Salesforce.com For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Managing Your Partners

In This Chapter

• Understanding the partner lifecycle

• Managing partners

• Using the PRM Portal to access Salesforce

• Configuring the PRM Portal

Now that Salesforce can get sales reps and managers on board to track all their opportunities and sales‐related activities, the big pipeline picture should be getting clearer for everyone. Well, almost everyone. Partners, which may also be known in your business as third‐party companies, value‐added resellers (VARs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), wholesalers, or distributors, could only be accurately managed in Salesforce if they were treated like full‐time dedicated company sales reps. It was difficult to create and maintain unique messages and branding for specific groups of partners.

In the summer of 2006, salesforce.com introduced Salesforce PRM, an extension to the existing Salesforce product that now brought the wonderful world of customer relationship management to partners and the leads and deals they brought in. Additionally, channel managers and channel reps within a company could more easily manage their partner relationships in Salesforce.

In this chapter, we provide a general overview of what life is like for partners and channel reps. We then discuss how a channel team manages their partners with Salesforce PRM. For partners asked by their vendors to use Salesforce PRM, we discuss how to access and navigate Salesforce from the PRM Portal. Finally, we help channel managers and administrators ...