Chapter 12
Managing Your Partners
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding the partner life cycle
Managing partners
Using Salesforce Communities
Configuring a Salesforce community
Because Salesforce can get sales reps and managers onboard to track all their opportunities and sales-related activities, the big pipeline picture should be getting clearer for everyone. Partners — which might also be known in your business as third-party companies, value-added resellers (VARs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), wholesalers, or distributors — can also be accurately managed in Salesforce almost as if they were full-time dedicated company sales reps. It used to be difficult to create and maintain unique messages and branding for specific groups of partners. Not anymore.
Salesforce Communities extends the existing Salesforce product to partners (as well as employees and customers, optionally) and the leads and deals they bring in. Additionally, support managers and support reps within a company can more easily resolve issues for your partners.
A detailed discussion of Salesforce Communities could take up a whole book on its own. In fact, many of the details are covered in Salesforce Service Cloud For Dummies, by Jon Paz and TJ Kelley (Wiley), so in this chapter, we provide a high-level overview of what life is like for partners and channel reps. Then we discuss how a channel team manages its partners with Salesforce. For partners asked by their vendors to use this application, we discuss ...
Get Salesforce.com For Dummies now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
