pioneer in the PRM industry. Impartner, (originally known as Treehouse Interactive) was acquired in 2015 with Kennet Partners and has been on a fast-track ever since. Over time, we have introduced a stream of industry-first innovations to make Impartner PRM the industry’s most powerful, easy-to-update platform in the market; grown revenue 300 percent and number of employees by 5 times; expanded into multiple markets globally; increased the number of customers by 7 times; closed a new round of funding from Emergence Capital; recently closed an acquisition focused on helping vendors amplify their branding to and through partners; driven our base of partners signing into portals using Impartner technology to nearly 7 million; and won numerous national and international awards.

Tell us about Impartner’s innovative products and services.

Through continued innovation, Impartner’s core Impartner PRM solution and robust set of modules from Lead Management to MDF to Business Intelligence, Impartner has become the best-selling technology in the market. Using the company’s highly engineered Velocity^™ onboarding process, which is guided by an individually customized Customer Success Portal, customers can be up-and-running with a new PRM solution in as few as 14 days.

What are the pain points of the industry addressed by the company?

With 75% or more of revenue flowing through the channel, indirect sales are by far the largest and most profitable sales channels for many of today’s vendors. These vendors control ecosystems of sometimes tens of thousands of partners selling their solutions. Without a system in place to effectively manage these partner networks, vendors will be unable to drive growth through indirect sales channels. Impartner PRM streamlines the management of these partner ecosystems by automating and optimizing every step of the partner journey. All of these optimization tools reduce the burden on the vendor’s team, while also ensuring the scalability of the system overall, and energizing each individual partner’s performance. Impartner’s analytics tools also allow for the extraction of data-driven insights and the segmentation of partner ecosystems to inform future changes.

What are the differentiating factors that set your company apart from its competitors?

First and foremost, when it comes to competing solutions from CRM vendors, we’re different in a critical, fundamental way – we’re purpose-built for complexities of a multi-touch indirect sales process, and a CRM is not. Those solutions are architected for a direct, one-to-one sale, and cannot serve the indirect market without gross configurations. When it comes to other pure play vendors, following are some the key reasons we are chosen by our customers:

• We are the only company that uses the Salesforce streaming API. This means our solution connects in real time to the CRM

• We have an app on the Salesforce AppExchange, which means we are a managed package and easily and quickly integrate with Salesforce CRM – in addition to all other CRMs from other players. This listing also means that our security protocols are strong enough to be listed here, plus, we have achieved the coveted SOC 2 certification, and passed the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Burp Suite security testing

Lastly, I’d touch on our roadmap velocity.  Impartner’s team of developers is larger than most vendors’ entire company! The velocity with which we can bring new solutions to the market is unmatched. And we go way beyond just “checking-the-box” with our features. Each new capability is designed from the ground up to deliver real ROI in the challenging real world of channel management.

Impartner Software is known for its distinctive Segmentation and Personalization. Can you elaborate?

With our Impartner Segment AI segmentation engine, we lead the industry in our ability to segment partners by any attribute – tier, type, region, size, vertical – really anything.  Every partner is “gold” for something, and when you can automate your ability to provide the precise care and feeding for each partner that is exactly what they need to be successful, all of your partners can be successful and not just that a handful you have the time to pay attention to. Additionally, Impartner SmartContent asset automation engine, when combined with Segment AI, enables vendors to automatically ensure that the right partner gets the right asset at the right time, based on their segmentation.

Tell us about your client-base

Initially, given our technology sat on top of a CRM, the majority of our clients were in technology, as CRM was most fully adopted in this vertical first. However, now that clients with and without a CRM can use our solution. World-leading corporations from Fortinet, to Zendesk to Splunk to Xerox are increasingly turning to Impartner to power their channels. We’re working across a broader range of verticals, including manufacturing, and are excited to include old-line but forward-looking manufacturers like Ingersoll Rand as part of our customer mix.

Introducing the Legendary

Joe Wang, CEO

Mr. Wang joined the company in 2015 when he, along with $700M growth equity firm Kennet Partners, acquired a majority ownership of the company, then known as TreeHouse Interactive. His record includes 25 years of growing high-tech businesses and generating tremendous returns for his investors.

As CEO at WatchGuard Technologies, he successfully turned around the declining business, creating a profitable and growing company with vastly improved technology and market position. Prior to WatchGuard, Mr. Wang made his mark in the Utah high-tech industry as CEO of local software powerhouse LANDesk Software, an Intel spin-off, where he grew the company by 150% in four years. He successfully sold LANDesk Software for over $400M, generating 11x return for shareholders. Before LANDesk, Wang was vice president and general manager of Symantec’s Enterprise Administration Division, a business unit with $230M in annual sales. He joined Symantec by selling them 20/20 Software, a company he founded and at which he was the CEO. He built 20/20 Software from conception to a growing and profitable business and ultimately championed its successful acquisition, generating a 10x return for investors.

 Mr. Wang holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Peking University, a master’s degree in managed information systems from the Renmin University of China, and a master’s degree in communications management from the University of Southern California.

What the Clients say

“In 2017, I put together a stretch goal to increase our pipeline influence 30 percent over 2016, and thanks to efficiencies, our ability to broaden our partner base receiving leads and onboard new partners, we were able to increase that nearly 200 percent.”

Liz Cope, Global Marketing Leader – Ingersoll Rand ARO

“Impartner was the perfect choice for us in that we’re in this together. We’re developing features together and we are improving together. Impartner is coming up with things we could only dream of.”

Armando Valim, Director of Global Partner Programs, National Instruments

“Our robust, out-of-the-box PRM technology has made Impartner the best-selling, most  award-winning pure-play PRM solution on the market.”

"We deliver the industry’s most advanced SaaS-based Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution, helping companies worldwide manage their partner relationships."