Run Your Partner Program From Microsoft Teams

Most partner managers I work with do not spend their day in their PRM. They spend it in Microsoft Teams. The PRM is a tab they open when somebody asks for a number, and a partner who registered a lead at 10:47 waits until that tab gets opened.

That wait is small, and it is where partners start to lose trust in deal registration. So over the last few weeks we moved the parts of CinnaLab.io that need a quick human response into Teams, and kept the parts that need a careful one in the web app.

This post explains what that looks like today, how the permissions work, what your Microsoft admin has to do, which plans include it, and what is not built yet.

Three layers, from simple to personal

### 1. Channel alerts

The simplest layer needs no app at all. You connect a Teams channel with a Workflows link, and CinnaLab posts partner activity there as Adaptive Cards. There are six categories and each one can be switched on or off:

Every card has an Open in CinnaLab button. CinnaLab sends a test card before it activates the connection and only accepts Microsoft webhook addresses.

It works on both sides of the relationship. A partner can connect their own Teams channel from their portal settings and receive their deals, leads, payouts and messages from you there, without logging into one more portal.

### 2. The CinnaLab app for Teams

The second layer is a real Teams app. It adds two things on top of the alerts.

You can ask it questions. @mention CinnaLab in a channel, or chat with it one to one, and ask the question that is actually in your head: which deals are stuck, which partners have not registered anything this quarter, what changed on a given account. It answers from your CinnaLab workspace with the same assistant as the web app, and every answer has a button to open the record.

You can act on a lead. When a partner registers a lead, the card arrives in your vendor channel with Accept and Decline buttons. Click Accept and the card is replaced for everyone in the channel with the outcome and the name of the person who decided. Nobody decides twice, and nobody wonders whether someone else already looked at it.

If a channel has both a Workflows connection and the app, new lead alerts are posted once, by the app, with the buttons. You do not get the same lead twice.

### 3. Personal alerts for the owner

The newest layer is personal. When a deal or lead changes, the person who owns it gets a 1:1 message in Teams. On the vendor side that is the user the deal is assigned to or who submitted it. On the partner side it is the partner's owner, and only for their own deals and leads. Everyone else keeps the in-app notifications and emails they already have.

A channel is the right place for "a partner registered a lead". It is the wrong place for "your deal moved to Proposal". The second message belongs to one person, so it goes to one person.

If someone does not want these messages, they type stop alerts in the 1:1 chat. start alerts turns them back on. The setting is stored on their CinnaLab notification preferences, so it follows them rather than the device.

Permissions: the part that took the longest

A Teams channel is a mixed room. It can hold your partner managers, your sales leadership, a read-only finance colleague and sometimes guests from the partner side. An app that answers "as the app" in a room like that is a data leak waiting for the right question.

So the CinnaLab app never acts as itself. Each person links their Teams account to their own CinnaLab user once, with a one-time link that expires after ten minutes. From then on:

None of these are new business rules. They are the permissions you already set in CinnaLab, applied in a new place.

What your Microsoft admin has to do

Channel alerts need no admin: anyone who can add a Workflow to the channel can connect it.

The app is different. A CinnaLab workspace admin downloads the app package from Settings, then Integrations, then Microsoft Teams. Your Teams admin uploads it as a custom app. Many Microsoft tenants do not let ordinary users upload custom apps, so in practice the upload becomes an approval request in the Teams admin center.

My advice is to ask for that approval before you announce the rollout to your team, not after. Once the app is published in your tenant, the rest takes minutes: add it to your partner channel, @mention CinnaLab, link your account.

Which plans include it

Channel alerts, the CinnaLab app for Teams and personal alerts are included in every paid CinnaLab plan: Starter, Growth and Scale. They are not part of the Freemium plan.

What is not built yet

I would rather you hear this from me than find it in a trial.

Who this is for

If your team runs on Teams and your partners complain about slow answers on registered leads, the alerts and the app will remove a real source of friction.

If your acceptance rules are unclear, a faster yes does not help, because the answer should sometimes have been no. Fix the rules first. Then remove the delay.

You can see how the Teams integration works, with setup steps, on the Microsoft Teams integration page, and compare plans on the pricing page.

-- Cédric

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