The Salesforce.com Admin Guide to PRM

Your channel team has told you they need a tool to support partners and it needs to integrate with your Salesforce.com implementation. As the Salesforce Administrator for your company, you need to be included in this decision. Having a Partner Relationship Management solution (PRM) seamlessly integrate with your Salesforce implementation is critical to a channel program’s success, and the following guidelines can help you help your channel team to pick the right solution.

Understand the impact on your Salesforce licenses

When evaluating solutions, make sure you fully understand the impact the solution’s integration will have on your Salesforce licenses. Some solutions require a license for each user of the PRM system, or only allow a set number of logins per month, while other systems require a dedicated license with administrator rights.

For Channeltivity: you do not need to dedicate a license to our integration, but we will need access to Salesforce.com via a user with API access.

Understand the impact on your Salesforce objects

A key component of managing partners is integrating their leads and opportunities into your system. This is typically done by sending partner information into various objects within Salesforce. Make sure you understand the impact the PRM integration will have on your current objects. You should also understand if there are any additional objects that are needed as a part of the integration as some systems require custom partner objects for their integration.

For Channeltivity: The Channeltivity Salesforce Edition works by adding custom fields to existing objects in Salesforce, which means minimal impact to existing processes and workflows within Salesforce.

Resources Needed and workload

With many PRM systems, integrating into Salesforce will require an implementation partner. It is necessary to know upfront the time investment you will have with regards to the implementation. Some systems can take hours while others can take weeks or months of resources. Also understand the full costs, including implementation time, expensive managed services and setup fees.

For Channeltivity: Channeltivity makes it easy with a point-and-click setup wizard that will take the guessing out of your PRM integration. The typical integration takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to complete. This assumes your Salesforce data is clean and well organized. Channeltivity puts the power in your hands and gives you the keys to managing your PRM implementation.

API Calls and Limits

Integrating a PRM system with Salesforce.com requires API calls. Your contract with Salesforce will determine the number of API call’s that can be issued against a Salesforce license within a 24-hour period. It is likely that the PRM integration will not be the only system making calls against that limit, so it is important that you factor in all the other API calls that are happening.

For Channeltivity: The Channeltivity integration with Salesforce is conservative with its usage of the Salesforce API and shouldn’t trigger any limits on its own.  Understanding the API limits upfront can save you a lot of frustration later.