Considering any given company’s range of products across various industries and applications, partners and resellers have the potential to become indispensable collaborators – not only in ensuring customers are able to purchase products or services, but also in getting the most out of their investment.
In this article, we will explore Partner Relationship Management, and how Salesforce’s native offering can be extended to empower and guide your entire partner ecosystem.
The Partner Ecosystem
Companies choose to partner up with other entities such as consulting firms, resellers, and training providers in order to streamline a customer’s procurement process and extend their market reach through these collaborations. Partners ultimately act as a liaison between your company and the customer – ensuring a seamless end-to-end experience is paramount.
Each organization can choose how they structure their partner programs to be aligned with internal processes and company goals. But one thing they all have to consider is that partners will need an efficient process to follow: a way to access resources and update customer information, submit deals, and easily collaborate with your internal reps towards positive revenue outcomes. Sounds easy, right?
Well, with Salesforce Partner Relationship Management (PRM), it can be! While you could start building an in-house solution, which is often laborious and time-consuming, Salesforce proposes an all-in-one, ready-to-go platform that can be functional at lightning speed. As it is built on the Salesforce platform, you can get seamless access to all customer 360 features of Salesforce, and fully tailor the experience.
What Are the Main PRM Features?
Salesforce PRM can be your go-to platform for everything related to distributors, resellers, and implementation partners. Be it training and enablement at the start of their journey, marketing and brand awareness, the actual selling process, or support, Salesforce has accounted for them all to help you offer an easy-to-use solution powered by the #1 AI CRM.
Let’s take a deep dive into how exactly all of this works and how you can achieve the perfect experience for both external and internal users.

Transform the Partner Experience
Nowadays, regardless of whether we’re discussing internal users, customers, or even partners, personalized and intuitive experiences are what everyone expects. You can ensure lightning-fast onboarding for all your resellers, distributors, and implementation partners with Salesforce native functionality exposed within the Digital Experience.
Not only can you pick and choose the branding, components, and control access, but you can also make use of features such as In-App Guidance to help users familiarize themselves with the content, available actions, and navigation.
Outcome-based enablement will not only make learning the new process fun, but also offer both you and your users a built-in mechanism to track progress and offer transparency about expectations of what should be done within the portal.
Using the Sales Programs add-on, you can create and assign Sales Programs in a matter of minutes, either manually or automatically based on criteria of your choice.

Once they familiarize themselves with the platform and start conducting their day-to-day activities, PRM makes it easy for partners to submit new deals, drive marketing campaigns, work on co-branded assets, request marketing funds, or launch campaigns without back-and-forth emails and delays.
Furthermore, partners can be granted access to see and collaborate on your Salesforce records in the same way they are used to in their own instance. Salesforce functionality such as Pipeline Inspection can easily be made available to make reviewing and working on Opportunities just a matter of clicks. Of course, they can choose to revert back to the well-known List Views or work within the Kanban view to progress deals through the pipeline.

Partners can and should have their dedicated record-level view as well, with the record details and related lists they need, as well as any actions or other components you wish to offer as part of the process and experience.

At the end of the day, investing time, money, and resources into a fully functional and customized partner portal should come with a significant return on investment. Don’t forget to always take into consideration feedback to help improve the functionality, but also keep an eye on adoption and license usage. Having a pre-established process to enable and disable users is key to maximizing usage while keeping those potential additional licensing costs at bay.
Ultimately, your collaborators are an extension of your internal team; hence, if someone is not actively using the platform as they should be, the enablement process should also be revised to drive the long-term success of the implementation.
Supercharge Productivity With Agents
It is by no means a secret that Salesforce has invested massively in AI capabilities across the platform, and PRM is no exception. It’s worth equipping partners to make better decisions with built-in AI within their workflows and automations, just as you would optimize your internal processes to offer a consistent experience on both sides of the collaboration.
You can leverage the out-of-the-box predictive or generative AI capabilities and also build Agents for Channel Managers. You can choose between readily available or custom actions to summarize data and activities about partners, make recommendations, send emails, and take actions.
On the partner side, introducing AI functionality in their flow of work involves some of the same capabilities the Channel Managers use, but within their dedicated digital experience. For example, they can draft emails with Einstein just as easily as internal users, all following the same process.
Custom prompts can be made available as needed, just as you would in any internal context. You can also extend Agents to your partners to answer product questions, qualify leads, send emails, and get product promotions, the possibilities are endless.

Capabilities such as Einstein Opportunity and Lead Scoring can also be exposed in the same manner that you would for your internal audience, to further enhance the process for your collaborators with readily available and actionable insights.

Set Partners and Your Company Up for Success
Help partners scale instantly regardless of their choice of CRM with Partner Connect – this ensures there’s no duplicate work while both parties can benefit from real-time access and ease of collaboration across different tools without having to go through a cumbersome process.
By removing the need to work in silos or depend on manual efforts to find out critical information about co-selling deals, the entire end-to-end interaction is sure to be faster, while also leading to accurate data for later analysis.

Speaking of data and analysis, part of PRM’s robust offering are the readily available Reports and Dashboards which can offer users all the information they need – for example, information about their performance, goals, and current pipeline. Salesforce can further guide partners with Einstein Recommendations to help them successfully close more deals and reach shared revenue goals.

Channel managers can also monitor partner activity with readily available analysis within the internal Salesforce platform in a dedicated Channel Management App. Managers can easily investigate the open pipeline and partner performance, as well as key metrics such as pipeline coverage and conversion rate.

Returning to the partner experience, there will surely be situations where extra support is needed, and the goal is, of course, for everyone to have the information they need available at their fingertips.
Generative AI-infused Salesforce functionality comes into play once again – this time in the form of AI-generated search answers which leverage your existing Knowledge Base, and AI-powered chatbots which provide 24/7 support, covering all bases before the partner needs to even think about reaching out to their channel manager.

Roadmap
Salesforce’s continued investment in their AI and platform services benefits all of their application customers, including those who are using PRM. Specific PRM product investments coming in the near future will further enhance the partner experiences and collaboration, driving sales and operational efficiency, including:
- Reimagined Partner Experience: A re-imaged UI experience and Partner Agents will create modern and efficient experiences for your partners and partner managers, boosting their satisfaction and productivity, leading to stronger relationships and increased sales.
- Streamlined Operations for Manufacturing Customers: For manufacturing businesses with complex distribution networks, Salesforce PRM will further optimize channel performance. Gain clear visibility into product inventory and pricing across your entire supply chain and effectively manage rebates and incentives to maximize profit for you and your partners.
Summary
Whether you’re a technology company working with implementation partners or a manufacturing giant with multiple reseller collaborations, Salesforce PRM has the potential to take these relationships to the next level by offering, not only a streamlined and intuitive process, but also the guidance and resources to help your collaborators (and your organization) get the most out of the partnership.
You can learn more about Salesforce PRM, including best practices and capabilities, using this Learning Journey or on the PRM product page, where you see more details about the product or navigate to other Salesforce solutions.