Salesforce today announced Partner Connect, a new feature for its Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution that will allow businesses to share real-time visibility into partner channel sales and make it easy for teams working across CRM platforms to streamline deals shared across businesses. 

Why it matters: Tech companies are increasingly under pressure to deliver results without spending more — and are looking to partner selling strategies to help. Fifty percent of companies are pursuing a partner experience in some form or another, if they don’t have it already, and 75% of the world’s commerce comes through indirect channels.

But teams struggle to coordinate deal data and co-sell for deals managed and sold across multiple businesses. These sellers and channel managers, often in different locations and using different CRM platforms at different companies, either opt out of co-selling these deals because they’re not easy to access, or lack real-time visibility into shared deals and spend too much time manually reconciling disparate data sources across teams. 

Innovation in action: Partner Connect, which will be available this fall inside the Salesforce PRM product (as a part of the SKU offering), makes it simple and easy for teams to focus and collaborate. With Partner Connect’s field mapping functionality, teams can easily specify which fields get updated across partner CRM platforms and determine how best to match the data in one given CRM with another. This data harmonization helps ensure that data is both reliable and also securely shared in a trusted way. Partner Connect also provides bi-directional integration, enabling automated updates that appear as notifications in each company’s CRM platform, offering more clarity to channel managers who want to track deals as they progress.

For example:

• Tech firm account executives (AEs) who already update their deals on one CRM platform won’t need another software or login to toggle between applications.
• Channel managers at one tech firm can track the same deals, or a cluster of deals, inside their CRM platform.
• Selling teams partnering on deals don’t have to worry about overwriting, duplicating, botching their existing data set, or compromising their data’s integrity.

Partner Connect will completely change how our customers co-sell with their partners.

Ketan Karkhanis, GM of Sales Cloud

Salesforce perspective: “Partner Connect will completely change how our customers co-sell with their partners. Partners can now co-work deals by easily sharing opportunities in their own CRM platforms and using their preferred data sets securely and in real time. This new heightened level of collaboration and efficiency will undoubtedly unlock new revenue.” – Ketan Karkhanis, GM of Sales Cloud

Customer perspective: “Appfire’s partner portal, built on Salesforce, is central to our partner business and represents the most scalable way of engaging and enabling our network of hundreds of partners. We are excited about Salesforce’s Partner Connect and its potential for connecting our CRM with partner CRMs, a critical advancement in creating visibility and real-time insights to the sales pipeline.” – Rick Buie, Sr. Director, Channel Strategy & Operations, Appfire 

Availability: 

• Partner Connect will be generally available in fall 2024.
• Initially, Partner Connect will be available between Salesforce orgs. By next summer, it will be available in at least two other major CRMs. 

Go deeper

• Learn more about Salesforce Partner Relationship Management
• See how high-tech businesses are powering their partner ecosystem with Partner Tracks, PRM for Slack, and AI at work
• Attend our upcoming PRM Workshop on Wednesday, August 7, 2024 at noon ET

Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.

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