Fund Manager

RelayWare 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.

Taking Control of Your Partner Marketing Budget

Partners can interact with the system online for consistency, efficiency and ease of use, improving uptake and usage from your partner community and allowing you to concentrate on marketing your product, rather than marketing administration.

How does Fund Manager work?

• Step 1: Define 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.
• Step 2: Sign up partners and agree 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 eMarketing and partner portal tools.
• Step 3: Set your channel funding budget – per activity, campaign or per partner
  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 specialisms 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. 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.
• Step 4: Manage fund allocation and link to partner program
  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. See Step 7.
• Step 5: Link funding to campaigns and nominate level of funding achievable
  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.
• Step 6: Set parameters to fully of partly automate approval, claim and reimbursement
  Accruals, funding requests and utilisation 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.
• Step 7: Set reporting templates, link to lead and opportunity and pipeline forecasting
  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.

How can you save with Fund Manager?

Fund Manager can help you to save budget in several areas. Specific examples observed by our clients include:

• Automation results in greatly reduced program administration costs
• Formal fund claim, approval and expenditure validation and ROI analysis deliver significantly greater sales return on your MDF budget
• You can be sure that funds are spent on activities that actually drive sales rather than on supporting partner bottom lines
• ‘Use it or lose it’ fund management drives 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.

RelayWare Fund Manager allows you to concentrate on marketing and selling more of your product rather than marketing administration. For more information on Fund Manager, the Program Management Suite or RelayWare as a whole please contact the RelayWare team today.

Fund Manager – Part of the RelayWare PRM Application

Fund Manager is just one part of RelayWare – the Partner Relationship Management application. RelayWare offers a number of suites, each designed to achieve optimal automation and simplification of your partner recruitment, engagement and management. Each suite has been developed based upon best practice requirements of sales, marketing and programs management user groups. An additional reporting and analytics suite support the user suites and external data sources and systems integrated into RelayWare. Read more about RelayWare.