Kara Allen

Constant Contact is an industry leader in small business marketing solutions (e.g. email, promotions, surveys, events, etc). Starting in 2013, Perficient helped Constant Contact migrate off of the Salesforce Partner Portal and migrate onto the Community Cloud platform. They spoke about that experience last year at Dreamforce; if you didn’t catch it then, watch it now.  Since that initial project, we have continued […]

The 2015 Dreamforce keynote started with a few songs by Stevie Wonder. When “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours” came on, it became required to dance. Stevie, you’ve still got it. That is a great example of what Dreamforce does to people year over year; it gets you so excited that you cannot sit still in […]

Last year at Dreamforce, Salesforce announced their Community Builder, a new tool that empowers companies to quickly launch self-service communities using one of three templates: Napili, Koa, Kokua. At the time, the product was in Beta and lacked key extensibility features required by more enterprise customers. The product showed great promise, but few people adopted […]

Dreamforce 2015 is off to a great start. I just attended my first session of the week where I had the chance to hear Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and AstraZeneca talk about how their enterprise social networks are transforming how they work as companies and how they retain top talent. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt integrated Chatter on top of an […]

The Community Builder is the future of Salesforce Communities and Salesforce is heavily investing in making it extremely user-friendly, easy-to-implement and fully extensible. If you are considering putting in a pubic knowledge base or self-service community, I urge you to look strongly at the Community Builder templates as the tool to go with for those […]

One of my favorite conversations to have with our Salesforce customers is around translating their partner community. Everyone wants to be able to support users in their native language to make it easier to do business with them, but not everyone has the infrastructure in their partner organization to support language localization. Here are three […]

As our world becomes more mobile, there is more and more of a push to make Partner Communities available on mobile devices. A recent Forrester study confirms that field sales teams at your channel partners increasingly manage their business from their smart phones and tablets, and partner portal adoption is low when companies do not […]

Partner enablement is one of the key business drivers that prompts businesses to invest in Partner Communities. This is not surprising; to grow your channel successfully, you want to give your partners the best information and tools to enable them to represent and sell your brand. However, partner portal adoption is low and most people […]

According to a PRM report from Forrester Research, partner portal utilization is often low and eBusiness and channel strategy professionals need to understand inhibitors to adoption and key actions to boost partner engagement since partner engagement directly correlates to loyalty and productivity. As a result, channel teams are turning to new methods and modern systems […]

  Deal registration continues to be the number one reason that we see our customers implement Partner Communities. Several years back, my colleague Jason Dickinson wrote an excellent blog about three different ways that you can implement Deal Registration in Salesforce that still rings true today. Here, I will focus on three deal registration best practices that […]

  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 […]

  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 […]