Businesses that rely on channel partners for sales are often embarrassingly bad at supporting their partners. These companies commonly struggle to effectively communicate, collaborate, and collect essential sales data and analytics from their channel partners. A whopping 58 percent of business decision-makers report that the accuracy of their indirect sales data falls below the levels needed to support sales and profitability decisions, according to 2021 Forrester research. When businesses make suboptimal and misinformed decisions regarding sales and profitability, it triggers a vicious downward cycle: Businesses that fail to properly support and empower their partners end up with partners that are less effective at selling. Specifically, partners lose their ability to deliver the high-quality customer service and cutting-edge customer experiences necessary to drive sales. Over time, partners disengage, let more and more sales opportunities slip through their fingers, and eventually give up altogether.

To maintain strong, mutually beneficial relationships with channel partners, companies need to invest in building a modern, integrated Partner Relationship Management (PRM) ecosystem. And there’s no better PRM platform than the industry-leading Salesforce Experience Cloud. Salesforce’s PRM offering is designed to help companies comprehensively manage relationships with all their channel partners, especially giving partners the tools, knowledge, and support they need to succeed. When companies initially invest in PRM, one of their most important responsibilities is introducing channel partners to the platform. The goal is essentially to sell your partners on PRM so you get strong buy-in and rapidly achieve strong user adoption rates. Let’s explore four essential tips for how a business can get its channel partners successfully onboarded to Salesforce’s PRM offering:

Build modern training resources and tools

Under a traditional onboarding paradigm, new channel partners are introduced to a company via in-person training sessions. While traditional training can still be an effective tool, channel partners expect other options—online training videos they can watch on-demand, knowledge bases they can search, and resources they can access from any device, including mobile. PRM is ideally suited to serve up all of these training resources and tools to partners, from introducing partners to product specs to introducing partners to suggested marketing and selling strategies to walking partners through the mechanics of preparing pitch decks. With these resources, channel partners gain…

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