David Bradshaw
Salesforce moves into partner relationship management
Yesterday, salesforce.com announced that it would be offering a partner relationship management (PRM) software extension to its CRM software-as-a-service. The new product extends the functionality of salesforce.com to channel partners. The product enables product or service-producing companies (or 'brand owners') to let their partners deal with them using a dedicated version of salesforce.com.The PRM product provides the ability to recruit, share sales information, offer improvements and measure channel partners via an easy-to-use web interface. It also comes at a 'bargain' price - $125 per partner, per month - and this gives each partner five users. Salesforce.com already has partners using it, including its currently largest customer Cisco, which is running a pilot programme in EMEA. Comment: PRM is a very important area. Only around one-third of goods and services are sold directly, meaning that two-thirds of the market for CRM is up for grabs via PRM offerings. However, PRM remains something of a Cinderella within CRM.Why? Because there are three key problems over the adoption of PRM systems. Firstly, channel partners often work with multiple 'brand owners', so see no reason for using one brand owner's system. Secondly, very many are fiercely defensive about their ownership of the customer relationships and don't want to make it easier for the brand owners to usurp that ownership. Finally, there are the usual issues over adoption of the system, which have increased because the end users are someone else's employees, not employees of the brand owner. Salesforce.com believes it has overcome some of these problems, by providing a tool that is very easy to use and that helps the partners' sales staff be more effective. As a result, it stands some chance of success, but it won't be easy. Salesforce.com is very effective at promoting adoption among its customers' internal users of CRM, but it will have a much tougher job with external users of PRM. What will really make a difference is if the brand owners offer sufficient incentive for their channel partners to adopt the PRM systems, and that is beyond salesforce.com's control.
