The ultimate goal of a partner portal should be the enablement of partners to self-service as much as possible. The more your channel partners can do themselves, the less time your internal resources will have to devote to partner support. This can free up your resources for more critical initiatives or even prevent the need for additional hiring.

However, actually creating a self-service environment requires planning and configuration. Depending on your partner channel, there are several areas to review. At Simplus, our goal is to simplify the journey. To accomplish this, we’ll be covering several areas crucial to partner self-service development in depth over a series of articles. Our first topic is sales enablement.

Problems in the process

If you sell through your channel, providing more self-service capabilities will significantly reduce your need for internal resource time. As a premier Salesforce CPQ partner, one of our most common partner portal use cases is enabling partners to create quotes within a branded community. But when working with our clients, we often see the deal registration to quote acceptance process take from five to twenty days—even more. The delay is mostly down to processes in multiple disparate systems, siloed data, and inefficient system capabilities.

Empowering partners as a solution

We attack these situations by breaking down the partner sales process to identify roadblocks. We find processes that can be eliminated or automated. If additional systems perform tasks that can be accomplished in Salesforce, we…

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