Partner/Channel Relationship Management software

[Anonymous]

Hi Folks,

My organization is currently in the process of evaluating partner relationship management solutions. Ultimately the partner portal will allow us to easily recruit, and on-board new partners, as well as manage deal flow. The portal will also provide a ecosystem for deal registration, lead distribution, business planning, marketing fund management, joint business planning, and performance analysis and profiling. The solution must integrate with Salesforce.com, e-learning solutions (such as Litmos or Adobe Connect) and our existing Client Services ticketing system (Jira).

Any suggestions for vendors we should look at? Please share you experiences.Your help is much appreciated!

Thank you,

D.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dipika,

From my experience, a well design Salesforce Partner community could do the job pretty well. An avoiding addition of another layer if your already well populated stack is, IMHO, a great advantage.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

Thank you for your response. I could not agree more on not wanting to add another layer to our technology stack; there is enough to manage as it is. Are you currently using Salesforce Partner community? If so, can you share your experience in terms of lead distribution as well as deal registration?

Thank you for your inputs,

Dipika.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dipika,

We have implemented the Partner community for a couple of our clients. It is flexible enough, but if you really want it to be finely tuned to your needs, be prepared to use advanced SFDC techniques. One of the issues we have been facing is the partner adoption of salesforce layouts and it ended up with some Visualforce custom development. But the ultimate the result was nice and did the job well.

Setting up SFDC is only part of the problem. One of the key points we faced is how to convince partners to use it. The youngest persons would usually jump into it, but for the older, there is always a reluctance towards the transparency that the tool enables. 

The change management issues are not the same depending of your objectives:

1. if your objective is to route leads to your partners, usually, the reluctance is not so strong, although they will be afraid of the tracking capabilities you are introducing (You may find out that the partners are not really working the leads you give them).
2. On the opposite, if you want your partners to declare their leads in your system, Partners will be reluctant to share lead info as they are afraid to disclose that info, being afraid that you may use the info against them (with your direct sales or with other partners). You will need to convince that it is their best interest. One of the arguments we have been using is that lead also interact with you directly, for instance on the web site. So, if a partner does not disclose it's leads to you, these leads from your direct lead gen WILL be routed to the direct sales.

-Greg