Partner relationship management (PRM) is the practice and the software category for running a company's indirect sales channel: recruiting partners, giving them somewhere to work, registering the deals they bring, and paying them what they earned.
Also called: PRM, PRM software, partner management software.
A PRM is to your partners what a CRM is to your sales team. The CRM holds the accounts your own reps work. The PRM holds the companies who sell on your behalf, the people inside them, the deals they source, the collateral they need, and the commission they are owed.
The reason it is separate software rather than a few extra fields in the CRM is access. A partner is an outside company. They need to see their own pipeline and none of anybody else's, they need to be able to register a deal without a licence to your CRM, and they need to do it without your team emailing spreadsheets. That boundary is most of what a PRM is for.
Four jobs, in the order a program hits them. Recruiting and onboarding partners, so a new partner reaches their first deal without a series of calls. Giving partners a portal where they can find collateral, register deals and see their own numbers. Tracking which revenue a partner touched, which is the part every program gets asked about and few can answer. Then paying commission against that record, without somebody rebuilding it in a spreadsheet at quarter end.
Around those four, most tools add tiering, market development funds, training and certification, and reporting for the person who has to justify the program internally.
A CRM assumes everyone using it works for you. Permissions are built for internal roles, records are shared broadly by default, and a seat costs what an employee seat costs. None of that survives contact with a channel: you cannot give two hundred partner reps CRM licences, and you cannot let a partner browse the pipeline of the partner they compete with.
A PRM inverts the default. Nothing is visible until it is granted, visibility is scoped per partner organisation, and partner users are not billed as internal seats. It then syncs back to the CRM, so your own team keeps working where they already work.
The threshold is usually a number of partners rather than a revenue figure. Below roughly ten partners a shared drive and a spreadsheet genuinely work. Past that, the failure mode is consistent: nobody can say which deals came from partners, commission is calculated by hand and disputed afterwards, and partners go quiet because using you is harder than using an alternative.
How Airstride does it
Airstride is a PRM built for teams whose CRM is Attio, folk or Zoho as readily as HubSpot or Salesforce, and it arrives populated from whatever you run today rather than as an empty portal.
See the platformLast updated 28 July 2026
