It is no longer hard to find the success stories. Thanks to closed-loop marketing, computer-aided design software maker Autodesk knows which promotions generate worthwhile leads and which partners should get which leads.  Georges Millet at Autodesk says: "It has enabled us to identify those campaigns which work and cancel those which don’t.”

Chemicals giant Dow Corning used to be assailed by requests for special prices from its channel.  These requests are now dealt with online and, because Dow can turn them round in minutes, it is far more likely to win big contracts.

Toyota’s system saves it and its dealer network nearly £1 million a year in the UK alone.  Dealers can mount their own campaigns using Toyota branded artwork and Toyota can be sure that they will not run counter to the new brand it spends £60 million a year nurturing.

All three companies have automated different aspects of their channel-marketing management. In each case they have generated a huge return on the cost of the system. The buzzword for all this is a partner-relationship management system, which normally means a large website dedicated to communicating with, and profiling, partners. 

Yet PRM remains a dirty and rather obscure word.  Several of the senior managers RTM interviewed for this article claimed never to have heard the acronym.  For others PRM stands for expensive internal projects that have failed in the past – like CRM, but not quite as expensive.

Professor Jim Narus is surveying channel players in the USA on what they want from such systems.  He says: "There is such confusion about PRM.  We just refer to electronic support."

This makes sense.  People tend to have extreme preconceptions of what PRM means.  It perhaps makes more sense to ask yourself: "what forms of electronic support could we usefully provide for our channel?" A counterpoint to this is to ask what others are doing – our light-hearted, four-step ladder to PRM Nirvana may help.

Yet for most companies, practice lags a long way behind and it is important to understand why.  Perhaps the first reason is that the processes theses systems replace were incredibly haphazard.

Take closed-loop marketing.  Professor Erin Anderson at INSEAD says: "A massive cross-industry project found that most salespeople treat them like junk mail.  They follow up selectively, based on their own private filters and their own sense of smell.  Some of the very best completely ignored all leads and just cold-called." 

“PRM remains a dirty word”

Small wonder that Techmar, a closed-loop marketing specialist, reckons that in companies working without closed loop, only 30% of leads are followed up properly. It reckons that half of all leads generated in most companies are lost.