Your website is your brand.
That's what we tell our customers when they have a bad partner portal – which is what functions as their website to partners. (We tell our customers that even when they have a good portal, but they clearly don't need convincing.) If you have a great brand but a terrible portal, partners only see the terrible portal. Vendors should make sure they are putting their best foot forward with partners and creating (and maintaining) a fantastic portal that educates, interests and facilitates partner activity. Oh, and it should look good too.
About six months ago we decided to put our money where our mouth is. Our website wasn't terrible, but it didn't portray our company correctly. It had great content, but the content was hard to find. It had descriptions of our products and services, but not presented in a logical way. It was clearly time to change the messaging, presentation, structure and look. So on Thursday, April 14, we launched our new website. New look, same great taste.
So, I invite you to poke around Partner-Path.com. We still provide consulting from our fantastic channel experts, but we've honed our focus to our SaaS solutions: PRM software from channel experts. Our new product page walks you through the modules we offer. Our editions page outlines our suggestions for what products may fit your channel structure. Our About page tells the story of how we transitioned from consulting to software and specifically, created a bootstrapped SaaS company.
I'm really excited to see how our new messaging better communicates to our prospects, customers and advocates the value and quality of our brand. A great website doesn't necessarily mean a great product, but when you have a great product you should shine it up and showcase it well. I feel that's what we're doing now, and in order for it to continue to be a good and valuable website we will update it often. Be sure to check back often and let us know what you think! We're still working out some bugs, but we wouldn't be human if we weren't.
I'll leave you with 5 of my take-aways from our new website launch:
- Spec out your new content as many times as needed, but know that it will never be perfect, it will never be done.
- Think about good visuals and enlist other team members to help with product images when necessary. Other departments have great input on the best product features to showcase.
- Commmunicate deadlines early and often. Everyone gets busy, but everyone has the best intentions to help, so reminders are a good thing.
- Test your website on multiple browsers and devices. What looks good on a monitor may look weird on a phone, and what works perfectly on Chrome sometimes does bizarre things in Safari. It's not for me to understand why.
- Make lists, lots of lists, and take small pleasures from crossing things off. A new website is a giant project and celebrating the small victories help you reach the finish line.
Bonus: Don't let weird eye-twitching from your marketing team freak you out. Staring at a screen intently wondering if your website will drive leads and communicate value the way you see it in your dreams can cause temporary (hopefully) spasms. Fair warning.
Amanda Hawkins, Marketing Director
