Are you looking for better ways to engage and enable your partners? Do you want to reduce channel conflict and get better insight into your pipeline? Are you struggling to get a 360-degree view of your partners due to managing your channel business in multiple systems or perhaps (gasp!) on Excel spreadsheets? Do you need better tools to be able to efficiently scale your fast-growing channel business? Perficient has been working with channel teams since 2007 to solve these business problems in Salesforce. Our eight years of PRM experience have made us big believers in using Salesforce to optimize channel processes as well as to enable and engage partners through a Salesforce Community.
Here are the top three reasons that our customers have gone with Salesforce to manage their channel partners over standalone PRM solutions:
- Flexibility. Perficient has done over 100 PRM projects, and while there are some core processes that are similar from one channel program to another, there is quite a bit of variance in how things are executed based upon the product you sell, the types of partners you work with, the markets you sell into and the maturity of your channel. Customers want business process driven technology solutions, not technology-driven business processes, and the power of the Force.com platform allows companies to make technology work for them.
- Scalability. Is your business growing year-over-year in the double or triple digits? We work with many fast-growing companies who desperately need a tool that can grow with them. Not only do companies need the ability to support more partners as they scale (Salesforce Communities supports up to 300,000 partner users per community), but more so, they need the ability to support new markets, new currencies, new languages, new programs and more complex business processes. In our 100+ PRM projects, we have yet to see Salesforce fail to scale for any of our customers.
- Single Source of Truth. It should be easy for your partners to do business with you. To achieve this, give your partners a single place to manage their entire relationship with you. One website, one login and one password. If your sales and support teams are already on Salesforce, it makes it much easier to connect your partners to those teams without any integrations or SSO required if you use Salesforce Communities. Imagine a world where your sales team can use Chatter to communicate with partners on deals that they are jointly pursuing, keeping the conversation in Salesforce like you would for your direct deals.
Interested in hearing directly from one of our customers? Now that you know a bit about why our customers have been picking Salesforce Communities, it is time for us to get into the “how”. Over the next few weeks, we will be covering best practices for implementing a partner community on the Salesforce Community Cloud platform. In the meantime, check out our 2-minute video to get a sneak peek of some topics we regularly cover when talking to clients about building a partner community and download a copy of our guide, “Channeling the Power of Partners with Salesforce”.
Please feel free to comment on this post if there is a specific topic you would like to see us cover!
