Salesforce.com may not sell much through the Canadian reseller channel, but it may be the company that will change forever the way VARs work with vendors.
The maker of hosted customer relationship management (CRM) software was in Toronto recently to discuss the most compelling features of its next release and to prospect for new additions to its worldwide base of about 55,000 customers. A lot of those are small to medium-sized business firms, which are the channel’s bread and butter.
But in a conversation, Frank Van Veenendaal, Salesforce.com’s chief sales officer, indicated there are no big plans to add partners here in Canada.
“We don’t use partners in North America to a great extent,” he admitted. “Where we have started seeing more growth of our channel is in places like China or Japan.”
Instead, Salesforce.com is pursuing a different kind of reseller opportunity: helping other vendors manage their channel partners. It’s been almost three years since the company launched Partnerforce, Salesforce Partner Edition, which brings much of the same logic and features of its flagship CRM tool to the vendor and VAR community. The browser-based tool includes electronic lead generation, partner marketing and recruitment, and metrics to monitor and analyze the business processes behind channel management.
During the keynote presentation at the Toronto event, Salesforce.com highlighted its partner relationship management efforts, highlighting Motorola as one of the customers that is already seeing greater efficiencies and sales opportunities by using its product.
Another, more recent win is Siemens PLM Software, which last fall launched the Partner Pocket Portal. Besides the features mentioned above, Siemens is also offering channel partners expanded availability of online classes via Partner University, and improved account and opportunity collaboration with deal registration. It’s been rolled out to more than 2,000 channel sales reps, and the company has since used Salesforce.com’s Force.com development platform to integrate it with its SAP for financials system.
Salesforce.com is not the only application vendor to take a crack at partner relationship management. Of course, Van Veenendaal suggested it could become one of the most successful. He touted all the advantages of its software-as-a-service capability, which allows firms to scale up or down as their channel grows, but more important may be the company’s shift into what he calls a “service cloud.” Besides offering integration with call centre software, Salesforce.com is creating more tools to monitor the support questions or comments that are being posted online in social networking forums and chat rooms, and giving companies the ability to respond more quickly. That’s the same kind of agility all resellers should strive to match.
Resellers may have ignored Salesforce.com until now because it’s not a product they’ve been allowed to sell. It might be time to take a second look, and consider Salesforce.com and products like it as tools they can use internally to sell everything else.