Streamline Collaboration with Partner Connect
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify and analyze the challenges of cross-company CRM integration.
- Describe the benefits of Partner Connect.
In today’s interconnected business environment, managing shared sales records across multiple companies can present significant challenges. Learn how effective CRM integration strategies can overcome visibility bottlenecks and streamline collaborative processes. Let’s understand how May Flowers and April Showers navigate these complexities.
When Your Data Is Available, But Out of Reach
Maintaining sales records for shared business in a single org creates a visibility bottleneck for April Showers’s sales leadership. Their business analysts and sales managers cannot see progress on this shared business. At times, May Flowers also has its own distinct sales stages, deal sizes, and outcomes that it wants to track for the same shared deal. However, because April Showers manages May Flowers’s versions of the records, the information has to be tracked separately.
To address these issues, April Showers encourages their reps to duplicate the records they are working on in April Showers’s own Salesforce org. This process alleviates some problems but introduces new challenges. Now, April Showers’s reps must maintain two different versions of the same record—a daunting task. Manually reentering records leads to typos and inaccuracies, not to mention wasting the expertise of their skilled irrigation system sellers on redundant data entry.
Moreover, because data is siloed within each company’s Salesforce org, comparing sales progress on shared deals is nearly impossible. May Flowers and April Showers attempt to address this by scheduling smart planter sales meetings. These sessions are long and tedious, with participants sifting through data to identify records that represent a single shared lead or opportunity.
However, the rapid pace of smart planter sales makes it difficult to schedule meetings frequently enough to keep up, and the meetings provide only a fleeting snapshot of current progress. Even emailing progress spreadsheets back and forth between the companies is problematic, as the spreadsheets are laborious to prepare, difficult to interpret, and quickly outdated.
A more serious issue develops: all the technological juggling is causing a rift between the two sales teams. May Flowers observes that April Showers sales reps are beginning to let smart planter opportunities languish. They also notice that April Showers reps are logging into the partner site less frequently.
It becomes apparent that April Showers reps are prioritizing deals with other vendors, with whom they have more traditional, straightforward agreements. The manual steps, multiple touchpoints, and incompatible technology are slowing down progress and eroding trust between the collaborators.
An Idea Takes Root
One day, May Flowers’s Salesforce admin, Daisy, stumbles upon a Salesforce Partner Relationship Management feature called Partner Connect. She discovers that Partner Connect is designed for collaborating on leads and opportunities across companies. Intrigued, she sends a Slack DM to Rainy, the Salesforce admin at April Showers.
Daisy explains to Rainy how Partner Connect can resolve the issues the two companies currently face. Vendors can grant permission to trusted partner users to export leads, opportunities, or both from the vendor’s partner site to the partner’s own Salesforce org. Partner Connect then provides both vendor and partner users a read-only glimpse of how records are progressing independently in each company’s Salesforce org.
Rainy is curious but wants to understand more. She muses, “So, Partner Connect acts like a lens, letting you view the records in the Salesforce org of another company?” She isn’t quite sure how that would work and wonders about its safety. She decides to research further.
Rainy discovers that Partner Connect does not override any of the existing record sharing and access levels set by admins. Partners can only export the records that the vendor has granted them permission to access from the vendor’s partner site. Similarly, vendor users can only view the partner’s version of those exported records. Admins at both companies can also restrict access by managing which fields on each shared object the other company’s users can observe from their own org. Rainy realizes that Partner Connect shares only the details she is already discussing in sales readout meetings with May Flowers. And it eliminates the need for constant updates to spreadsheets that are often ignored. “Sign me up,” she declares.
Rainy shares some Partner Connect documentation with her tech security team. After confirming that the connection between orgs is authorized through the Salesforce secure external client apps service using OAuth 2.0 client credentials, security clears Partner Connect for use. Rainy messages Daisy back, excited about the prospect of abandoning a task she finds burdensome. The two admins decide to give Partner Connect a try.
Streamline Cross-Company Sales Processes
May Flowers and April Showers spend the next few weeks implementing Partner Connect. The admins integrate the objects and fields they want to share and roll out the feature to their sales teams. Now, the partnership is back on track, and the smart planter biz buzzes once again.
May Flowers reps add 1,500 new leads and 300 opportunities for smart planters. April Showers reps locate these records in the May Flowers partner site and export them to the April Showers Salesforce org.
After importing the records, April Showers reps see a related list on each lead and opportunity that displays a read-only version of the record. These read-only versions—called connected external leads and connected external opportunities—show April Showers reps what is happening with May Flowers’s version of the record.
Because May Flowers stores some data that it wants to keep internal, Daisy decides not to share certain fields with April Showers. As a result, April Showers reps cannot see these fields on the connected external opportunities viewed from April Showers’s org.
Similarly, when an April Showers rep updates their opportunities, May Flowers reps also have a read-only connected external opportunity in their org that shows April Showers’s version of the record. Like May Flowers, April Showers decides not to share all of their field data either.
Now, reps from both companies genuinely share deals. Information that used to be labor-intensive to gather, inaccurate, or hard to parse is now automatically available to either party in near real time.
Sales leadership from both companies tracks all of their team’s deals, not just a subset. They can also report on connected external leads and opportunities, keeping track of the other company’s data just as easily as their own.
When May Flowers and April Showers meet, they no longer hunker down over outdated spreadsheets to sort through data minutiae. Instead, they celebrate the successes of a fruitful partnership, aided by Partner Connect.
In fact, the collaboration is going so well that when May Flowers learns that Partner Connect allows vendors to connect with up to 50 partner orgs, they plan to roll out Partner Connect for two of their other selling relationships, Sunshine Window Boxes and Rainbow Rain Barrels.
With Partner Connect, vendors and partners continue to expand the reach of their CRM applications to meet the needs of their growing businesses and simplify the complexities of their strategic relationships.