The Salesforce partner community has been a powerful force driving the technology ecosystem. It is a place where Salesforce partners manage their business, learn best practices, get support on projects, and engage with Salesforce employees in a secure environment.
Today, 90% of Salesforce customers rely solely on the partner community to implement, manage, and optimize projects together and achieve maximum business value.
As per Salesforce, 9 out of its 10 customers prefer partners over small in-house teams and groups. In addition to it, the revenue from the partner ecosystem is predicted to reach 1.6 Trillion by 2026. In order to get a market share of such a huge market, there is hardly any partner that can offer end-to-end capabilities across all the Salesforce product range or has a strong business development team which can accelerate the revenue growth. If a lack of readily-available skilled experts, knowledge around newer Salesforce products is creating roadblocks in customer acquisition or project execution/delivery, you should leverage the salesforce partner community for the right collaboration and co-achieve business objectives mutually.
What is Salesforce Partner Collaboration?
Salesforce partner collaboration is the partnership between two or more Salesforce service providers with similar business goals, to deliver and manage projects by working in tandem across geographies. It's a great way to deal with resource/skill and capability gaps which helps in meeting project delivery timelines and increasing revenue without going through hiring and retention hassles of in-house setup.
The Need for Salesforce Partner Collaboration
Salesforce keeps rolling in new products every year and has aggressive plans for the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS markets. For example, it has recently launched the much awaited Salesforce Ginie at the recently concluded Dreamforce 2022 conference. However, no partner is fully capable of developing and nurturing a new team with necessary expertise in all product lines/business domains especially for the new ones. This makes partnership the go-to option for Salesforce companies and registered consultants.
Here are some scenarios where companies can look for collaboration:
- Adapting to Salesforce M&A model: Salesforce hosts diversified products for multiple industries. These are regularly supported by merger and acquisition (M&A) activity. Since M&A is followed by changes and frequent updates, a partner needs to spend ample time and resources to understand the changes which prevent them from exploring other opportunities which may take far less time.
- Need for New Capabilities: While the comprehensive product range of Salesforce allows partners to expand their product experience, it is practically impossible for a single partner to fulfill all incoming requirements and immediately tap into new prospect segments — something that requires a new set of capabilities.
- Matching the Speed of Business Development: Many partners have a strong business development team and can bring in projects on newer Salesforce products/technologies. If you are in such a category, you can easily fulfill your supporting needs by collaborating with a right development partner with experience in a relevant product/technology to deliver the projects on time.
- New Revenue Generation Channel: A large number of Salesforce partners have strong development/consulting teams who are up-to-date with new updates and releases but lack sales/business development capability. Such teams can collaborate with strong business development teams of an external Salesforce partner and share profits as per a mutual agreement.
Benefits of Salesforce Partner Collaboration
Having discussed multiple scenarios for collaboration, let’s shift our focus to the benefits of a right partnership. So what benefits can you expect from the partner ecosystem? Here are some pointers worth considering:
- Bridge Skill gaps: With the existing know-how knowledge, no partner can handle delivery requirements across every industry/domain or address an immediate requirement to scale up its team. Additionally, training users on new technology and tools is a costly affair and a headache. With a right partner collaboration, teams can share resources on-demand and bridge skills gaps without having to hire professionals on a full-time basis.
- Enhance Client Experience: With Salesforce partner collaboration, teams can work on development of new products, accelerators, and implementations to fulfill the client’s requirements more efficiently. This not only helps a company expand its development experience but also empowers them to align diversely skilled on-demand resources whenever required.
- Better Salesforce Experience for Clients: In case of Salesforce managed services, the supporting team should have strong knowledge about all the complex and critical scenarios to make sure the Salesforce system runs at peak performance 24*7 throughout the year. This is where the additional skilled resources and knowledge of a right partner can be leveraged to result in a flexible, on-demand and responsive service tailormade for the clients.
- Increase Productivity: Small teams find difficulty in delivering new projects on time. Working in a partnership allows such teams to stick to the delivery timeline and offer best-in-class support to customers .
- Increase in Market Share: A partner’s solution portfolio largely determines its capabilities which drives the interest from its potential customers. Similarly, a well-oiled business development team can make the best use of existing capabilities and drive revenue growth. When you collaborate with a right partner to supplement the missing capabilities or business development efforts, you have a higher probability to convert potential customers to clients and thus achieve even higher revenues together.
How Damco Has Worked On a Collaborative Partner Ecosystem?
As a Salesforce Crest (Gold) Partner since 2014, we at Damco have designed, developed, maintained, and supported a countless number of projects of our partners and customers globally in multiple products/technologies. We recently built an accelerator with a partner that allowed them to manage and secure sensitive Salesforce data.
Similarly, our partners assist us in domains where we have limited resources or exposure to fulfill incoming requirements. By collaborating with Salesforce partners on specific products/domain-based solutions, we ensure that we don’t miss out on new prospects and can deliver with confidence.
Bottom-line
With M&A, new product launches, and business expansion happening at a fast rate, it is impossible for individual Salesforce partners to fulfill every project requirement with the people on board and accelerate revenue growth. Collaborating with other partners opens a gate for shared profits and allows small teams to scale up their business expertise into new domains/products. Collaboration is not only beneficial for Salesforce partners, Salesforce users too can make use of collaboration for better project management and on-demand support for one or more skills as per their requirements.
Source: Co-Create Success With the Changing Salesforce Ecosystem
