Co-Create Success With the Changing Salesforce Ecosystem

The Salesforce partner community is a powerful force. 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.

With Dreamforce 2022 round the corner (which will take place in San Francisco from Sept 20-22, 2022), partners have an opportunity to listen to thought leaders, industry pioneers, and emerging trailblazers as they share success stories, new innovations, and growth tactics for Salesforce users and partner community.

Dreamforce participation allows Salesforce customers and partners to learn new things and enhance their productivity, profitability, and brand value. As per the 2021 Dreamforce survey, 87% of Salesforce customers registered positive growth, 89% saved on time and investment, 86% innovated something new, and 83% discovered a new tool or product to solve an existing problem.

But wait, what is the secret sauce that helped them achieve these business goals? Without a doubt, it’s ‘Salesforce partner collaboration’. It has helped Salesforce users and partners to achieve increased growth and profits over the years. With Salesforce partner collaboration, partners can work alongside and fill skill/resource and knowledge gaps of each other without missing out on business opportunities.

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. However, no partner is fully capable of developing and nurturing a new team with the necessary expertise in all product lines/business domains, especially for the new ones. This makes partnership the go-to solution for Salesforce companies and registered consultants.

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Here are some scenarios where companies can look for collaboration:

• Adapting to the 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 fulfil 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 fulfil your supporting needs by collaborating with the 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 on a mutually agreed-upon percentage.

Benefits of Salesforce Partner Collaboration

Having discussed multiple scenarios for collaboration, let’s shift our focus to the benefits of a partnership. So what benefits can you expect from the partner ecosystem? Here are some pointers worth considering:

• Bridge Skill gaps

No partner can handle every domain requirement. Additionally, training users on new technology and tools is a costly affair. With partner collaboration, teams can share resources and bridge skills gaps without having to hire professionals on a full-time basis.

• Increase Revenue

Since partner collaboration helps you share capabilities, it helps in generating a new revenue channel that you were missing earlier when you were managing everything based on the existing capabilities and missing out on possible revenue generation opportunities which can be driven by new capabilities.

• Enhance Client Experience

With Salesforce partner collaboration, teams can work on new products, accelerators, and implementations to fulfil the client’s requirements more efficiently. This not only helps a company to expand its development experience but also empowers them to align diversely skilled on-demand resources whenever required.

• Increase Productivity

Small teams find difficulty in delivering 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 portfolio largely determines its capabilities to potential customers. When you collaborate on a project, you can show your experience and partnerships with communities and AppExchange to get new high-value clients.

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How Damco Has Worked On a Collaborative Partner Ecosystem?

As a Salesforce Gold Consulting Partner, 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 fulfil 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.

Bottomline

With M&A, new product launches, and business expansion happening at a fast rate, it is impossible for individual Salesforce partners to fulfil every project requirement with the people on board. Collaborating with other partners opens a gate for shared profits and allows small teams to expand their business expertise into new domains/products. Collaboration is not only beneficial for Salesforce partners, Salesforce users too can make use of collaboration with experienced partners for better project management and on-demand support for one or more skills as per their deployments.

Source: Damco Solutions