This past July Salesforce announced the availability of Einstein Analytics for Partners. Adding this functionality to the existing Partner Relationship Management (PRM) offering promises to be an advantage for synchronizing communication between vendors and channel partners. Before we get into what this will ultimately mean for those relationships, I’ll touch on PRM & Einstein Analytics (EA) and discuss their capabilities for those who haven’t had the opportunity to get much exposure to these tools.
Salesforce Partner Relationship Management
Salesforce’s Partner Relationship Management tool is available as part of the Sales Cloud offering. PRM performs similar to how a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system functions and in fact, is an extension of it, however, it’s geared toward companies (vendors) managing their relationships with their channel partners on a more personal level.
It can be used to administer the complete lifecycle of partner relationships which Salesforce explains, “from recruiting and onboarding new partners to your business, to providing self-service and analytics tools to your most advanced partners.” (1)
Sharing data with partners becomes a smooth and logical operation. There should be no concern about scalability as Salesforce will handle whatever growth may incur. Partners utilizing the same sales & quoting components as their vendors can more quickly close out more contracts.
Salesforce Einstein Analytics
Einstein Analytics is a Salesforce product that allows you to explore and discover your data regardless of volume or complexity. This exploration can lead to insightful knowledge about your organization. Using this knowledge, you can provide your team with actionable events to further grow your business.
The amount of customer data continues to grow rapidly and the typical tools of analyzing data such as simple dashboards & reports are becoming less effective in identifying trends as this data balloons over time. Trying to capture and quantify correlations in a massive sea of data is proving more difficult every day with traditional means of analysis.
Within Einstein Analytics there is another product called Einstein Discovery (ED), which implements what is referred to as supervised machine learning. Envision the algorithm as a student and the dataset as an instructor watching over the mechanism of learning. The algorithm will continue to generate predictions against the training data and is corrected until a sufficient number of successes has been established. Einstein Discovery verifies specific trends against thousands of statistical validations. Once the data has been drilled down and stories (analytical models) are created from the data, ED uses natural language to suggest actions based on the knowledge derived from the patterns observed. The content provided to the end-user is available in various formats to quickly share with others.
With Einstein Analytics & Discovery, users can utilize an intuitive, native interface to create datasets, lenses (visualize data from a dataset), stories, dashboards and ultimately apps to mine their data and draw out correlations & trends. These correlations and trends provide them with the intelligence required to make smarter decisions about their day-to-day responsibilities and their business as a whole.
What does the integration of EA into PRM mean to vendors and their channel partners?
With Salesforce’s PRM one of the primary goals is to provide partners with the same tools and insights the internal vendor company’s sales teams use and are able to leverage, enabling channel managers to be engaged less in tasks of an administrative nature and more involved in acting as strategic partners. This effort aims at reducing friction from vendor to partner to customer.
Over 90% of companies depend, at some level, on their channel partners to bring in revenue. It has been shown that partners are naturally more apt to adopt an affinity to products that tend to have the least amount of difficulty to sell. For this reason, it’s a good idea to try to be inclusive when it relates to the sharing of information and the tools the vendor’s internal sales teams use so partners feel vested in a strategy of comprehensive collaboration.
So, of course, it makes perfect sense from both a vendor and a partner perspective to enhance their commitment by making Einstein Analytics available for Partners.
Einstein Analytics can provide predictive guidance when partners need to prioritize leads. Channel partners can now utilize AI within Einstein Analytics to find, analyze, & hierarchize lead & opportunity data returned based on historical performance with insights about the data described in natural language.
Providing an application native to Salesforce to address analytics within the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management platform (and through extension of PRM) is disrupting typical paths of analysis by granting access to KPIs specific to roles, empowering users to dive into current data, and equipping them with the tools to discover new ways of managing channels, projections, and optimize team achievements.
Sales Analytics (2)
Dive deep into:
• Pipeline trending
• Forecast reviews
• Sales productivity
• Customer trends
• Closed/won business by geography
• Performance by product
• Performance by lead source
• Historical analysis
• Rep performance
• Account summaries
• Business review
With Sales Analytics, now both your whole vendor sales team and your partner sales team can immediately see through the entirety of their sales data which in turn opens up the ability to act quickly, on which your various tasks hinge, whether that be generating new tasks, pinpointing opportunities, or participating in activity that increases revenue based on predictive insights.
Find out more about Salesforce’s Partner Relationship Management platform here.
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