Channel Partners play a crucial role in the whole gamut of businesses. Per Accenture statistics, an average of 70 percent of high-tech sales are accredited to them. Hence, efforts to improve Channel Partner ecosystem becomes an absolute to-do for companies.
On the same line, SalesForce announced the launch of Lightning Partner Communities in November, 2016, delivering a best-in-class platform for companies looking to accelerate channel sales from their partners. The CRM giant says that the new programme will allow companies to ‘arm resellers, franchisees, channel teams and more with the same tools that make their own direct sales force successful’.
What one can expect to find in this:
- Lightning Partner Experience: Providing personalized, and a complete mobile-responsive solution on-the-go at any place and at any time.
- Integrated CRM for Partners: Now including Sales Path, Kanban View, Lightning Dashboards and Salesforce CPQ, Integrated CRM for Partners extends CRM records—including leads, opportunities and accounts—in an intuitive workflow that provides partners with everything they need to close deals in a single location.
- Salesforce Einstein for Partner Community: The ever genius new SalesForce Einstein is also at the dispense of the users.
If you’re in the market for a new partner portal to help accelerate channel sales, you will absolutely love Lightning Partner Communities for these reasons:
- Community Builder Templates – For channel teams managing a partner portal, ease-of-use and empowering the business to manage the community (instead of going to IT for small changes) is one of the top business drivers for investing in Lightning Partner Communities.
- Lightning Components – The drag-and-drop capabilities of Lightning Components allows your channel team or community manager to configure or update a community without the assistance of a developer. In short, using both the Community Builder Templates and Lightning Components, you can significantly cut down the time to design and stand up your partner community.
- Mobile Responsive – Because the Community Builder Templates are fully mobile responsive, it’s easy to provide a rich experience that can be viewed on any mobile device.
- Community Translations – If you have a global partner program and there’s a need to display content in your partners’ native language(s), here it is, localizing community content in six different languages.
- CPQ for Partner Communities – In addition to the connection to accounts, leads and opportunities, you can now enable your partners to work alongside your sales team with quotes to customers. Salesforce CPQ for Communities offers self-service price quotes giving your partners a one-stop-shop for everything they need to close business for you.
Many companies still struggle with disconnected business systems and primitive processes to communicate with their partners, thus resulting in disengaged partner system and channel sales likely suffer. Lightning Partner Communities is just what companies can look forward to boost partner contributions in the current scope of sales-earned revenue. Yet another feather in their cap.
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