Adopting an indirect sales model significantly increases the reach and velocity of product distribution, ensuring a significant sales rise. That’s why more and more companies decide to sell through partners to take their products or services to market faster and boost revenue.
Implementing a channel sales approach may be challenging for some companies that work with third parties. Keep reading to learn how to use Salesforce Partner Relationship Management (PRM) to create mutually beneficial communication and collaboration between you and your channel partners.
What is Salesforce Partner Relationship Management (PRM)?
Salesforce PRM is a system based on the idea of relationship management. As a great tool for managing channel partners, it helps vendors build strong relationships, streamline interaction and collaboration with their partners, and enhance channel marketing and analytics.
Partner relationship management in Salesforce extends customer relationship management (CRM) functionality, allowing partners to use leads and opportunities to track their deals. Since it’s a central location for passing and receiving data, it makes the collaboration between vendors and partners easier, faster, and more effective.
What are the Benefits of Partner Relationship Management?
When talking about Salesforce Sales Cloud PRM, we mean a partner ecosystem empowered with the Lightning components, preconfigured workflows, information, tools, and the resources partners need to simplify every step of the channel sales process, from onboarding to selling.
The Salesforce partner management system helps solve multiple partner needs. Let’s go through some of the best Salesforce partner community features and benefits:
- Simplifying Training and Onboarding: Use PRM features and tools to help your partners start selling faster. Simplify recruitment and onboarding by providing your partners with step-by-step instructions on configuring lead distribution, deal registration, or allocating marketing development funds (MDF).
- Preventing Channel Conflicts: By allowing the vendor to assign the leads, you prevent channel conflicts when two partners are going after the same customer.
- Increasing Channel Sales: Creating a Salesforce partner portal provides your Salesforce channel partners with a single place to register deals, manage leads, opportunities, and accounts, track progress, and close business…making collaboration faster and more efficient.
- Empowerment with Helpful Support Tools: Provide your partners with a content library full of Knowledge articles and FAQs to help them find instant answers to their questions. Implement live chats to let them initiate real-time assistance when needed.
- Creating Visibility for Both You and Your Partners: Use PRM analytics tools like reports and dashboards to deliver performance insights to your partners anywhere, on any device.
- Enhancing Channel Marketing: Provide your partners with access to your campaigns to let them create co-branded collateral aligned with your brand identity. Empower them with the opportunity to build, track, and analyze distributed marketing campaigns.
Note!
Use the AC Partner Co-Branding app to empower your partners to develop their own marketing assets with their name, logo, contact details, and other elements while aligning with your marketing and brand guidelines.
5 Best Practices for Successful Partner Relationship Management in Salesforce
To help partners, your goal as a vendor should be to focus on the partner experience first and create a space for simple and engaging collaboration. This is where Salesforce Sales Cloud PRM comes in. Let’s review our 5 best practices to scale with channel selling.
Partner relationship management best practices for productive channel partnering in Salesforce:
- Create a beautiful Salesforce PRM community as a centralized place for collaboration and channel management. Benefit from the high customization capabilities of Experience Cloud sites to build a site that meets both partners’ and vendors’ specific needs.
- Facilitate the deal registration process. Try to make the deal registration form as simple as possible, asking only for data that’s essential for the sales cycle. That will help motivate channel partners to complete the registration forms. You can also use automated tools for fast approval and conflict resolution.
- Enhance self-service and provide real-time support. Let your partners focus on selling by providing them with enhanced self-service. Create a shared library of resources, including how-to articles, videos, support materials, and FAQs, so your partners can troubleshoot on their own and close deals faster. When partners have access to all the resources and tools they need, they’re much more likely to stay productive.
- Deliver fresh analytics and monitor the progress of your partners. Design dashboards based on the real-time data you’ve gathered with reports to provide partners with important information on deals, pipelines, opportunities, etc. Constantly measure your partners’ progress and analyze your MDF spent with a return to define the best-performing dealer. Regular customer surveys will help you assess how partners represent your brand and define the customer satisfaction rate.
- Help partners provide great customer support. On-demand articles, videos, presentations, product/service information one-pagers, co-marketing materials, copies of sales tools, price lists, and sales bots support are really helpful in the sales process. Provide your partners with all they need to maximize their sales efforts.
Final Thoughts
Your primary goal as a vendor company is to build trust between you and your partners, improve communication and collaboration, as well as eliminate complexities that may slow down your sales efforts. By extending Salesforce to your partners, you empower your partners with end-to-end sales, service, account, and knowledge management tools to achieve all of the above and keep customers happy during the entire sales process.
Reach out whenever you need help creating or implementing Salesforce PRM. Advanced Communities is a team of Salesforce certified Experience Cloud consultants who are always happy to help at any stage of your PRM implementation.