Fund Manager

RelayWare Fund Manager manages a wide range of partner MDF, co-op and marketing rebate programs. Whether you operate budget- or accrual-based models on a global, regional or local basis, Fund Manager provides the infrastructure to define and execute marketing funding programs in collaboration with your channel partners. It lowers the administrative burden of your partner marketing through online management of accruals and fund allocation, automating the approval, fund crediting, claim, reporting and validation process.

Why Buy RelayWare?

Because by ensuring that your partners are given easy access to the tools necessary to drive and fund collaborative marketing initiatives tightly linked to your own demand generation campaigns and in accordance with your business goals and strategy,  it will pay for itself in no time and then keep on delivering incremental sales, increased profits and lowering your cost of sale.

What are the Key Features of RelayWare Fund Manager?

RelayWare Fund Manager executes on every component of your partner co-marketing program including:

• Accrual rules setup
• Budgets setup
• Campaign set up
• Program set up and administration
• Program registration and approvals
• Program communication and promotion
• Partner co-marketing fund account setup
• Importation / loading of point of sale data
• Automated fund accrual
• Budget management
• Online fund request wizards
• Online customizable joint marketing tools
• Multi-level / tier approvals workflow
• Online proof-of-execution upload
• Online account statement
• Full reporting and dashboards including ROI analysis

Return on Your Investment

Fund Manager will…

• Automate manual, offline processes
• Reduce headcount costs
• Greatly reduce program administration costs
• Improve partner marketing alignment with your corporate marketing goals and strategy
• Enable formalized fund claim, approval and expenditure validation and ROI analysis
• Ensure that funds are spent on activities that actually drive sales rather than on supporting partner ‘bottom lines’
• Facilitate ‘Use it or lose it’ fund management to drive effective usage whilst cutting overall expenditure, with substantial net reduction in MDF and co-op expenditure but greater quantifiable sales return as a result of improved controls.
• Substantially improve sales return on your MDF budget

Automating Partner Funding Programs

Co-marketing programs have a reputation for inefficiency, high cost and low return. Legacy programs act as little more than rebating vehicles to provide below-the-line cash-back payments to the channel. Since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act came into force in July 2002 introducing major changes to the regulation of corporate governance and financial practice, many vendors have struggled to manage compliant co-marketing programs whilst handling the complex administration and reporting with dwindling resources.

How does RelayWare Fund Manager Work?

RelayWare Fund Manager automates every component of a partner co-marketing program from setup and configuration through accrual and budget management to claiming and rebating with full partner interaction throughout.  It enables you to:

Defining your Channel Funding Program, Policy and Parameters
A combination of metrics, goals, budgets, accrual rates and business rules will enable you to shape a highly effective channel funding program. A new program can be simply defined or based upon an existing set of business processes. Always ensure you define goals and metrics that are qualitative as well as quantitative to get real value from the resulting ROI output.

Signing Up Partners and Agreeing Terms of Engagement
Once your program has been created, RelayWare enables you to communicate your program objectives and participation T’s and C’s to your partner community, via your Communications Manager and partner portal tools.

Setting Up Your Channel Funding Budgets or Accrual Rules
Fund Manager enables you to plan and manage your MDF budget against forecasted sales, actual sales or qualitative measures such as a partners’ previous budget utilization, product specialism or market coverage. Budgets can be managed on a global, regional, local or account-specific basis and can be assigned to budget owners such as product divisions and P&L’s. Alternatively, rules can be established to accrue funds or rebates based upon imported point of sale data.

RelayWare allows you to change policy on an ad hoc basis, offering complete flexibility – for example, you may wish to administer greater funding emphasis on a single campaign each quarter by offering 100% funding in order to encourage uptake and activity.

Managing Fund Allocation
Funds can be allocated and credited based upon the satisfaction of your defined business rules and metrics, including your partner program tiers that may have pre-defined variants on fund accrual and allocation. The approvals processes can be defined with varying complexity subject to claim value, activity or partner track record or activities satisfying pre-defined criteria. Fund credits can be subject to the application of pre-defined performance or ROI metrics from simple ‘no win, no fee’ to complex multi-criteria measures.

Linking Funding to Campaigns
RelayWare allows you to create campaigns linked directly to your funding process and automates your activity submissions to ensure only those activities which meet pre-defined criteria proceed for approval. Your campaign collateral can be made available to your partners on approval of funds, giving you real time tracking of partner usage.

Approval, Claiming and Reimbursement
Accruals, funding requests and utilization can be monitored to effectively manage available funds, ensure adherence to budget and direct funds to the most effective partners. Partners can easily make claims against their accrued budget and submit usage and ROI reports or analyses online, in order to receive the fund credit. RelayWare offers a tiered approvals process linked to claim value, plus use-it-or-lose it or time-limited funds to drive effective utilization and ease accounting and budgeting.

Customizable Joint Marketing
Partners can select from a range of joint marketing templates and use RelayWare’s online tools to edit the templates, add content and publish to PDF or other document formats This ensures that partners are creating marketing materials that are consistent with your corporate branding guidelines and timed to hit the streets to coincide with your own campaigns. Depending on the medium, collateral can be downloaded free of charge or billed to the partner’s MDF account.

Reporting and Analysis
Reporting on your channel marketing spend completes the Fund Manager process. Having obtained quantitative data such as total target numbers and geographic region in your submissions process, you now need to define your claim criteria to get a full ROI report. Upon claiming, a partner will be required to advise on the following example criteria; number of respondents, number of meetings, number of direct sales, overall deal value, future opportunity value and timescales.

Building this into your claims procedure and balancing it against your total targets for each campaign, helps you to achieve ever greater insight into the success or failure of each of your campaigns per marketing budget spend. Campaign generated leads will be uploaded onto the partner portal by your partner as part of the submission process. Managing your leads via RelayWare’s lead and opportunity manager and / or your deal registration program gives both you and your partner visibility and tracking of the leads through to closure.

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