Overview of Partner Relationship Management and Channel Sales

What's the Difference Between Direct and Channel Sales?

In a direct sales environment sales representatives, who are employees of your company, sell your company's products and services.

The best way to understand channel sales is to think of it as a branch of your company tree that connects your internal sales team with teams of partner sales representatives who are external to your company.

In a channel sales scenario, members of your internal sales team, called channel managers, work with external partners to sell your products and services. Your channel managers work closely with these external partner sales representatives to make sure they have your most recent product and service information. Channel managers monitor the sales activities of your partners to prevent issues such as duplication of leads or opportunities between your internal sales team and your external partner sales force, or any other type of channel conflict. Channel managers also provide incentives for their partners to sell your products or services, or to increase recognition of your brand in new or expanding markets.

What Needs to be Done?

By default, your sales applications are configured for direct sales. Since channel sales expands your sales capabilities beyond your internal organization, sales administrators and channel managers must set up and secure the business objects they want to use to work with teams of external partner sales representatives. These objects include:

Partner Accounts and Partner Contacts
Customer Accounts and Contacts
Partner Announcements
Partner Activities
Partner Programs
Partner Program Enrollments
Partner Business Plans and Objectives
Leads
Opportunities
Deal Registrations
Marketing Development Funds (MDF)
Business Intelligence

How you configure your business objects depends on how you plan to use them for channel sales.

Beyond setting up the business objects, you must also configure other functionality for channel sales, such as sales territories and assignment so that your leads and opportunities go to the most appropriate partners.

How to Use This Guide

Here's how to use this guide:

Use the Setup Task Overview chapter to get an overview of the tasks covered in this guide.
Read the brief conceptual overviews at the beginning of each chapter to understand the setups the chapter covers.
Use the Setup Overview as a guide to the setups you must perform. The remaining topics in the chapter provide the step-by-step details of how to perform each of those setups.
Refer to the following guides for full explanation of the different features and options:
- Getting Started with Your Sales Implementation
- Implementing Sales
- Understanding Import and Export Management for CX Sales and Fusion Service
- Configuring and Extending Applications

Prerequisites

Since partner relationship management is a set of features within your sales applications, and since there is no need to duplicate content from guide to guide, this guide assumes the following:

You have already implemented and configured your applications for direct sales as specified in the Getting Started with Your Implementation guide and the Implementing Sales guide.
You are now ready to implement and configure partner relationship management functionality for channel sales as a branch of that existing direct sales organization.

Supported Business Use Cases

This guide provides general setup information about all of the partner relationship management features, and provides worked examples that support the following two business use cases:

A partner brings in new business: This process starts when the partner creates and submits a deal registration. The default, but configurable, workflow routes the deal registration request to the channel manager for approval and notifies the channel manager that there is a pending deal registration to approve. The channel manager identifies the right account and runs a duplicate check against existing accounts, contacts, and opportunities. The channel manager can also request additional information from the partner if questions still exist. The channel manager then approves the deal registration. The approved deal registration becomes an opportunity that partner works on and hopefully closes.
The brand owner offers business to a partner: This process starts when the brand owner sends a lead to the partner. The default, but configurable, workflow routes the lead to the partner for acceptance or rejection, and notifies the partner that there is a lead to review. The partner can accept the lead and become the owner of the lead, or reject the lead if the partner thinks it's not a good business fit. The channel manager can then reassign the rejected lead to another partner. When the partner accepts the lead there are two routes the partner can take. In the first route, the partner fully qualifies the lead and can then request the channel manager convert the lead into an opportunity. In the second route, the partner can convert the lead to a deal registration. The channel manager then approves the deal registration and the lead is converted to an opportunity.

What's in Each Chapter?

The chapters in this guide are organized in the logical sequence you follow when implementing and configuring the various aspects of channel sales functionality.

The following table lists and describes the chapters in this guide.

Chapter Title	Description
About this Guide	Discusses starting point assumptions, the supported use cases, and a description of each chapter.
Understanding Partner Relationship Management Channel Sales	Describes channel sales and the user roles involved.
Channel Sales Setup Task Overview	Lists the high-level configuration tasks in order.
Creating Channel Sales Users	Discusses the ways to create channel sales users and provides steps for each creation method.
Configuring Your Sales Applications for Channel Sales	Describes the business objects that need to be configured to handle channel sales, including: Partner Accounts and Partner Contacts Leads Opportunities Deal Registrations
Configuring Data Migration for Channel Sales	Discusses the import of partner relationship management objects and provides a worked example for Partner Accounts and Partner Contacts.
Setting Up Sales Territories and Assignment for Channel Sales	Discusses how to configure partner territories and territory assignment for channel sales.
Configuring Business Intelligence for Channel Sales	Describes how to configure audit reporting and how to expose the Reports tab on Channel Sales pages.
Expanding Your Channel Sales Capabilities	Provides steps to configure additional business objects for channel sales use.
Additional Learning Resources	Provides a list of locations to find additional documentation, tutorials, support articles, and other resources.