Salesforce Partner Community – The Ultimate Guide

Salesforce is a fairly large and intricate platform. Your Salesforce org is composed of multiple features and tools that are dedicated to performing multiple activities and automating your business processes.

Working on such a vast platform is requires the users to communicate with each other effectively. Communication has always been the soul of an organization and allows employees to communicate with each other, the clients, or with the business partners.

Salesforce facilitates seamless communication between different entities connected (directly or indirectly) to the organization using Salesforce. This communication takes place through Salesforce Community Cloud.

What Is Salesforce Community Cloud?

Salesforce Community Cloud is a Salesforce offering that allows users to create branded communities for interacting with multiple entities that have a vested interest in your business and its processes.

The communities created using this platform act as meeting grounds where different individuals can come together, communicate, and collaborate with people having similar likes, preferences, and interests.

With the help of the Community Cloud, you can indulge your customers, employees, and partners to interact with each other on a unified platform and solve issues pertaining to common organizational goals and objectives.

Here, we will take Salesforce Partner Community into consideration.

What Is Salesforce Partner Community?

As the name suggests, Salesforce Partner Community is a community consisting of different Salesforce partners. Essentially, these individuals/companies are the business partners of an organization, working in sync with the company to achieve specific goals and carry out specific activities.

Salesforce Partner Community is created for a business to help their partners in managing their business processes and obtain help from them in handling their enterprise. It can be seen as a virtual meeting ground where all the partners come together to discuss issues, sharing data, and solving common problems.

The platform allows you to create sites and portals dedicated to your community, not too different from a professional social networking site. Here, you can make use of collaborative and sharing tools to seamlessly exchange data with your Salesforce partners.

Using Salesforce Features For The Partner Community

Salesforce provides you with an option to use the basic Salesforce features for better collaboration with your partners. You can make use of opportunity management, leads, campaigns, and more to have more effective and in-depth discussions with your partners.

Also, using these features will help you solve specific marketing and sales issues your partners might have.

Salesforce allows you to provide a full view of your marketing and sales processes, from start to finish, to provide valuable insights to the partners make them understand the complete progression of the processes. This is ideal when you have added a new Salesforce partner and are introducing them to your organization.

Using Salesforce features, you can also provide valuable information about quality onboarding, making sure that your partners hire the most suitable employees and train them on using Salesforce.

Moreover, the Salesforce Partner Community allows you to optimize lead and opportunity management with your partners, making sure that your partners generate more leads and close more deals effectively.

Highly Customizable Platform

Just like all other features and tools involved in Salesforce, the Salesforce Partner Community is highly customizable. While creating the community, you can manipulate the tools and design the layout to focus only on the matters that are important to you and your partners.

In simple words, this is similar to editing the default contents of a Facebook page to suit your needs and preferences. This feature allows you and your partners to organize the interactions and coming up with productive outcomes.

Scope For Expansion

Salesforce Partner Community is a great example of sustainable teamwork. You can team up with your partners in achieving common business goals and turn one’s failure into the other’s opportunity.

For example, the lead distribution feature allows you to identify the leads that would be ideal for you and your partners to pursue. In case you are not able to nurture a lead successfully, you can combine the efforts of your partners for doing the same and increasing the chances of converting the lead.

Through the Partner Community, you can clearly define the common goals and track the efforts made by your partners to achieve them. Also, simplifying workflows and proven results will encourage more partners to collaborate with you.

The Importance Of Salesforce Partner Community

So, should you go ahead with building a Salesforce Partner Community?

If you are still unsure whether your organization needs a Salesforce Partner Community, here are some of the reasons why it is important for your business:

Unified Business Analytics

Salesforce is not limited to handling customer database and providing personalized services to the clients. Business analytics plays an important part in the functionality of the CRM platform.

With Salesforce Partner Community, Salesforce partners can share important analytics pertaining to their businesses on a common platform for their peers to see the results. Whether you are analyzing your marketing or sales processes, the platform allows you to display valuable insights about the same for all your partners to be on the same page.

Also, the community allows you and your partners to keep a track of the deals that have been closed and the ones that are still in the pipeline. This helps everyone in the community to have all the data about what is happening in the organization and use the analytics to make future decisions.

Moreover, partners can share important insights about the data analyzed and results obtained with each other to improve their overall productivity.

Rapid And Safe Sharing Of Information

Salesforce is all about data and the way it is used for serving your clients/customers. With a platform as vast as this, it becomes really important to share valuable information with your partners on a scheduled and real-time basis.

Salesforce Partner Community helps you in sharing all relevant information with your partners at once. Also, it helps you in controlling the amount of information that you want to share with your partners.

Not all information needs to be shared with all your partners. You can restrict access to specific information on the portal by making changes in the administrative options. This helps Salesforce users in making sure that their valuable data is safe. The partners can only see and access the information you want them to consume.

Also, the platform allows you to share all necessary information directly on the portal. This eliminates the need to make phone calls, write emails, and wait for the partners to respond.

Salesforce Partner Community makes sure that the messaging and feedback is quick.

Better Relations With The Partners

It is important for a business to build and maintain healthy relations with their partners, irrespective of the industry they belong to and the scale at which they operate. This co-existence helps all the parties to streamline their processes and achieve their respective goals.

With Salesforce Partner Community, you can strengthen this relationship with your partners by having regular, personalized, and productive discussions. As mentioned earlier, a Salesforce community is as good as a virtual meeting room with people having common interests.

Salesforce partners can help complete each other’s processes to help their business grow and prosper. For example, if you have acquired a client and are not able to nurture them further, you can hand over this responsibility to your partner, who will complete the process, keeping you in the loop the entire time.

You might have your sales analytics but having trouble showing the same to your clients due to technical errors. In such situations, if you have shared the analytics with your partners, any one of them can take the meeting forward and share the analytics with your clients.

It is these activities that help you build strong and lasting relations with your partners. No matter where you are located, you can stay in touch with people and businesses that matter to your organization and for whom your organization matters!

Salesforce Partner Community helps you get rid of any and every communication that may result in misunderstandings and reduced performance by your business.

The Final Word

When it comes to effective communication, you cannot compromise interaction with your business partners. Salesforce takes these matters seriously and allows individuals and businesses to become Salesforce partners and communicate through Salesforce Partner Community.

The community bridges all gaps between Salesforce partners and allows them to work on a centralized platform having a unified interface. The portal allows all the partners to share valuable information in the form of records, files, and analytics with each other in a seamless manner.

At the same time, it puts you in control of your community and allows you to monitor the amount of information shared with specific partners. In the partner community, every partner has a say in the processes that matter, making everyone work in the same direction and work towards similar goals.

If you want to know more about becoming a Salesforce partner, you can visit this link.