A new opportunity for partner enablement
Brian Carbone
Traditionally, partner organizations face a complex operational burden managing supplier relationships across multiple platforms, portals, and systems. A typical channel partner juggles between five and twelve different supplier relationships, each demanding dedicated attention through its own interface and authentication system. This fragmentation leads to partner frustration as they attempt to stay current with each supplier’s products and promotions. Training overhead compounds this challenge, with partners often required to maintain certification and compliance across multiple systems—each with its own learning curve. With “75% of world trade flowing indirectly,” according to Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Canalys, we should conclude: our partners deserve better.
Unifyr+ is the direct result of our eyes and ears laser-focused on the market and the requests of our customers. It defines a marked shift in how partners and suppliers engage in the channel ecosystem: rather than forcing partners to juggle a spattering of disparate systems, Unifyr+ centralizes daily partner workflows into one interface where they manage all supplier relationships. The platform’s aggregated content feed ensures partners never miss critical supplier updates, while AI-powered support ensures the right information is surfaced at crucial moments in sales processes. Our approach changes the partner-supplier dynamic by acknowledging partners—not suppliers—are at the center of the channel relationship model, directly orchestrating deals in the most profitable way businesses sell today. It needn’t be said: when partners succeed, suppliers succeed, too.
Creating an advantage for suppliers
Unifyr+ is a platform for partners, but it—as with all channel growth—requires mutual engagement between partners and suppliers, and it’s fueled by supplier-provided content by design. Suppliers stand to onboard, train, and maintain high-throughput partnerships with fewer long-tail partners due to the way Unifyr+ supports partner awareness and efficiency. The total resource cost of training decreases substantially as partners become more self-sufficient through the AI adviser’s content discovery and usage guidance capabilities. Via ZiftONE, suppliers will benefit from best-in-class depth of visibility into how partners interact with their content, which materials drive the most engagement, and which resources lead to successful deals.
Understanding supplier opt-in controls
The ZiftONE-Unifyr+ connection is disabled by default. Within ZiftONE, suppliers can visit the opt-in page by clicking the Unifyr+ logo at the top right of admin panel. Here, a supplier can choose whether to feed content to their partners in an automated fashion and, with granularity, choose which—if any—content should be exposed to non-partners seeking new supplier relationships in the Unifyr+ platform. The ability to selectively expose potential partners not yet registered to content creates an excellent opportunity for suppliers to grow their partner network in a controlled way.
We take the data privacy of our customers extremely seriously. Unifyr+, like ZiftONE, is SOC2 Type II compliant and data is only shared with partners if a supplier has opted in. When partners engage with the AI adviser for training and materials key to perpetuating new deals, all data remains confidential and within the Unifyr ecosystem—nothing is shared with unauthorized third-parties.
The ability for suppliers to configure partner enablement transparently and granularly is a cornerstone of the Unifyr ecosystem of industry-leading PRM products. Suppliers interested in engaging partners via this intelligent new channel can opt in to Unifyr+ partner enablement today within the ZiftONE platform. Unifyr+ will reach general availability in March 2025, but partners participating in the beta program will have access to supplier content effective upon opt-in. For additional information, please visit the knowledge base article available here or for further questions, reach out to your contact in customer success (alternatively, customersuccess@unifyr.com).