4 Reasons to Automate Your Partnership Application Review Process ASAP
Organizations are struggling to keep up with the manual process of reviewing and approving hundreds – sometimes thousands – of partnership applications. Some submissions require global reviewers and others need to be routed to regional teams. Some have short approval processes and others require long, detailed reviews. Regardless, manually tracking and pushing applications through multiple different processes is tedious and can result in poor vetting opportunities and choosing partnerships that don’t align with a brand’s objectives. In addition to vetting potential partners, organizations also rely on their review process for auditing and governance purposes. So, having an all-in-one platform to securely store and reference applications at any time can help adhere to internal policies.
Understanding the need for efficiency, accuracy, and transparency, we created approval workflows in KORE’s Intake product to streamline the partnership application review process and ensure every submission is documented and accessible in a single platform.
Four benefits of setting up approval workflows include:
- Save time – no more sifting through countless applications or manually following up with multiple reviewers and approvers. Handle a large number of applications faster than before.
- Improve collaboration and visibility – with an all-in-one platform to manage every application, cross-department reviewers and approvers are always in the loop about every application.
- Enhance documentation accuracy – create a “paper trail” of who approved what and when for auditing purposes.
- Increase internal alignment – ensure alignment between groups and stakeholders regarding company policies.
3 Steps to Get Started with Approval Workflow
Here’s how you can use the new approval workflow feature to automate your application review process.
Step 1: Define your application review process.
Before automating your partnership application review process, you need to define the steps involved in your review process. This could include determining a budget threshold for applications, specifying if it reaches a targeted audience, or identifying if it helps achieve any of your brand’s key objectives. For example, if the opportunity is less than a $250,000 investment, send to the regional team for review, if more, then send to the global team. Once you have a clear understanding of your review process, create an outline with the steps involved and define the conditions that must be met for each step to be approved.
Step 2: Configure your approval workflow.
Once you have defined your review process, it’s time to configure your approval workflow. This involves setting up your approval workflow in Intake, creating decisions or actions for each step, defining the order of steps, and setting up the decisions for how the system should proceed with the workflow.
5 critical functionalities that help keep your partnership review workflow airtight:
- Custom Options – allow you to configure the actions a reviewer takes. The flow is not limited to basic “yes” or “no” but allows the creation of other options such as sending to the financial team, legal team, or executives to review.
- Automated Decisions – create automated steps that will route the applications to different teams based on form responses.
- Auditing – actions on each application are logged to track who took what action and when.
- Notifications – email notifications can be configured and sent at any step to keep all parties informed.
- Secondary Submissions – automatically email a participant or internal reviewer at any step in the approval workflow to request additional information. The information will automatically tie back to the original application.
Step 3: Review and approve sponsorship applications.
After your approval workflow is set up and configured, you can start reviewing partnership applications using the new automated process. The system will automatically route applications to relevant team members based on the workflow you have set up, and team members can easily access and complete their assigned tasks in Intake.
With our intuitive dashboard, you can track the progress of each application and see which ones have been reviewed and approved, and which ones still require attention. Plus, if you ever need to refer back to an application, you can easily find it since they’re securely stored in Intake.
Making the Most Out of Your New Process
As you start using the new approval workflow feature, it’s best practice to monitor its performance and adjust as needed. Our platform provides valuable data that you can use to identify bottlenecks in your review process and optimize your workflow to improve efficiency. For example, if you notice that a particular step in the workflow is taking longer than expected, you can adjust the workflow to improve the speed and accuracy of the review process.
By automating your partnership application review process with our new feature, you not only save time, but also improve transparency. Our tool offers customizable criteria, automated notifications, and collaborative workflow features to increase visibility at every stage and streamline your selection process. By following our guide and continually improving your process, make smarter business decisions and select successful partnerships. Try our platform today and see the difference it can make!
KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.
