Companies across various industries collaborate with implementation partners, resellers, and distributors to either provide customers with readily available specialized expertise, expand across different markets, or introduce new offerings faster while ensuring scalability. The overall process entails various steps, active communication, and information exchange, all of which require a smooth collaboration for an enhanced customer experience.
Let’s take a closer look at the new Partner Cloud offering, the challenges it solves, and how it aims to transform how your organization achieves its revenue goals through the partner ecosystem.
The Why Behind Partner Cloud
The partner ecosystem can be the greatest ally of a company, and making sure that they have everything they need to succeed at their fingertips is not always easy, nor is it always fast. With any miscommunication, silo and delay ultimately impacting the customer’s experience, partner leaders and operations should no longer have to piece together temporary solutions, get lost in spreadsheets and emails, or spend countless hours tracking partner involvement from different sources to offer the accurate incentives.
Salesforce aims to provide a unified solution for all of these concerns with Partner Cloud, which can facilitate internal processes and provide all of your company’s partners with the tools they need to deliver a top-notch customer experience.
What’s in It for You?
Partner Cloud is the complete offering that Salesforce is bringing to market to support all of your partner-related efforts – sales, marketing, support, and even enablement. This new cloud offering is comprised of three separate SKUs:
- Partner Relationship Management (PRM): Equips Salesforce customers with all tools and functionality to extend their Salesforce implementations to their partner ecosystem, across sales, service, and even marketing processes through a bespoke partner portal.
- Partner Ecosystem Management (PEM): A brand new SKU Salesforce launched to bring together the entire power of the Salesforce platform. It encompasses everything included in PRM with new enablement and incentivization-related capabilities and more, to ensure a cohesive end-to-end experience across both internal teams and partners.
- Channel Revenue Management: Facilitates everything from rebate management to inventory tracking. This SKU is an add-on that caters primarily to customers focused on physical goods distribution.
What About the Partner Experience?
Overall, the entire partner experience will only get better. With PRM, Salesforce customers could already empower partners and distributors to actively collaborate on the sales process and also help customers at lightning speed thanks to the built-in Knowledge access.
Partner Ecosystem Management (PEM) takes the already available functionality one step further by extending what is possible in a limited amount of time, removing the need for Salesforce and operations teams to double the work or have to build everything from scratch.
With the included Sales Programs and guided selling via Agentforce, enablement can also be extended to your partner ecosystem in no time, directly in their flow or work – just like program managers alongside Salesforce admins would do for internal users.
PEM allows for Account Planning to become an option for partners as well. If you’re a Revenue Cloud customer already, bring the new Transaction Line Editor and all of the CPQ or CLM functionality in front of your partners, too.
Also, transparency is paramount in any productive business relationship, and when it comes to partner incentivization, Partner Cloud has you covered! Powered by Salesforce Spiff, all of your distributors, resellers, and any other types of partners can review their activity at a glance, drill down into their plan, and have immediate access to information that could have previously meant email exchanges and unnecessary back and forth.
Loyalty and referrals are also covered through the loyalty management functionality, helping you promote long-term commitment, as all benefits, previous transactions, and additional perks can be made available from the get-go.
On top of this, PEM allows for advanced marketing initiatives through B2B referrals, includes even more custom objects, alongside extra storage and more API calls per member.
Do More With Agentforce
Of course, it should go without saying that your partner ecosystem can also benefit from everything Agentforce has to offer, just like your internal sales team would when working on a deal or across any other process.
Any partner user can have their dedicated, around-the-clock, Agentforce-powered assistant to help them do even more for your customers with natural language prompts.
For example, Agentforce can overhaul how your partners find the information they need and take actions on their behalf – such as nominating a customer for a webinar.
You can also employ an agent to help partners generate quotes as well. In the end, based on your process and your desired experience, there are many ways in which Agentforce can help save time and allow partners to focus on building customer rapport.
Availability and Considerations
The new Partner Ecosystem Management SKU is available as of June 17, and can also be combined with the Channel Revenue Management add-on SKU if warranted.
Keep in mind that in order to make certain functionality available to your partner ecosystem, your organization needs to have that functionality to begin with. For example, a dedicated Partner Agent will still consume Agentforce credits and Einstein Requests (which you can explore with Salesforce Foundations or purchase additional ones).
In order to expose incentive information, you first need to have Salesforce Spiff implemented. All in all, Partner Cloud is an extension of products your organization has already invested in, and can help you maximize the return on investment by also extending it to your entire partner ecosystem.
Final Thoughts
Whether your organization is just beginning its partner portal journey or you’re well into building your partners’ experience, extending Salesforce, Slack, and other functionality to your entire partner ecosystem has just got much easier!
Partner Cloud is a complete solution that can streamline implementations by allowing you to tap into Salesforce products you have already invested in to effectively engage partners, while ensuring full transparency, collaboration, access to training and resources – all towards optimizing the end-to-end partner and channel motions.
