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Challenge: Scattered partner deal information increased the risk of losing deals and created an admin headache |
About Wisefish
Wisefish are on a mission to improve the sustainability and success of the seafood industry by optimising business processes. Their software solutions help seafood organisations digitise their entire supply chain, ensuring critical data is always available to make smarter decisions, increase efficiency, and reduce waste.
Industry: IT services and consulting / Fishing industry
Number of employees: 11-50
Location: Reykjavik, Iceland
Contact: Thorunn Oskarsdottir, Director of Partner Operations
The challenge: no visibility into a global partner network
Wisefish use both direct sales and a partner program to bring their software to the market. Thorunn, as Director of Partner Operations at Wisefish, needs to be able to support partners proactively and quickly provide pipeline updates to her internal stakeholders. For this, she needs a way of understanding every partner’s deals and status.
Wisefish were using Confluence to log some information about partners, but not in a systematic way. Everything was quite ad-hoc. Much of the critical information on the partner pipeline was stored in email inboxes. Prep time for regular catch-up meetings with partners became too long, and reporting for leadership was laborious. Thorunn realised Wisefish needed a formal process to track partner pipeline and the stages each deals go through. Without it, Wisefish risked deal slippage, lost revenue, and reduced trust with its partners.
Starhive as a partner relationship management system
Wisefish initially considered using their existing direct sales CRM solution to track partner deals, but they quickly realised the cost would be prohibitive because each partner needed edit licences to add and maintain their deals. They needed a lower-cost solution.
So Thorunn investigated using Starhive to build a lightweight partner relationship management (PRM) system herself one that wouldn’t break their budget. Because Starhive has unlimited users, everyone relevant can get access without spending more on licences.
Thorunn first trialled Starhive with one partner as a proof-of-concept. She set up a private area in Starhive for herself and her partner. Instead of sending information via email, the partner registers leads and deals in Starhive. Thorunn was able to set stages for each deal that are consistent across all partners and now she can discuss activities to move deals through the stages together with her partner.
Additionally, she created a dashboard where both she and her partner can get an instant overview of their KPIs, perfect for their regular meetings and for Thorunn to share updates with her CEO immediately, rather than having to dig through emails to find out how a partner is performing.
It was essential to Thorunn that their PRM system was straightforward to use, as technical capabilities among Wisefish’s partners are not uniform. Starhive proved to be a big success there.
“Starhive is very simple to use once configured; you don’t have to explain it. It was so intuitive that our first partner started using it correctly before being formally onboarded."
- Thorunn
Following the success of the proof-of-concept, Thorunn is rolling out the PRM system, built on Starhive, to all partners.
Reduced admin, greater visibility, lower spend
Wisefish’s new PRM system has been a success. On a personal level, Starhive provides Thorunn with significantly more insight into her partners, boosting teamwork and eliminating the risk of missed deals due to administrative issues.
“I estimate I’ve been able to cut my preparation time in half for every partner. I can instantly pinpoint if there’s something new to discuss, or if something is stalling and I need to proactively pull in a colleague to help unstick a deal”
- Thorunn
On a business level, Wisefish management is delighted and reassured to receive instant status updates on partners at 80% less than the initial price quoted to buy more seats for their CRM. By building a system on Starhive they got the formal process that they critically needed at a significantly lower cost.
Wisefish also see the future potential of Starhive to build apps to optimise other internal processes outside of the partner team, which they will explore shortly.
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