OREANDA-NEWS. April 11, 2016. Businesses today are more complex and move faster than ever. In order to keep up with the rapid pace of business, across every industry we are seeing companies rely on vast partner ecosystems to drive sales and and explore new markets. A strong network of partners can help you grow your business in many ways. Partners can help you scale and maximize your existing business lines by extending the footprint of your sales force. Partners can help you enter new markets, regions and industries to grow in areas where your company might not be familiar. And partners can provide a new channel for selling new products.

A thriving channel partner relationship can mean a competitive advantage for any business that is looking to grow. But managing these partner relationships is anything but simple. When critical information exists in fragmented systems, you lose productivity and some of the power that comes from your collaboration.

To make the most out of your partnerships, you need Partner Community from Community Cloud, which brings together everything partners need to sell in one place.

Built on the secure and reliable Salesforce platform, Partner Community is designed to make collaboration and engagement between partners more transparent, seamless, and connected than ever before. You can build, empower, and grow your partner network all within a secure, branded community. Share goals, collaborate on new ideas, and support partners who need assistance all without having to leave the community.

But in order for the community to truly be a one-stop shop for partner success, you need analytics and data in context to drive business decisions and close deals.  

When working with partners, just like with your own sales organization, analytics is a critical part of hitting your sales targets because decisions must be grounded in data. But legacy tools are slowing you down with manual processes, multiple spreadsheets, and disconnected systems.

Partners cannot get answers from legacy analytics tools — fragmented systems make it difficult to have one view of your business. Additionally, analytics are often buried behind firewalls and not enabled to support the partner security model that you need when you give your partner access to business intelligence tools. Limited self-service capabilities don’t allow your partners to do their own data discovery. And a lack of mobility means that your mobile-minded partners don’t have the tools that they need right at their fingertips.

You need to provide partners with the insight they need to drive more business and these insights need to be transparent and personalized so you can build trust and partner loyalty. With the right intelligence, your partners can sell more and sell smarter.

Partner Community not only makes data storage and sharing simpler than ever before — it’s also designed to make parsing through all of that data easy and accessible. Partner Community centralizes all of your most important information into one feed for easy, collaborative, and secure access to the data you need to keep your business moving. But that’s only one piece of the puzzle.

With Wave Analytics for Community Cloud, you can give your partners the insights they need to drive sales. With the right numbers located in the context of the rest of the community, you can collaborate more effectively because every partner is always working with the most up-to-date numbers.

Wave for Community Cloud allows your business to share personalized Wave dashboards in the Partner Community. Your partners can see historical performance summaries and prioritize which opportunities to focus on, so they can start selling like your own reps do. With the Wave Platform, the data is delivered in a simple, easy-to-use UI, so every partner can slice and dice data to understand and grow their business (and your partnership). You can embed these dashboards right within the community so your partners can reference key metrics instantly. Plus, the data is always secure, and you can set permissions to control the visibility of data  — so only the right people see the right analytics.

With Wave for Community Cloud, you can optimize every stage of the partner lifecycle from partner recruitment and onboarding, to closing deals and analyzing performance. Want to learn more about driving channel partnership success? Check out the webinar on April 13th!

You can also download the free e-book, Partner Community 101, for more insights.