Partner Relationship Management (PRM) is designed to improve communication and coordination between businesses and their partners including suppliers, distributors, and resellers.

Salesforce PRM is basically a Vendor Management System that provides a business with the ability to manage their partners and vendors through a central platform. PRM helps in channel marketing and close deals faster.

Key features of the Salesforce PRM system include:

1. Managing the training and certification
2. Lending assistance for Marketing Communications
3. Introduction to new products and trends
4. Sales Productivity tools
5. Channel partner On-Boarding
6. Bolstering new hires

Salesforce PRM comprises 6 basic modules:

1. Partner Management: – A Successful PRM requires a few key elements with structured Channel management. Channel management is nothing but to design a clear channel policy so that partners know what their roles are and on what basis their performance is going to be measured and rewarded. It increases partner performance, reduces overall cost and provides visibility and insights into partner activities.

2. Partner Training: – It provides a native module or an integrated third-party Learning Management Solution (LMS) to deliver customized training and quizzes for partners to meet program requirements. Successful training programs that focus on channel partner enablement need to address many aspects of the sales cycle including marketing, sales, and technical knowledge. Training could be provided through Videos, Slides, Images, and Texts as well as support for importing content from other course authorities. The development and implementation of channel partner training and certification programs are critical for the success of any channel partner sales approach.

3. Sales Management: – In current times, PRM is the most efficient tool for Vendors to oversee, document and improve the performance of their sales partners. It gives them visibility to the partners’ business activities in detail along with the ability to share those insights with the partner themselves. It uses centralized communication through a variety of formats by using Emails, Chat, etc.

4. Onboarding Process: – Recruiting and onboarding partners is the first step to building a good partner relationship. Partner Onboarding refers to the process of engaging new partners, signing them up, providing initial training and transition to working on deals. PRM provides an Automate Onboarding Process and Self-Service Onboarding Process.

5. Market Development Funds (MDF): – It is a tool for strategically planning market penetration. It helps to give visibility into deals, and you can track the results. MDF is a Streamline application for managing and processing funds and makes it easier for you to help eligible partners manage their program participation, apply for funds, track marketing campaign approvals, and payment processing. Through MDF we can speed up review and approval process for plans and expense claims and set up notifications to keep the partner informed on the status and lastly, we can track the results too.

6. Analytics: – It helps to optimize your channel with intelligent analytics where you can quickly gain channel visibility, track partner performance, and help partners uncover opportunities to grow their business with ready-to-go analytics products for channel sales teams.

We can also integrate it with Google analytics which helps us to understand how partners are using partner portal by tracking new and returning visitors, page views, and search activity.

Salesforce PRM Benefits

Salesforce PRM offers many key benefits to ease different activities in partner management including-

1. Saves time in onboarding partners
2. Drive demand through the channel
3. Guide partners from leads to deals
4. Provide real-time support and visibility into operations
5. No coding required for customization
6. Empower the channel team
7. Increases partner satisfaction
8. Automates business process

Managing channel partners can be complex, more so when you have a large number of partners in your ecosystem.  A structured partner management strategy along with a technology-enabled platform like PRM simplifies managing channel partners and helps you build a stronger relationship with them to drive your business. 

Building a Partner Relationship Management system can really ease managing a large number of partners. An experienced Salesforce developer can help you build a custom solution to meet your specific needs. To explore the possibilities of building a PRM system, please contact us at customersuccess@appshark.com.