Deliver Partner Success with Great Design and UX

What does it take to provide partners within the Salesforce ecosystem with astounding results and success? Are there any lifehacks to get them to use a partner portal? These and other questions were the webinar agenda we hosted with Salesforce and our client — Appfire — on May 7th, 2024. 

Tom Furtney (Managing Partner at Advanced Communities), Matt Crane (Salesforce Product Management – PRM), and Rick Buie (Senior Director of Channel Strategy & Operations at Appfire) discussed numerous ways the Salesforce PRM can elevate partner engagement, where the Advanced Communities products stand in the picture, and what the Appfire’s journey with Salesforce PRM was. 

You are welcome to read this recap to grab all the details. For TLDR, please watch the full video recording of the webinar here. 

What is Salesforce PRM?

Salesforce PRM (Partner Relationship Management) is part of the entire suite of Salesforce capabilities—it’s all built on the #1 AI CRM for Sales platform. Generally, Salesforce provides various opportunities for partners, namely prospecting, CPQ & Billing, Sales Analytics, Sales programs, and team collaboration, to name just a few. 

Speaking of the broad capabilities included in the Salesforce partner management kit, they let you extend your CRM efforts to your partners. The company allows you to market, sell, manage, support, enable, and incentivize them with top-notch digital experiences. 

Being the hottest topic of the day, AI has found its spot in the Salesforce landscape. In the partner space, this technology allows you to:

• Simplify partner selling;
• Generate partner engagement
• Onboard and prepare partners for sales with Einstein;
• Connect your partners to great deals with Lead & Opportunity Scoring;
• Focus on partner strategy with Pipeline Inspection;
• Skyrocket customer success with Einstein for Service in PRM.

How does Advanced Communities Implement PRM on Salesforce Experience Cloud? 

Advanced Communities (AC to our friends) has been a partner with Salesforce for almost 10 years. The company was at the outset and started working with Salesforce when Community Cloud was first launched. Right now, this is already called Experience Cloud. 

As Tom Furtney rightfully noticed, Experience Cloud is the engagement level of Salesforce. Thus, Advanced Communities helps drive success and sales for partners and makes it possible for businesses to engage and adopt the platform. 

When we are talking about PRM in Salesforce, we refer to it as an external portal or webpage that, ideally, has partners that want to engage and work with your organization. There are a plethora of other in-depth capabilities that come with Salesforce PRM. This is when Advanced Communities comes into play. 

As both an app developer and services provider, Advanced Communities was able to deliver holistic solutions that drive partner success with Salesforce out-of-the-box functionalities as much as possible. 

One of the AC’s strong points is our expertise in design and user experience. They are differentiators for us, helping organizations boost their external partners’ journey. Thus, AC does its best when developing a partner portal that reflects your brand’s identity. 

As mentioned earlier, Advanced Communities is also an app developer. Our products are 100% native to Salesforce and require no third-party integrations. To extend the Salesforce features, we’ve built several bolt-ons that go above and beyond. Among them, you will find these products for curating partner experiences:

• AC Partner Marketplace, which allows your partners to have their listings on the portal and generate more leads through their profiles. They can manage them in a self-service mode, keep them updated, and just stay successful.

• AC Partner Co-Branding, which lets partners create co-branded marketing and sales content within the portal in real time following your brand guidelines. They can use the prebuilt branded templates you provide them with, upload their logo, and do so much more.

What is the Appfire’s Journey with Salesforce PRM? 

Appfire is a software company that extends and enhances the world’s leading platforms, such as Salesforce, monday.com, Attlassian, and Microsoft. The company is committed to strong partner relationships and creating value for them. Rick Buie states that Appfire has three major rules for that:

• Being curious and really good listeners;
• Asking the question ‘Is this the right thing for partners?’;
• Making it easy to find what partners need, when they need it.

Appfire strives to take its partners down the following growth path. They want to drive their awareness, make the learning curve simple and user-intuitive, provide partners with a consistent suite of resources, and allow all of them to grow through a mix of their self-service programs.

How did Advanced Communities Assist Appfire in Their Salesforce PRM Aspirations?

In April 2023, Appfire started with MVP and prioritized some basic goals. They used out-of-the-box layouts and functionalities for the portal to get them to market faster and harvest valuable user feedback (it was amazing!).

April 2024 marked the period for Appfire when they partnered with Advanced Communities—a highly recommended Salesforce consultant. Together, they focused on personalization, updated branding, enhanced the partner portal’s design, and created different entry points to allow partners to find what they need within the Appfire ecosystem. 

It’s been a year since the Appfire’s launch and the results are whopping. The company has 150+ partners, 650+ users, 150+ assets, and 8 training courses. Together with Advanced Communities and Salesforce PRM, Appfire has built a self-service model and high-touch activities for partners.

We Appreciate Your Joining in!

We received brilliant feedback on this webinar which adds up to our bottom line and everything we do for our audience. The entire Advanced Communities team is thankful and is already planning the next, meaningful sessions. 

To dive even deeper into all things partner success, you can sign up for our post-webinar bonus resources. Just fill in the Contact Sales form with the note “Want to get the bonus “Deliver Partner Success with Great Design and UX” webinar resources”. 

Stay tuned for more and keep close tabs on our upcoming teasers.