Impartner is tackling a common channel bottleneck: manual processes that slow down resales, distribution deals and other vendor-dependent partner transactions. The company added configure, price and quote tools to its partner revenue management platform earlier this month. Partners can now build and advance quotes without handing routine transactions back to the vendor.
“The issue we see is that the partner often owns the opportunity but doesn’t own the quote,” Impartner COO Brad Pace told Channel Dive.
Within the platform, partners can select available vendor products, configure offerings, apply eligible pricing and discounts, create quotes and submit proposals for approval.
Vendors still set the catalog, price books, pricing rules and approval requirements, but the CPQ capabilities let partners move opportunities forward independently as long as they stay within those commercial parameters.
That’s a crucial distinction, Pace said.
Partners generally have the ability to register and work channel opportunities, yet often lose control of the process when pricing and proposal creation require help from a vendor sales team or deal desk. Kicking a deal back to a vendor for email exchanges, sales operations work and reviews — even when it fits standard pricing and configuration rules — slows down transactions.
“There’s a velocity cost because the partner waits, but there’s also an operating cost because vendor sales, channel operations or deal desk resources are spending time assembling routine quotes that already conform to established commercial rules,” Pace explained.
Feedback from Impartner’s client communities showed simple, standard deals can take up to 48 hours to complete. More complex deals can take upward of five days and often a few weeks when manual quote generation relies on spreadsheets and email for routing and approvals.
Delays have consequences, especially for channel partners who represent several vendors.
“When a partner can move quickly with one vendor and encounters unnecessary friction with another, that can influence where they focus their time,” Pace said.
Multi-vendor relationships make direct-sales CPQ models difficult to implement in the channel. Much of the CPQ technology on the market was developed for vendor salespeople who have access to corporate systems, know company processes and can turn to internal experts when something goes wrong.
“A channel partner is different,” Pace said. “They’re outside the organization, they may represent several vendors and they need a much more self-contained experience.”
Impartner supported partner quoting previously through Salesforce-based CPQ technology, including Steelbrick and Revenue Cloud. Now the company has placed its CPQ engine directly into its PRM.
The platform’s native engine is a neater fit for partner workflows and vendor processes, according to Impartner. EDepending on the vendor’s setup, the PRM can now furnish vendors with key data points, including partner tier, geography, program membership, competency or certification, product authorization and deal registration status. These factors can then be used to determine what the partner sees and how quoting works. For example, the vendor can use the platform to automatically assign the appropriate price book accordingly rather than leaving the partner to choose the pricing structure.
“The goal isn't to eliminate vendor involvement altogether,” Pace said. “It's to reserve that involvement for the quotes that actually require judgment.”
There are limits to the platform’s CPQ experience.
Partners can quote inside Impartner regardless of whether the vendor uses Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics orHubSpot — even if the vendor has no CRM. However, the underlying integrations are not identical.
Partners already relying on Salesforce for CPQ calculations can continue using that integration. With Dynamics or another CRM that is not calculating prices, Impartner can handle the quoting logic and send the data to the CRM.
The HubSpot integration is less complete. The current iteration does not yet synchronize quotes and line items. Pace said that requires additional scopes and customer-specific approval work.
There’s also no automated migration tool that takes an existing CPQ configuration and recreates it inside Impartner. Bulk import is available for appropriate data, along with CRM synchronization, but some configuration still requires hands-on work.
“Vendors want control, and partners want the ability to move,” Pace said. “Those two things don’t have to be in conflict. The vendor can establish the rules, and the partner can actually transact within them.”
