Digital communities result in 43 percent increase in partner sales, according to recent research from Salesforce.
Channel Managers know that their partners are busy; most of the time, working with your company is not their full-time job. In fact, they may also work with your competitor so it is critical to make it as easy as possible to do business with you so they are more likely to sell your products over your competitor’s. Here are three things to keep in mind when designing your Partner Community to ensure your partners have the best user experience possible:
Make it easy for them to do business with you.
Give partners a single place they need to login to do business with you and make that URL easy to remember, such as partners.yourcompany.com (learn how here). If you are a SaaS-based software vendor and your partners are also your customers, consider putting SSO in place so there is a single username and password that they need to remember to do business with you. Learn how Constant Contact used Communities to improve their partner experience, going from a half dozen places to do business with them down to just one.
Tailor your partner’s experience.
When a partner logs in to the community, they should see information that is relevant to them. From the sales and marketing tools you provide them with, to the announcements you make on their home page, to the training courses they have access to inside you in your learning management tool, it should all be targeted to show them relevant information. That said, don’t try to target content in too granular a fashion, as it is costly to implement and creates a maintenance nightmare. Do: target by all different combinations of Partner Type + Partner Level + Partner Region (i.e. Platinum Resellers in EMEA). Don’t: target content down to the partner-level; rather, use Chatter to communicate to your partners on partnership specific details.
Make your Partner Community mobile-friendly.
Have you ever felt the frustration of trying to do work in transit, when you land on a website that isn’t optimized for your mobile device? The browser page is tiny and you have to zoom in on the page to consume any information. Need to fill out a form? Forget it. That’s way too painful. Don’t let your partners feel this kind pain and be sure to optimize your partner community interface for mobile devices. Later, you might consider building a mobile app on Salesforce if you notice a large percent of partners visiting your community from mobile devices to allow you to push notifications to your partners, such as reminders about when deal registrations are about to expire or alert them to a new incentive program that you’re offering.
Want to learn more about how you can empower and engage your partners to drive channel performance? Watch our 2-minute video on how our clients are using Salesforce Community Cloud to power their business.
