As discussed in my previous post on lead distribution, partners can use your Sales Cloud instance to manage their leads and opportunities if they would want to do so. I already discussed in previous posts on how benefits from partner programs, marketing development funds and lead distribution mechanisms might incentivize partners to use a brand owners Sales Cloud system. Deal Registration might be an additional reason.
What is a deal?
In the deal registration process, it is important to understand what a deal exactly is.
A deal is not an opportunity. It is like a hidden initial sales stage in the opportunity management sales process. They act a lot like leads as they can be converted to opportunities also. But a deal is not a lead either.
Deals act like a second waiting room from where opportunities can be created. Just like leads, they do not show up by default in any pipeline or forecast report until they have been converted to opportunities.
Deal Registration
A partners can register a deal under a partner program for the benefits that come with the program. In this case the partner hopes that he will get exclusivity from other partners on this opportunity. Once the partner has prepared his deal, he can submit it for approval to his channel manager.
Channel managers can then accept, reject or return the deal to ask for more information.
But is this deal a new one? Is the customer the partner logged the deal for the customer we think it is? In order to answer questions like these, the channel manager can check for duplicates first. This will give the channel manager the confidence that he can accept the deal for what it is.
The duplication check verifies 3 key data elements:
- Is the account for which the deal was logged the right one, or should it be a parent holding, or just a completely other account with a similar name?
- Is the contact person mentioned on the deal the person we think it is? This works identical to checking for duplicate accounts.
- Does a similar opportunity for the same account exists? A deal should not be accepted if the deal already exists and if the related partner program promises exclusivity to the partner. The partner logged the deal too late.
The right choice for the deal above seems to be to return the deal and ask for more info. The partner has logged 2 deals of which one has already been approved for the same customer and similar products. Should this be a second deal, or should the first deal be expanded instead? Does it have to be a separate opportunity or is he disguising a big deal into 2 smaller ones 🙂
Deal Management Mobile App
Sales Cloud comes with a mobile app to enable the channel manager to perform these duplicate checks from his mobile phone and process the deal registrations as they are logged.
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