Partner Relationship Management is all about defining and documenting the relationships we can build with partners. But before that, partners need to be recruited. In this post I want to not just highlight ‘Partner Assessments’ as new PRM feature, but also share how this otherwise familiar and simple feature can be extremely useful in the partner on-boarding process.
Partner Assessments
Assessments are not new to Sales Cloud or Engagement Cloud. They have been there as long as I can remember but so far they could not be implemented against partners until now. As of 18A, assessments can be defined against partners, and reports can be ran against the partners assessments data. Nothing special right, pretty boring? … but forget about the ‘feature’, think about what we can do with this:
- Partner needs to be on-boarded and all kinds of specifications or certifications need to be checked
- Partners need to be evaluated to change tiers
- Partner relations need to be reevaluated regularly
- Partners capabilities need to be checked before engaging in new geographies or with new products or services
- …
Partner assessments could be valuable for each of these situations !
Partner On-boarding
I think partner assessments will play a critical role especially in partner on-boarding processes. Allowing your partners to engage with your customers is not to be taken lightly! You want to make sure you engage with the right partners and your partners score highly enough against your recruitment criteria, before you let them represent your brand with your customers. Partner Assessments are a great tool to document these decisions.
Assessment Reporting
Once assessments data is available in Sales Cloud or Engagement Cloud, it can be used for all kinds of reasons:
- For one partner, compare the progress of assessments outcome when partners over time take are taken through the same assessments multiple times
- Compare multiple partners against an assessment to find the best partner to engage with for a special partnership, or to progress in tiers
- …
I hope this post inspires you on how to implement partner assessments !
Reghu
Thanks for this. Do we have any self-registration for Partners? In other words, can partner register themselves to a brand owner, which can later be approved by Channel manager to complete the onboarding?