Impartner has acquired Amplifinity to help formalize management of emerging “shadow channel” partners, which are expected to explode in growth in the coming decade.
By providing corporations with an intentional versus ad-hoc process for managing these increasingly critical relationships, Impartner says, companies see an average revenue increase of over 30 percent from these partners. The shadow channel of non-traditional partners has emerged because business unit buyers, who make 72 percent of purchasing decisions, increasingly turn to disparate groups such as industry-based consultants, service providers and independent software vendors to help implement technology given their role as trusted advisors.
Forrester’s principal analyst of channel partnerships and alliances, Jay McBain, addressed the trend earlier this year in his Forrester blog, What I See Coming For The Channel In 2019. One of his 2018 predictions was that “vendors [will] put formal shadow-channel programs in motion,” wrote McBain, citing a vendor who has since replaced “its traditional, compliance-based programs with new performance-based programs designed to reward all types of partners, business models, and various customer technology consumption preferences…Most programs will follow suit in 2019.”
The acquisition includes Amplifinity’s referral marketing software, which automates and formalizes the referral process for lead generation at scale and includes its incentive management technology and integrations to a suite of payment fulfillment providers to reward this new generation of partners in the manner they most prefer.
Amplifinity’s team will remain in the company’s Ann Arbor, MI, offices, adding a Midwest team of developers to Impartner’s global Channel Innovation Labs, made up of engineers, data scientists, UX and UI professionals and channel strategists who are committed to providing future-proof channel management technologies and services that accelerate channel performance.
