PRM: Partner Portal in action
Aug 16, 2005Companies today are realizing the benefits of PRM (Partner Relationship Management) by consolidating their direct and indirect sales and marketing activities. Companies are using salesforce.com to manage partners while they’re extending their deal data and sales tools to share with their partners
through salesforce.com’s Partner Portal. To the right is an example of a Partner Portal. The company is fictitious to protect the innocent but the message is clear. Branding is easily customized to match corporate guidelines and corporate style sheets. The experience is tailored to meet the needs of the partner community. Leads, opportunities, documents and custom objects are shared for collaboration. A custom object was designed and launched to model the Market Development Funds (MDF) business process. There are many customers tare extending the benefits of salesforce.com to their partner communities. Share your PRM successes here.
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6 Comments
August 16
I'm a salesforce customer and I've been considering building a partner portal. Do I have to build it within the SF web client, or I can use the SF API to integrate my partner functionality seamlessly into the template/frame of my existing corporate web site? In other words, rather than attempt to replicate the branding of my current web site in the SF web client, I would prefer to go with an integration strategy. We have several strong web developers on staff. How do other SF customers handle this issue?
Thanks for any advice.
Craig
August 17
To answer your question, the choice is yours. You can use the Partner Portal that salesforce.com developed OR you can use the APIs and embed your PRM data in your own secure site. Regardless, you'll have to license each partner user. Other customers have used the Partner Portal and done single sign-on to existing communication based partner extranets.
August 18
Craig, The Partner Portal is open source. So your web developers should use it as a starting point and they will easily be able to make it match the look of your website. You can download the source code here: http://www.sforce.com/resources/toolkits-samples.jsp#partnerPortalToolkit
August 23
Thanks for the help!
January 5
As far as I see the situation now there is no benefit for a small company like ours to have Partner Portal. We will have to invest more than we will get. And every penny is essential for us at the stage being. Actually this is the question: what will it cost to have smth like that?
January 5
Kelly, you are right, there is a cost to setting up the Partner Portal. If you have someone technical you can set it up yourself and keep the costs down to a minimum. I can connect you with a couple companies that did this themselves on a shoestring budget. We've seen many customers download the Partner Portal Toolkit and get it up and running in a day. As long as your developer is proficient in JAVA and the Salesforce datamodel you should be in good shape. Dont forget, you still need to buy a license for each partner company and PRM is only available for enteprise edition customers.