Hello, Supplier Relationship Management
Brian Carbone
At Unifyr, we are attuned to the daily workflows and challenges facing suppliers and partners in the channel. For many suppliers, partners aren’t just a nice-to-have; they’re a necessity representing more than 50% of annual revenue. There are many types of partners, but one fact holds true: managing multiple supplier relationships has been made unnecessarily difficult by the lack of proper tools offering operational cohesion. In fact, partners:
(1) Need to stay atop news and content in several partner portals, (2) Are unable to see lead and deal registration across suppliers, (3) Are unable to see holistic performance indicators, such as total pipeline and revenue, (4) Find it difficult to take on new supplier relationships.
In particular, one class of partners struggles the most: managed service providers (MSPs). Often, MSPs weave multi-supplier solutions for their customers—it’s a critically important function for suppliers and customers, and it can’t be easily replaced. In reality, the issues outlined above are multiplied ten-fold for MSPs and there hasn’t been a sign of relief—until now. Today, we’re announcing the availability of Unifyr+ open beta, the partner-first Supplier Relationship Management platform built to centralize partner operations and accelerate growth in the channel.
The emergence of a need for SRM
The supplier-partner dynamic has quietly shifted over the past decade. Traditional PRM platforms emerged from a supplier-dominated channel paradigm where partners essentially functioned as extensions of supplier sales teams. These systems were designed with a singular focus: to help suppliers manage their partner networks from the top down. These systems operated on the assumption that partners would adapt to whatever systems their suppliers implemented, creating an ecosystem where partners were perpetually adjusting to different platforms, portals, and processes for each relationship they maintained. This supplier-centric model might have made sense when partners worked with only one or two vendors, but today’s reality is dramatically different.
Partners now juggle relationships with many suppliers simultaneously, building solutions that weave together multiple products and services to meet intricate customer requirements. It’s a brilliant business model that benefits all parties (customers, suppliers, and partners), but the architecture of PRM systems remains largely unchanged, leaving partners to navigate a labyrinth of portals that drain productivity and obscure holistic performance insights. This fragmentation is a structural impediment to growth for partners and suppliers alike.
The persistence of this outdated model has created “visibility asymmetry” in channel relationships: suppliers maintain comprehensive visibility into their partner networks, while partners lack equivalent insight into their supplier relationships. This has concrete consequences for business performance: partners that lack integrated visibility across their supplier relationships leave significant potential revenue on the table due to missed opportunities and inefficient operations. The time has come for a new approach—one that acknowledges the central role of partners in the channel ecosystem and provides them with tools matched to their actual workflows.
MSPs have suffered the most
The average MSP maintains active relationships with between 5 and 15 suppliers simultaneously. Consider the daily reality for an MSP operations manager: they might begin their day checking for critical updates across multiple supplier portals, then pivot to manually aggregating pipeline data from disparate systems to create a unified view of upcoming business. Later, they’ll likely spend time tracking down commission payments that should have arrived, reconciling deal registrations that exist in multiple systems, and trying to identify growth opportunities across their supplier portfolio without any tools designed for cross-supplier analysis. This operational fragmentation extracts a heavy toll not just in time and attention, but in missed opportunities and stunted growth.
Revenue is left on the table
Behind the obvious operational headaches of managing multiple supplier relationships lies a more insidious problem: the substantial opportunity cost imposed by fragmentation. When partners lack a unified view of their supplier relationships, they make suboptimal decisions about resource allocation, customer engagement, and strategic direction—not because they lack the necessary business acumen, but because they lack the information infrastructure to support more sophisticated decision-making.
The financial impact of this fragmentation is rarely captured on balance sheets but materializes in numerous ways throughout partner operations. Partners without unified supplier relationship management will suffer comparatively in several key metrics, including customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and revenue per employee. Perhaps most concerning is how this fragmentation impacts strategic planning and investment decisions. Without a comprehensive view of performance across their supplier portfolio, partners may struggle to identify their most profitable relationships and their most problematic operational bottlenecks. They resort to gut feeling and anecdotal evidence rather than data-driven analysis, leading to misallocated resources and missed opportunities. It’s time to stop flying blind.
Unifyr+: SRM for Partners
Unifyr+ is Supplier Relationship Management. It reconceptualizes how partners should and can function in a partner-driven channel ecosystem. Rather than asking partners to adapt to each supplier’s unique systems and processes, Unifyr+ inverts the traditional model by creating a partner-centric hub where multiple supplier relationships can be efficiently managed through a single, unified interface. This approach acknowledges the reality that partners—not suppliers—now occupy the central position in customer relationships and solution design.
The platform addresses the core challenges of fragmentation through several key innovations. First, it creates a unified supplier news feed that aggregates updates, announcements, and opportunities from across a partner’s supplier portfolio, eliminating the need to monitor multiple portals for critical information. Second, it centralizes lead and deal registration tracking across suppliers, providing partners with a comprehensive view of their pipeline regardless of which suppliers are involved in each opportunity. Third, it delivers consolidated performance analytics that illuminate patterns and opportunities across supplier relationships, enabling truly strategic portfolio management for the first time.
Importantly, Unifyr+ simplifies the process of establishing and maintaining new supplier relationships through its supplier discovery functionality. Partners can explore potential new supplier relationships based on their existing portfolio, customer needs, and growth objectives, with streamlined onboarding that dramatically reduces the friction of adding new relationships. The platform’s architecture doesn’t force, rather it leans into the nature of modern channel relationships. Partners often play different roles with different suppliers—sometimes acting as resellers, sometimes as referral partners, sometimes as service providers. Unifyr+ accommodates this complexity by providing a flexible relationship that serves each supplier’s unique engagement model, while still maintaining unified visibility and management.
Relationship intelligence at scale
Beyond operational efficiencies, Unifyr+ offers integrated artificial intelligence at strategic points (often the cause of congestion) in daily partner workflows. Using the AI adviser to surface material for any supplier based on your current lead or deal lifecycle requirements will diminish the incredible time investment required to stay atop supplier assets. Strategize the best ways to make supplier-generated content work for you using natural language and get answers without waiting for email responses or training sessions. Using an AI fully aware of your workspace is the best way to accelerate growth and optimize workflows.
Implementation and integration: breaking down adoption barriers
The potential of centralized supplier relationship management remains unrealized if partners face insurmountable barriers to adoption. Recognizing this reality, Unifyr+ has been architected from the ground up to minimize implementation friction and accelerate time-to-value. For partners engaging with suppliers using ZiftONE, getting started is instantaneous: register for Unifyr+ today and let us help grow your business.
Unifyr+ recognizes that adoption doesn’t happen in a vacuum—it requires cultural and procedural changes within partner organizations. To facilitate this transition, our teams are prepared to explain SRM best practices, the vision for success in executing SRM strategies, and how the platform is poised to evolve alongside your growth in the channel. It is our goal to reduce organizational resistance that often derails even the most promising operational transformations; Unifyr+ is an opportunity for both partners and suppliers, and we want you to experience the value of the platform with optimal conditions.
Future-proofing partner operations
As the channel ecosystem continues to change, partners are becoming more and more empowered to build operational infrastructure that can adapt to tomorrow’s requirements while addressing today’s challenges. From a technological perspective, Unifyr+ employs an API-first architecture that ensures compatibility with emerging systems and platforms. While PRM-agnostic connectors are not available today, using Unifyr+ SRM will prepare your business for anticipated improvements to the product.
Unifyr+ isn’t just the “SRM of today”—it’s positioned to evolve with customer feedback. For existing customers of ZiftONE, learn more about Unifyr+ in the customer portal. For partners and MSPs looking to discover the platform, complete the form here to gain instant access to the Unifyr+ platform. Your feedback is welcome and necessary. Partners and suppliers both should share their experiences with partner enablement through ZiftONE and Unifyr+. To reach our support team with additional questions, please reach out to support@unifyr.com.