(Ops) Why are organisations adopting PRM in Salesforce?

 Why are organisations adopting PRM in Salesforce?

In this article, we focus on what is Partner Relationship Management and why organisations are increasingly adopting PRM solutions. We also discuss advantages and disadvantages of using Salesforce PRM to collaborate with partners.

What is Partner Relationship Management (PRM)?

The Partner Relationship Management solutions developed in the last 10-15 years is a type of software used by companies to facilitate execution of Channel Sales. 

Channel Sales is a simple sales strategy used by companies to leverage the help of third-party vendors to sell your products and services. Channel sales strategies are usually deployed as part of your business growth effort. Channel Sales can help business grow in three key ways:

• To reach new customers who don't buy directly from the vendor, preferring instead to buy from resellers or ISV's (Independent software vendors).
• To sell products through third-party market places and managed service providers, which may offer package deals to end-customers and appeal to buyers looking for different product options and deals.
• Channel Sales programs tap into broader partner ecosystems and help find business in new geographic locations.

Why do organisations need PRM?

Over the past few years, consumer behaviour has shifted from a traditional landscape to a more digital landscape across many industries. To stay relevant, businesses need to build right partnerships to stay competitive. With right partners, you can successfully set yourself up as an industry leader. 

A Partner ecosystem allows organisations to focus on co-creating value and contribute to revenue growth. Partner ecosystems are essential in building right partnerships and there is a level of strength in collaboration than working in silos. A PRM solution is used to manage all the data on channel partners (i.e. data of sales activities being carried out by the partners) as well as training and certifications for these partners enabling partners with information, providing support to partners and more. 

A typical Partner Relationship Management solution provides important elements of reselling such as partner recruitment, onboarding, enablement, co-marketing, deal registration and commission payments for partners. In order to work with partners, organisations require additional tools and functionality in Salesforce to leverage lead pools and multiply sales pipelines in multiple ways.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Salesforce PRM?

A Salesforce PRM is essentially an extension of Salesforce Community Cloud and is not a purpose-built PRM platform. One way to look PRM is, it is a way to extend Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality through workflows out to partners. Similar to direct sales teams, partners would also use leads and opportunities to track their sales deals. 

Having a common system allows partners to log deals that they source along with direct deals and this helps prevent channel conflicts by allowing vendors to assign relevant leads. Another major advantage of using a common system for both CRM and PRM, it makes forecasting channel sales, collaborating with partners a lot easier and faster contributing to sales pipelines in-turn revenue growth.

Salesforce PRM handles the entire partner lifecycle from recruiting and onboarding new partners, to providing self-service and analytics tool to your most advanced partners using community cloud capabilities. You can manage the partners in real-time and amplify your brand by marketing through partners. Most importantly, you can close more deals with channel partners with same sales and quoting features you already use in CRM.

There are basically three key areas where Salesforce PRM provides advantages as shown below:

1. Extending Direct Selling - The Sales Cloud PRM, powered by Salesforce platform allows passing data to partners and receiving data from partners in a seamless way either for a handful of partners or for a more mature partners to scale your business. Salesforce PRM community capabilities could provide some basic collaboration capabilities to share content with channel partners allowing both direct sales teams or inside sales teams to easily collaborate with each other.

2. Eliminating Integration Work - If your organisation is already using Salesforce CRM, it is very easy to enable PRM capabilities on your Sales cloud eliminating any need for integration with other PRM tools. However, in order to  turn on PRM capabilities, admins may require to do additional configuration and customised templates.

3. Powerful Workflow Tools - Salesforce platform provides powerful workflow and application configuration capabilities, which are almost limitless. With skilled application development team, you could customise and build custom workflows to overcome any limitations with Salesforce PRM.

However, there are some a few disadvantages for using Salesforce PRM such as:

a) No dedicated PRM Solutions - Beyond Salesforce community cloud, salesforce does not offer any PRM capabilities such as onboarding, partner recruitment, asset co-branding, marketing tools and so on. In order to expand Salesforce PRM into a true channel automation, your organisation may need to purchase other third party solutions for additional capabilities.

b) Lack of pre-built templates - Another important weakness with Salesforce is the lack of pre-built application and modules that you can use to augment your current workflow and adapt to automate channel activities. This gap becomes obvious when you try to expand beyond community and basic deal registration capabilities.

c) Configuration expenses - While there is no doubt Salesforce PRM has incredible workflow and application capabilities, developing a custom application is not easy. It requires workflow expertise, highly skilled resources, time and money. Not all companies are able to invest and develop customisations and configurations required to develop good PRM capabilities.

There is no product which fits for every organisation, no matter how great the product is. This is also applicable for Salesforce PRM. Although Salesforce is great CRM product, it may not fit if the organisation is looking for a purpose built PRM solution. However, Salesforce remains a powerful tool which provides extended capabilities for sales and marketing automation segment.