The Dealer Portal Problem: The Bar Is Shockingly Low
If you've ever tried to find a product image on a manufacturer's dealer portal, you know what I'm about to say.
I spent years working with about forty different manufacturers, many of which had their own dealer or "partner" portals, and none of them necessarily made my life easier. Every portal had its own login, its own password rules, its own expiration schedule, and its own completely unique idea of where to put things. Spec sheets under "Resources" on one. "Marketing Assets" on another. "Dealer Tools" on a third. One of them had a tab called "Literature" that hadn't been updated since what I can only assume was the early 2010s.
And the product photos. I could write a whole separate post about the product photos. If your product image looks like it was taken on a folding table in a warehouse with a fluorescent light buzzing overhead, your dealers are not excited to sell that product. And when the image is postage-stamped size, it's not super helpful when trying to make your product look good on screen or in print.
The real problem is that these portals were built for the manufacturer's internal workflow, not for the people actually trying to sell their products. And when your partners have to fight through dozens of different logins and treasure hunts just to find a brochure, some of them are going to quietly stop fighting. They'll just sell the product from the manufacturer whose portal doesn't make them want to throw their laptop out a window.
This is fixable from both sides. If you're a manufacturer, your portal is your partner's first impression of what it's like to work with you. It should be at least as good as your product. And if you're a dealer or distributor drowning in logins, something as simple as one organized page in your own system, with every portal bookmarked, labeled, and annotated with where things actually live, can save your team real time every single day.
I build both of these now. The bar is shockingly low.
