Salesforce.com Introduces New Partner Relationship Management Features

Salesforce.com recently introduced three new features for its partner relationship management (PRM) product, built on its Sales Cloud platform. The new features aim to drive growth by creating stronger partner relationships.

“We recognize that we have to shift the paradigm and give partners the insights that they need to drive their own business and turn channel managers into strategic advisers. We’re doing that with these three new features,” says Jason Perocho, director of product marketing for Sales Cloud.

Self-service reports are the first feature. These enable partners to explore their data with an eye on better analyzing, managing, and expanding their business. “This is around empowering partners to data-mine their own business. We have the ability to do self-service reports so that partners can create their own reports, and cut the data the way that fits their selling motion,” Perocho says.

The second feature is Einstein Analytics for partners, which aims to help partners identify and prioritize leads via AI-driven insights. Einstein Analytics can bring in reports and dashboards to help partners understand what’s happening inside their business and carry out “deep” data mining to uncover trends. Then the Einstein Discovery feature draws upon past lead and opportunity performance to provide predictive recommendations. This feature delivers plain-English recommendations to partners about how to convert a lead or to close an opportunity, Perocho says. “For example, if they’re working on a lead, Einstein Discovery will analyze what that partner is doing that’s helping convert the lead and rank those activities to tell the partner what to do,” he adds.

The third feature is Quip for Salesforce, which aims to improve real-time collaboration between a company and its partners. More specifically, Quip’s productivity workspaces allow partners to actively align with companies on yearly business plans and KPIs, co-selling activities, and proposals and quotes. “For the first time with this latest release, we can extend Quip documents out to the partners so we can coordinate on complex deal cycles or quotes or even business planning. This isn’t just a blank document in which you can coordinate; inside of Quip are live apps that are templates to help do these specific activities,” Perocho says.