With the start of its new fiscal year, Salesforce has announced updates to its Consulting Partner Program.
The updates come on the heels of data from IDC showing that Salesforce partners report an average year-over-year growth of 48 per cent. Additionally, the data suggested that by 2020 for every one dollar of Salesforce revenue, the company’s partners will generate $4.14 of revenue.
This convinced the company that in order to capitalize on this opportunity, it will need to attract an increasing number of consultants. To do this, Salesforce has unveiled three changes coming to the program.
“The Salesforce product set has gotten very broad, and what we find is that we need to encourage partners to keep branching out because our customers are expecting them to do so,” said Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, senior vice president of partner programs at Salesforce, over the phone with CDN. “It’s on us to provide the enablement, training, and tools to make it easier for our partners to extend and grow.”
New emphasis on partner tiering based on cross-cloud delivery capability.
The key with this change is the provide the cross-cloud delivery tools necessary so that partners can expand into clouds they may not have experience with in order to offer a much broader range of capabilities to clients. This includes an emphasis on partners becoming certified and building out expertise across products such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud among others.
“The idea of cross-cloud capability is to encourage our partners to diversify into adjacent areas of their main area of expertise so that when they talk to our clients, they can speak very broadly and holistically about a solution as opposed to a single product,” said Taychakhoonavudh.
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Increased emphasis on expanding the Salesforce expert consultant ecosystem
The updates focus on putting a larger focus on consulting partners hiring or training more Salesforce-certified consultants to meet the market demand. To do this, new Salesforce University courses will become available in order to help partners develop these new tools.
Incentives for building up these certifications are simple, partners who do so can achieve higher levels of tiering, and will benefit from additional marketing, technology, and business resources under the program.
Increased focus on product and industry specializations
This last update is all about helping partners distinguish themselves. Consulting partners now have the ability to “specialize across product and industry based on implementation experience”. Industries available for this specialization are: financial services, telecommunications and media, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and public sector.
In addition, customers will be able to search for clients based on specialization.
“If I’m a smaller customer in the southeast in the retail verticle, and I’m trying to figure out who are the partners with the right expertise, I can actually search for partners in the area I’m looking for through filters in the partner directory on our external app exchange,” said Taychakhoonavudh.
For more on the Salesforce Consulting Partner Program updates, read more on the company’s website.
