May 31, 2017
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

Salesforce Announces Sales Cloud PRM App

Salesforce today announced Sales Cloud Partner Relationship Management (PRM), a sales app designed to accelerate and simplify channel sales. More specifically, the app looks to help companies build productive partner communities by uniting partner and direct sales functions.

"There's a change going on in the channel sales market—channel sales used to be all about lead distribution and basic lead passing. Over the past few years, that has completely changed to a new model in which companies are truly engaged with their partners," says Greg Gsell, senior director of Sales Cloud product marketing at Salesforce. "We’ve seen the revenue and the scale of channel sales dramatically increase: Now, across all industries, about 33 percent of revenue comes through the channel."

Gsell added that a challenge for companies has been to empower partners and equip them with the same tools their internal sales reps have access to. And there's ample incentive to do so. "There are some real benefits of going to market through the channel: partners have access to local markets, local long-term relationships, and they’re really able to handle complex deals that involve multiple vendors," he said.

One of the chief attributes of the Sales Cloud PRM app—"I want to stress the fact that it's an app," Gsell says—is that it enables users to get up and running quickly. "We've always had a platform that allowed our customers to really build any use case they want to, but now this app is going to allow them to deploy quickly, to customize in a very scalable and fast way, and really get up and going and deliver this amazing partner experience in days, not months. We think this is going to change the way that our customers are able to go to market because it will be so easy to expand their channel sales.”

The Sales Cloud PRM app has four main components. The first of these is Guided Setup Wizard, which enables channel managers to quickly configure, customize, and deploy the app. They can group partners into tiers, and deliver targeted promotions and customized content based on those tiers. The second component is Lightning CMS Connect, which allows channel managers to quickly create customized, branded partner experiences. They can drag and drop existing website content, graphics, and videos to keep these experiences up to date. The third component is Einstein Content Recommendations, which utilizes machine learning to identify files that improve productivity. And the fourth component is Channel Marketing Automation, which extends the capabilities of Salesforce Marketing Cloud to all partners, allowing them to build, track, and analyze email campaigns with the goal of providing one-to-one customer journeys across devices.

"Sales Cloud PRM…is going to save our customers time, [and] it's going to save our customers money when they roll it out because we've really built it from the ground up to be fast to deploy, easy to manage, and to be able to get a PRM solution up and running in days, not months."