Salesforce.com For Dummies, 5th Edition (2014)

Understanding a day in the life of a partner

A partner’s perspective is the flip side of the relationship managed by the channel manager. For example, one type of partner could be reselling your company’s products. That partner works in a territory that’s managed by a channel manager.

With Salesforce Communities, partner users can now access a limited view of your Salesforce information via a Partner Community. The Partner Community provides a centralized view of leads to pursue, opportunities in your pipeline, vendor documents to help with the sales cycle, and optional tabs to help with additional responsibilities, such as making fund requests. Partners get to see leads specifically assigned to them or grabbed from a general “shark tank” in which first come is first served. Additionally, partners can receive other key targeted messages on the website, update their company’s information for the vendor to see, and e-mail their channel rep, as needed. Figure 12-1 shows a sample Partner Community that you might set up for your partners.

Figure 12-1: Accessing the Partner Community.

Managing Your Channel with Salesforce Communities

After your administrator has set up your organization with Salesforce Communities, the channel team can easily access it from the AppExchange app menu in the upper-right corner of your Salesforce window. This section provides a high-level overview of how the channel team can now use Salesforce Communities to gain better visibility into their partner relationships. We also recommend that you scan Chapters 4 and 9, which talk in more detail about navigating accounts and leads.

Enabling partner relationship management

To allow partners to take part in the benefits of communities while still providing certain privileges specific to partners (such as working leads assigned to them), you have to first turn it on. To enable partner relationship management, follow these steps:

1. Choose Setup⇒Build⇒Partners⇒Settings.

A page appears to enable partner relationship management (PRM). Note that this action is not reversible! We suggest you try out this feature in a Developer Edition instance first.

2. Click the Edit button and select the only check box on this page to enable PRM.

Again, you’re reminded that this action is not reversible.

3. Click the Save button.

The Introducing the Convert External User Access Wizard page appears. This wizard helps you adjust sharing settings that might allow certain records or folders to be otherwise shared with external users.

4. Click the Continue button.

The three-step wizard begins.

5. In Steps 1 to 3 of the wizard, see whether any existing sharing rules need to be updated.

Consider whether any records may contain information that you don’t want shared with partners.

6. Click Done when you’re finished, or click Cancel if you don’t have any rules to modify.

Creating partner accounts and contacts

First, you should make sure that all your partners are represented as accounts in Salesforce, with the respective channel managers owning the partner account records. This then allows channel managers to monitor and record all activities related to partners in their territory.

To create a new partner account, follow these steps:

1. Use the Create New drop-down list on the sidebar and select the Account option.

See Chapter 4 for more information on managing accounts.

2. Create the account record.

3. Click the Manage External Account button and select the Enable as Partner option from the resulting drop-down list.

4. Associate partner users to this partner account record by adding contacts.

See Chapter 5 for details on creating new contacts.

5. Create a new contact, click the Manage External User button on the contact record, and select Enable Partner User for your partner user to receive his or her login and password notification via e-mail.

A New User page appears, allowing you to confirm user details before saving the record and generating a password for the user.

Assigning leads to partners

By assigning leads to partners, channel managers ensure an organized way of seeing what potential business their partners are working on.

Leads may be assigned to partners by manually switching the record ownership, by assigning partner leads to a queue (also known lovingly as the “shark tank”), or by adopting a “round robin” method, in which leads are routed evenly to a number of queues. Partners then have access to the queue to grab leads. (You can keep them from getting too greedy by setting a ceiling on how many leads they can accept to work on at one time.) Additionally, lead assignment rules may be set up by your administrator to automatically assign leads to partner users or partner queues based on certain rules.

To reassign a lead to a partner user, follow these steps:

1. On the lead record, next to the Lead Owner field, click the Change link.

The link is in square brackets. The Change Lead Owner page appears.

2. From the Owner drop-down list, choose the Partner User option.

3. Select the partner user to whom you are assigning the lead.

This assumes the partner’s profile has been added as a member into the community you want him to join. The community has been published and can be viewable by others. And, the partner user is already activated and logged in at least once to the system. If the user is not active, his name will not show up when filtering for partner users.

4. (Optional) Select the Send Notification Email check box to notify the partner about the lead.

5. Click Save.

The lead record reappears with your ownership change. The new partner owner instantly receives a customizable e-mail if you selected the Send Notification check box, and the lead appears in his Lead Inbox the next time that he accesses the Partner Community.

You may also reassign leads in bulk. See Chapter 9 for more information.

Reducing channel conflict with deal registration

Without a well-thought-out Partner Relationship Management (PRM) process, companies often run into channel conflict when their direct sales and indirect sales forces butt heads over who found which lead first. As the channel manager, you often have to waste time arguing with a direct sales rep and her manager over who has dibs, while the prospect waits for the internal bickering to stop. This isn’t an efficient way to close a deal, and it’s frustrating for the customer to often hear multiple messages (or even price quotes!) from what’s supposed to be a united front. In addition, if the partner loses out on that opportunity, you’ve just lost some of her trust in how supportive you really are in her efforts — so why should she reveal her pipeline data early or adopt your processes?

By taking the time to design a deal registration process, concisely and consistently communicate the status of deal registrations to partners, efficiently carry out the approval for all submissions, and then be able to measure related conversion and close ratios, you can eliminate channel conflict. The deal registration capabilities of Salesforce Communities help provide clarity on what your deal registration processes are from start to finish, which can increase adoption of your partner program and help increase partner sales because the channel conflict inefficiencies disappear. However, this setup can be successful only if you invest the time to think out your deal registration process. If you have a hard time explaining it or whiteboarding it, how do you think your partners feel?