Salesforce is an amazing company led by its founder and CEO Marc Benioff. What started as a CRM-focused SaaS company has evolved over the past several decades into a business process automation ecosystem. Salesforce’s core strategy is to provide a few core applications around customer relationship management (CRM), service management and marketing, and allow independent service providers to connect to its platform and augment its core capabilities to create a more niche application. Salesforce also provides basic partner relationship management (PRM) capabilities, and in this article we will explore the pluses and minuses of Salesforce PRM.

Before we proceed further, let’s take a step back and understand Salesforce’s overall strategy. As I said in the beginning, it started as CRM platform in a SaaS package—an alternative to on-premise software that had to be installed and configured on a company’s physical servers. (Yes, remember those days? Not so long ago, eh?) More recently, Salesforce has followed the lead of software platform providers like Microsoft in offering customers a development environment called Force.com, with its own software built on that. In much the same way Microsoft provides Windows as an operating environment, but then also sells Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Salesforce provides a solid CRM platform and allows third-party providers to build and run applications on its Force.com platform and connect to its core applications. In fact, ZINFI’s own PRM application connects to Salesforce CRM as well as Salesforce PRM.

Now, over the past decade or so has Salesforce dabbled in the area of partner relationship management. At one point in time, it had a dedicated product, but according to industry analysts achieved only lackluster sales, and therefore decided to roll that into the Salesforce Community Cloud business line. Salesforce PRM today is essentially an extension of Salesforce Community Cloud, rather than a purpose-built PRM platform. Salesforce PRM has unique strengths and weaknesses, and if you are considering investing in it you should understand what they are.

There are basically three core positive areas for Salesforce PRM. They are focused on a) extending your direct selling motion to the channel via Salesforce PRM, b) minimizing or eliminating any integration work for another application if you are a Salesforce CRM house already, and c) giving you powerful tools to build custom workflows for your channel applications, in much the same way you can build workflows for direct sales automation activities. 

Let’s take a moment and explore these three areas in a bit more detail:

Extending Direct Selling – If your organization has chosen Salesforce CRM for sales and/or marketing automation and you are looking to provide some basic capabilities for sharing information with your channel partners, then Salesforce PRM is certainly worth a look. Using Salesforce PRM community capabilities, you can build some basic collaboration capabilities and share content with your channel partners. This allows your direct sales team or inside sales team to easily collaborate with partners using a few basic communication tools.Eliminating Integration Work – If your organization is already using Salesforce CRM, then turning on the PRM capabilities is quite simple. Even though Salesforce PRM is not a purpose-built application and may require you to do a lot of configuration and customization work, in the end you can eliminate any integration requirements. While ZINFI’s PRM platform—along with other third-party purpose-built PRM platforms—comes with easy-to-connect PRM to SFDC connectors, in the end some organizations simply don’t want to manage another application. If you are in that boat, Salesforce PRM is a reasonable option for you to consider.Powerful Workflow Tools – even though it comes with very limited PRM capabilities,