Salesforce launches Einstein Analytics for Partners

Most businesses — a whopping 92%, by some estimates — make a killing from partner sales but ultimately fail to empower their channel partners with the tools and information their internal sales teams receive. To reverse this trend, Salesforce today introduced new features to its Sales Cloud partner relationship management (PRM) product — aimed at removing friction by delivering “intelligent insights” and “visibility” to partners.

“It pays to treat your partners like they’re part of your organization and empower them with the same tools and information as your internal sales teams because partners will lean into the products that are easiest to sell,” wrote SVP and general manager of Salesforce Community Cloud Adi Kuruganti. “PRM is designed to solve for that — making it faster and easier for vendors to communicate and empower partners.”

To this end, Einstein Analytics for Partners taps AI to identify and prioritize leads. Specifically, it mines past lead and opportunity performance data to deliver predictive recommendations, which guide partners to focus on the most promising existing and potential partners. (Einstein, Salesforce’s proprietary predictive analytics and AI platform, now powers 6.5 billion such predictions daily.)

“Einstein Discovery can analyze recent opportunities and see that trade show attendance has a strong impact on winning deals; therefore, channel managers can strategically allocate budget for trade shows and partner reps can extend trade show invites to their biggest prospects,” explained Kuruganti.

Also new are workspaces in Quip for Salesforce, the company’s cloud-based document solution, which provide collaborative places where partners can align with companies on yearly business plans and KPIs and submit proposals and quotes to close deals faster. Importantly, they enable partner reps to collaborate with account managers in real time on account plans, obviating the need for back-and-forth emails and meetings.

“For example, an organization can roll out a new standardized account plan process for partners with customizable templates that combine live Salesforce data, strategies, action items, and more,” said Kuruganti.

Lastly, PRM now supports self-service reports, enabling partners to explore data to better analyze, manage, and expand their business. Partners can edit a report to tailor it to their needs, for example breaking an aggregate report on Q2 sales into region, state, or product and then allocating resources for Q3.

Einstein Analytics for Partners, Quip for Salesforce, and self-service reports are available today.

“These features … empower businesses to drive growth through partnerships by intelligently surfacing insights and strategically aligning on priorities,” said Kuruganti. “We’re empowering channel partner managers to spend less time doing administrative tasks and more time acting as strategic advisors, while improving the selling experience for partner teams. [The more] companies and partners are in lockstep, the easier it is to sell products, and the faster you and your partners will grow.”