How Salesforce Uses Community Cloud to Power its Partner Community

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning in our webinar to discuss how Salesforce uses Community Cloud to power its partner community. I'm Kimberly Vatlin, Senior Product Marketing Manager with Community Cloud, and I'm joined by John Richter, Director of Partner Community Programs at Salesforce. Before we get started today, I'd like to review a couple of ways you'll be able to interact with us during this broadcast. First is the Ask a Question button in the upper left corner of your screen. If there's anything you'd like to ask our presenter today, please click this button and type your question. We will leave time to answer your questions at the end of the presentation and we'll get to as many as we can. You may also use this button if you encounter any technical issues during the call. We want to make sure our webinars are delivering valuable content for you, so please take a minute after our presentation to tell us how we did using the Rate this button, which you'll see to the right of the Questions button. All right, before we go any further, I have to remind you that Salesforce is a publicly traded company, so when considering future developments, you should always base your purchasing decisions on what is currently available in market today. So let's get started. A common theme that you'll hear us talk about, whether it's at Dreamforce or if you follow Salesforce, is about becoming a customer company and how we have brought together marketing, sales, analytics and service in one system to get that complete 360 degree view of the customer. And that is very much the spirit in which Community Cloud was built as it's about engaging customers both outside and inside of your organization and Community Cloud spans across the Customer Success platform with employee, Partner and Customer communities. We engage customers by connecting them to drive employee productivity through employee communities, by helping our partners close more business more quickly through partner Communities and by delivering a better customer experience and support system through customer communities. Today we'll focus on Partner Communities and show you how the Salesforce community connects over 31,000 global partners in our community to make our partners more successful by better understanding the partner journey, increasing efficiencies and connecting your channel to your company. We've deployed thousands of communities already across industries and geographies and on average, when we've surveyed our customers and look at the metrics across various stages of the lifecycle, they have reported that their partners were more engaged after deploying a community with an increase of 46% in partner engagement, partner collaboration was up 35% and for partners that sell deal registration is up 33%. So you can see how partner communities can maximize the performance of indirect sales channels. And that's important because when we talk about partner communities, your partner's performance is essential to your company's growth. Let's think about some of the things businesses want to accomplish. Whether a company wants to maximize their existing business or branch out and enter a new region or industry, or take a new product to market traditionally, that can be a complex undertaking. It can be expensive and can have long lead times attached. In that partners are essential. They provide you with credibility as you work with experts in a new region. And they bring a knowledge of how your products will fit or translate in that new market. But that can also mean a complex ecosystem of partners to manage. With a partner community, it allows you to unify all of your communication and partners on a single platform that is connected to business. A business can't do it alone, and it's through a partner community that you can truly connect your channel to your company. With community, companies can manage their entire partner lifecycle. Because regardless of your industry and if you sell through distributors or resellers, brokers or agents, a company with an indirect channel needs a solution to manage its partners. From partner recruitment to onboarding, training and certification, partners can share information and get access to other experts in the community to ensure that they have what's needed to close business. You can track channel sales performance and identify top performers. This gives you visibility into where to spend your resources. Everything from marketing campaigns to fund requests are shared seamlessly across the life cycle. A partner community improves relationships and empowers your partner network. And to tell you more about how that is done with the Salesforce partner community, I'd like to now pass it over to John Richter.

All right, thank you very much, Kim. Happy holidays, everyone. Glad to be on the call today and and to talk to you a little bit about how we manage the partner community at Salesforce. So, as most of you know, Salesforce is all about apps. We actually have over 5.5 million apps running on the Salesforce app cloud today. And if we break that down a little bit, you can see that it includes the Salesforce apps, meaning our own products. It also includes partner apps that are available@appexchange.com so people often ask me, what's a good way, you know, what's a good tip you have with Salesforce? Or what are some good ways to really maximize Salesforce? And I tell them, go to the App Exchange, we have great products out there. That you can plug and play right into your existing Salesforce instance. Many of those apps are free and available to you right now to add value. And then we have your custom apps, apps that you've built yourself with your own company. And many of our SI or consulting partners have helped you to build those customized solutions. So you'll notice that the partner channel is very active in all of our apps, especially the apps on the app Exchange and the custom solutions that are being built directly for customers. So how do we enable all of our partners? We have a very large partner channel. What are we doing to enable them? Partners have a lot of needs, they have a lot of things that are important for them. And you can see a few here that we've listed on the slide. These are things that I get asked for every day, whether it's technical issues, information about new releases, how do I log my leads or do deal registration. I need to get an extension on an org. I have questions about design. What if are you running a particular pilot on a product? These questions come up very frequently. And so the way that we manage all of these requests for information and all this education is through our own partner community. So this is based on our own community product and it is seamless, it is structured and most importantly, it is secure. And I'll show you how that plays out with the way that we use it. So for us, the partner community really is a one stop shop for both education and engagement. Whether it's details about our partner program, whether it's communications that we're trying to push out to partners and training that we offer them, dealreg collaboration with other partners, which Kim mentioned earlier. All of our programs, our webinars, our recordings, monthly office hours, sales and enablement resources, getting support when you need it, all of that is available to our partners@partners.salesforce.com if you look at the way kind of organizationally that we operate, you'll see that we have a number of different kinds of partners. We have ISV partners who are building commercial apps. Those are the ones listed on AppExchange. We have consulting or SI partners. They are building custom solutions for customers all over the world. We have resellers, we have digital agencies. It doesn't matter what partner type we have. And we brought on a lot of new partners even in the last couple of years. And we're able to enable them and educate them and onboard them very quickly using this partner community layer. As you see here. This also is the engagement model for our internal teams to engage with These partners. So you can see at the bottom of the diagram here, it doesn't matter if it's partner operations, partner marketing, our development teams, our sales teams, all of those internal groups now have a very clean and seamless way to engage with any type of partner that we have through the partner community. If we look at it from the partner side, this is the very real world example of the kinds of things that our partners experience on a daily basis in the partner community. Whether it is looking at partner alerts or accessing program guides, roadmap information, release information, attending our office hours, knowledge about certification. What's going on at Dreamforce? Maybe some of you have heard of Dreamforce? We have a whole program around helping our partners to be successful at Dreamforce, because we know that when we make our partners successful, we're helping our customers to be successful. So all of these different assets and programs and initiatives are being run and generated through the partner community. I will mention one more. You'll see that social media is on here. And you might be wondering, what does social media have to do with the partner community? Well, we publish a lot of content on the community, but we also use social media channels to get that content out to the public and to our partners. So it's easy for us to use. For example, our Twitter handle is partnerforce. We have almost 100,000 followers of artnerforce on Twitter. So when we create new content on the community, I can just simply link that on Twitter to almost 100,000 people worldwide to alert them that we have this new knowledge and and information in the partner community. If it's secure information, then it will be authenticated or gated, meaning that it will require a login. So even if it's something that's more private, we can still push the link out through social media. And only partners can access it because they have a login to the partner community. So for this reason, we have experienced some pretty tremendous growth. And I do have partners and customers ask me fairly frequently, like, well, does your community scale? And I kind of chuckle a little bit because it actually scales very easily. I'll give you an example. In early 2014, I started with our partner community, a pilot of 50 partners. That's 5. Zero. Okay. About a year and a half ago, today we have over 31,000 active members of the partner community. And that includes a lot of activity. Over 35,000 posts, comments and likes. We've added over 1,000 new assets in the community. We have over 280 groups that are collaborating together. So I have new teams, even internally at Salesforce, I have new teams that are spinning up who are contacting me almost on a weekly basis to find out how they can engage our partners through the community. And so the real value is both to our partners, but also to our internal teams who are trying to figure out how do I reach out to the partners, what is the best way to engage them. So let's take a look now at kind of our partner community in action. So what you should be seeing here is, and you might say, well, this doesn't look like the partner community. This is what we call our aloha product, or we call it Aloha internally at Salesforce. But I wanted to show you this first because this is basically our identity product. And I would encourage any customer that's out there listening within the sound of my voice to really take a hard look at identity from this console. And I use this every day. I keep this console open. Notice I can access our partner community, our own salesforce. Org, which we call 62Success community security information, my Gmail, my calendar, our Salesforce foundation. I can access all of our solutions, all of our content very easily from this console. So every day I'm just clicking on the partner community and it opens right up. So what you're seeing now is the partner community that we use every day. And any of you can check this out if you go to partners.salesforce.com so I'm going to talk you through some of the very tangible, very real ways that we use the community on a daily basis. You'll see here that we link to our social channels, which I mentioned earlier, so you can get right into our LinkedIn or our Twitter account. Then you see partner alerts. As most of you know who run a partner channel, you're always trying to keep partners very informed on the latest and the greatest. And it could be a program update, it could be a technical update. Usually it's time sensitive or some action is required on the part of the partner. And so we issue these alerts and it's the first thing you see when you log into the partner community. So if you visit the community, you won't see this. But. But if you log in, if you authenticate, you will see these partner alerts. If you scroll down, we have news and we have events and so you can see exactly what's going on. Rajiv Patel, who's on my team, publishes these weekly updates. So we keep partners very informed to what's going on. Some of you may know Tyler Prince, he runs our partner channel. He posted a blog for us very recently. So all of the news is cataloged here, as well as the events. And so we cover all kinds of different events, whether it be Salesforce World Tours, whether it be webinars that we do. Everything is captured here on our event calendar, including the event today. How Salesforce uses community cloud to power its partner community. So even customer events and webinars like this, we add to our partner community calendar to make sure partners are very aware of what's going on. We also record and provide the slideware for all of the programs that we run. As you know, it's very hard to get partners all in one place at one time. And so recordings are a very real way for us to scale content so that partners can watch it on airplane or when they're traveling to and from customer sites. So having this ability to just go to a calendar and access something you might have missed and have the content readily available to you, a summary of the content, all the slides from the event and the recording from the event are all available to you. And partners really love this value in the partner community. So we take a look at the collaboration section. This is in the top navigation. We have a section called featured groups, and these are some of our most popular groups. Groups are the way that we really engage with our partners. This is how we show new content and new information. It's how we answer questions. It's how we keep partners informed and how we engage with them. So we have, like I said, over 280 different collaboration groups. These are some of the most popular. But I want to drill down on one of them and just show you a creative way that we are using the community to communicate with all of our partners. So you'll see this group called Official Partner Community. If we look at that group, you'll notice over here to the right side of the screen that this group has over 30,000 members. It's actually one of the largest chatter groups that we have in all of Salesforce. This is how on any given day, at any given time, if we have a new webinar or an alert or a new asset, new sales resources, we can share that on this official partner community group. And what we do is we encourage partners to get the email to every post, or if they don't want to hear from us that frequently, they can do a daily digest or even a weekly digest, and that's giving them an update directly to their inbox. So we're not even talking about logging into the community. We're talking about reaching directly into the inbox of every partner in our channel and enabling them with the knowledge and information they need on a daily or weekly basis. So there's a lot of power in the ability to do that and to communicate in that way. So we use this group very frequently. It is our kind of channel number one for reaching partners and for reaching all of them. There's another group I wanted to mention which is our question and answers groups. Sometimes when you have a lot of groups like we do in the community, it's difficult to figure out, well, which group should I ask my question in? How do I know which group is the right one? So what we do is we use this question and answer group as a clearinghouse for all questions that come in from partners. And we even have a short URL that we use, t.force.com, which is just a shortened version of the partner community, and then question. So our partners know and you have to log in to get to this. But our partners know that if they go to p.force.com? anytime, anywhere, they can ask a question. Here we have a lot of our Salesforce staff members who are monitoring this group, who are watching it, checking things out, and we will either answer the question directly, we may route you to a particular group or route you to a particular individual that can help you to get that question answered. This has been an incredibly valuable piece of the community, this collaboration aspect. We used to have an old portal and some of you may still be operating out of an old portal, even our prm, our old PRM product. And I would strongly encourage you to move to a community. This is the just the collaboration aspects alone are well worth the investment because now we are getting to the issues, we are getting to the real problems or concerns that partners have. It's not a one way dialogue anymore with us just pushing out content. Now partners can interact with us and we can direct them to the exact person within the company that can answer that question or get them the right resource. So compare that with email, where you might email your partners or your partners might email you. And it takes quite a while to figure out who's the right person to route it to. And obviously a person can only email one other person. But with the community we have a lot of eyes on these groups and so you're kind of contacting a lot of people within Salesforce at one time. So it's a great way to surface questions and concerns. Like I said, we have a lot of other groups, but I think you kind of get the idea of some ways that we use the collaboration features that are built into the community right out of the box. The next section I want to talk about is education. So that's a big one when it comes to the partner community in any partner channel is just making sure partners have access to training and the knowledge that they need. You'll notice that we've broken our groups here into app vendors, which are basically ISV partners, consultants, or sometimes called sis or management consultants, and in general, topics, things that apply to every partner like Dreamforce or office hours or our roadmap or release information. So let's take a dive into app vendors, which are our ISVs that are building commercial solutions. You'll notice that we have a journey or a path laid out for them directly right on the community. So there's no question about like, how do I get started or how do I learn what's going on or what do I need to do first? Every ISV partner that comes into our community, we direct them here. And so the goal is to help them to move through the entire partner life cycle. In the overview section, we provide them with documentation right up front. They can download this guide that has all of the detail about setting up the technologies that they need to be successful building and distributing their solution. We provide them access to our partner online training, our learning management system, so that they have access to all of the training that we have access to inside Salesforce. We provide that to partners at no charge. So this is a way to get our partners going very quickly, to get them onboarded and trained up, then moving through the plan phase. This is when you're planning your app, you're getting started. We have a new trailhead module. I know many of you understand and know about trailhead. We have a new trailhead module just for ISPs to go through the basics and help them to get started. We have them join the official partner community group, which I showed you earlier. We show them our policies and how to work with their account manager, how to learn more about the program requirements and the benefits, technical updates. All of this is in the plan phase and we won't move through all of these, but I think you get the idea that we've laid out the journey very clearly. Remember I said earlier about the partner community is seamless, it is secure. This is what I mean. So this presents a very clear way for a partner to understand how to matriculate or work through our system and how to be successful. Whether it's Building their app, distributing their app on AppExchange and on their own website, offering free trials, and then marketing their solution through the app Exchange or through campaigns, selling and then supporting their customers in market. So we have content and knowledge at every phase of the partner life cycle. If you're an experienced partner, you're going to spend more of your time here in the latter phases. If you're a brand new partner, we're going to direct you to these early phases so that you understand what it takes to get up and running very quickly. So the education section, very important for us. And I mentioned earlier that we're onboarding new partners, even new partner types all of the time. And as we do, we are creating new journeys and new paths for all of those partner types, whether it's consultants or very soon marketing, cloud partners for us and digital agencies. If we look now at the support section, I want to show you a few things here that I think are quite valuable. Obviously, we cannot answer every question through the collaboration groups. Sometimes it takes a lot of research on a particular case with a particular partner in a very specific situation. And for that reason we have support. And support gives our partners the chance, first of all, to search on solutions and search on issues that are meaningful to them. And they can simply search, click anything in the search bar and they can search for it before they submit a case. And that's what we encourage them to do, is to always search before they submit a case. But even if you've submitted a number of cases, as a partner, you can track all that in the community. So I'm looking now at cases that require action. Maybe I've submitted the case and then our Salesforce team has pushed it back to the partner saying, okay, it's time for you to take action. I know exactly what cases require action. You can see I'm up to date because nothing requires action. I'm very up to date and you can see all the cases, whether they are being worked on, whether they're new, all of that in this console. If I want to submit a new case, I simply use the new case button. And a lot of the most frequent issues are already laid out here in the ui. So if I have questions about certifications, I can simply mouse over the word and it's already giving me a lot of information about certification and things I can search on. And our hope is that this will solve the problem and that you don't even need to create the case. I always say the best case is the one that never gets created. You get the support you need and there's no reason to even escalate it any further. But if you did need to escalate, you can simply create a case from here. So we enable all of our partners this way, whether it's ISVs or specific consulting partner issues, as you see down here, whether it's program requirements, content syndication, questions about lead referrals or credit on acv, that's annual contract value, these are kind of the frequently asked areas for us. And we want to make sure that those are laid out early so that we can attempt to clarify and give you a lot of information up front. So support is very powerful. Let me show you now the business console. So business console, you can see, obviously we have referral partners that are submitting leads to us. Those leads are getting, they are getting converted to opportunities for consulting partners. They are putting together projects and they are submitting those projects so that we can help and support them on those customer projects. And all of that. Again, the detail for all of those is available here. As you see here, I could view all the projects or all of the opportunities and one question I sometimes get is who's seeing what? If a partner enters an opportunity, does everybody else within that company see that opportunity? No, you see your own opportunities. But if an executive needs to see high level, needs to see all the opportunities through the community, we have a permission set for that. I'm going to show you that later. Same thing for leads, same thing for projects. There's a permission set there that deals with that. We also have a link here. I love this link. It's called Trouble with a Project. This is like a red account button. I call this the don't email our CEO button. Sometimes customers love to email our CEO and you know who he is. I won't mention him, but they love to email him directly if they're not happy. And so we try to head those off as best we can. So we have this special link here that says, hey, if you're having trouble with the project, let us know now so we can support you. And it doesn't get escalated to the top level below here as a partner, we also show you your program status. This is a frequently asked issue and question that we get from partners is how do I know where I stand, what level am I on? What benefits are available to me at my tier level and what would it take for me to progress to the next level? What if I'm a registered partner and I want to become a silver partner or a gold partner? How do I do that. This console walks you through exactly how many points you've earned as a consulting partner. So you're 35% of the way there on getting to the next level, getting to a silver Partner status. And you can drill down on this link and see even more information about your program status. There are also questions about certifications. We work very hard to keep our partner community well trained on all of our products and all of the technical aspects of our solutions. And so we take this information. This is actually an integration with our vendor, which is webassessor. And many of you who are certified know you go in and take webassessor exams. So basically, we're integrating into webassessor. We're taking all that certification data. It goes into our own Salesforce instance, and then we push that data out to partners here in the community so that they can see all of their certifications and, and how many are active and current and how many are even behind by one exam or two exams. This is incredibly valuable information for any partner channel, not just Salesforce. Any partner channel needs to understand their tier level, the benefits that are available, and their certifications on your product. So this is a great console. We're very proud of it, very happy to have it. The next section in the partner community is our publishing console. So what exactly are we publishing? Well, we're publishing to the AppExchange. So as I mentioned earlier, if you go to appexchange.com you can search on over 2,800 apps that are out on the AppExchange today. And many of those apps are free. So if you have a Salesforce instance today, you can add immediate value to your instance at no cost by just plug and play. A bunch of AppExchange apps that are available and out there, whether it's lead de duping, team management, organizational management, data management, sales, marketing, we have all kind of different categories. And so what happens here in the partner community is we have to give our partners the ability to manage their listing. So not only on the App Exchange, not only do you have commercial apps, but you also have consultants who are listing their services. If I was a customer and I was looking for a consultant to help me with a big implementation or integration project, I would go to the App Exchange and I would search on consultants. Whether it be some of the largest consultants that we have, like Accenture and, and Deloitte, all of the names that you would recognize, or even our smaller partners, all of them are in there, listed on the App Exchange with ratings from customers with information about the partnership and about the solutions that they can help you with. So it's a great tool. But then how do we enable our partners to update their listings in real time? And the way that we do that is through the community. So this is custom work, but you can see that a partner has access to all of their listings. They can manage all of their solutions, what we call managed packages, through the community. They can set up all of their trial templates. So this is how they deliver free trials of their product. We have all the different orgs that are set up, the company info, this is the actual listing where they talk about their company and link to their website and things like that. And then analytics, so they can actually see the click to install ratio and a number of other very important analytics coming off of the AppExchange. So again, this is very valuable information. It's a powerful dashboard. You can export this data so that you can then run trending. You can see how your AppExchange listing is trending if you're running particular campaigns, a lot of great information and features. And again, all of this is enabled through the partner community. And then the last thing I want to show you, because this does come up a lot, is how do you decide who can see what inside the partner community? Well, first of all, we give administrators. So every company, every partner company has an administrator for their own company. With the partner community, that admin has the ability to give permissions in the following areas. So they could give user permissions. That means another admin could add users or remove users from the community. The permission for listings, that's the publishing to the app exchange. So you can use listings to decide who can manage the app exchange or the managed packages, who can see all cases, who can see all leads and opportunities and projects. These are all the ways. And it's as simple as just checking boxes. We've made it really simple for admins to give the permissions that they need for the people inside their company to have the visibility that they need. Inviting users is very simple. You simply put in the email address of the person that you want to give access to the partner community. This is not Salesforce doing this. This is the partner. The partner has their own admin that has full control over who has access from their company and what permissions they have on these various functions. So again, very powerful tool for administrators to use to control access to the community. We've encouraged a lot of our partners to set up their own collaboration groups so you can imagine in our partner community, we have hundreds of sub communities that are just one particular partner and usually the larger partners are the ones that take advantage of this. But this is how they can communicate to their own people through the partner community. And that's capabilities they may not even have internally with their own company, but they can do it through the partner community because they know exactly who is in the community from their own partner company. They know exactly who's in there because they can see that in the community and they can see it through the collaboration group and then they can communicate with them in real time. So some very powerful features, very powerful ways for us to enable the partner community. So I'm going to head back now to the slides. I hope that demo was helpful and what I would encourage all of you to do is check it out for yourself. As it turns out, and we did this by design, 80% of the community content is publicly available. You don't even need a login for much of what is available. What we pushed out as far as knowledge, education and news and events, all of that is public. So I would encourage any of you who are thinking about using communities to check ours out and poke holes in it and look around and see what you think. You can go to partners.salesforce.com and check it out anytime. I thank you again and I'm going to turn it over now back to Kim.

Great, thank you. John, we're now going to jump into Q and A and I just wanted to remind you that there is the Ask a Question button in the upper left corner of your screen if there's anything you'd like to ask. So I see some of the questions are starting to roll in. John, there's a question about how do you onboard partners through your partner community?

Yes, onboarding is a huge issue. It's something that we think about all the time. We have a number of different ways that we onboard partners. I think what I showed you in the demo was that you can go directly into the community. You can pick on what type of partner you are in the education section, whether it is the ISV section or the consulting partner section. And then the program is laid out for you. The life cycle is laid out as well as the access to all the training. We have an app academy that is specifically geared toward onboarding our partners. That's a virtual program. Any partner can take that, especially isv. And then for sis, we have a cloud academy that is an onboarding program that also is recorded. And any partner can get into that. They can Also take the trailhead modules and we're developing more of those every day. We give them access to our partner online training, our lms, so that they have access to the same training that we have inside Salesforce. And so we feel pretty confident that with all these different avenues, we are able to provide good onboarding for our partners.

Excellent. Thank you. I see a couple of questions here. Wondering about the demo that you took us through. How much of that is out of the box versus custom configuration?

I would say it's, I don't know percentage wise, but I would say much of what I showed you was out of the box, especially the collaboration sections. All of that is out of the box. The custom work was more around. I think you saw the dashboards, like those performance dashboards. That was custom work. Any integration where we have to go out, for example, to webassessor and grab that data, put it back into our own org and then push it. That integration work is custom. But really a lot of what you saw is out of the box. Even the education content that's based on site.com so it may not be community, but it's related. It's all part of the same product. You can use different products in this way. Site.com is very powerful for spinning up your own pages, your own kind of website. And so using communitieswithsight.com is a real win win for us as well as I think I showed you earlier identity so that now you have a very easy way to access the community and, and set up all the tools that you need, whether it's workflow or content.

Great, thank you. So another question here. Earlier you talked a little bit about how search works within the app exchange within the partner community. There's a question here about how does keyword search work within the partner community. For example, if I wanted to find like minded customers on semiconductor, how does that keyword search work within the partner community to connect with like minded customers?

Well, I think most of you know we also have a success community for customers that's managed by Erica Kuh, a good friend of mine. And she would tell you that, you know, search is very robust in the success community as well as partner community. I didn't show you search. I did allude to it when we talked about the support area and how you can search on different features. But search is powerful and for us in the partner community, it's searching on both the partner community and the success community. So we're actually bringing both those knowledge bases together inside the search. The search is covering A number of different areas. So, for example, if you search on something in our partner community, you are searching alerts, files, groups, people, news items. I'm just going by memory here. Product areas, questions, cases. You're searching a lot of different areas, all being pulled together in one view across the board. So I will say search takes a couple of minutes to come back because it's searching so many different knowledge bases and areas, but it's pretty robust. And so if you're trying to search within a community, it's touching on all the areas of the community. It's not like it's just searching on education or just searching through case material. It's searching across the board.

Great. So the next question is, so you're running a partner community with over 30,000 members. How big is your team to make this happen?

Well, I'm almost embarrassed to say this. Our team is quite small. We have a lot of other teams that support the content. There's no way that our team could build the content that's available, all of the content that's available in the community. So we have, I would say, between 30 and 40 different teams inside Salesforce that are working with us. They're developing their own content and they're creating their own engagement through collaboration groups and so forth. So that team is very large. But my actual team to manage the education content, to set up groups and do webinars, all the things I showed you earlier, is actually just a handful of people. So again, if you're out there thinking about managing your own community, it doesn't take a lot of people. If you're going to do custom work, you will need a partner or your own scrum team or development team. But beyond that, the ongoing management of the community is actually quite easy to do with a smaller team of people.

Great, thank you. And we have time for one last question. So, John, you talked a little bit earlier about controlling access within the partner community. So the question is, as a salesforce.com admin, if you grant access to a partner community, are they automatically granted approval to a new group or are you added as a participant?

So there are a couple things that happen when a new partner comes in. First of all, if you are the first person to join from that partner organization, you are automatically made the administrator. So you are kind of our point of contact. You are the first person to get in the community. We immediately provision you with administrative access so that you can then turn around and invite all of your users. We also auto add you to the official partner community group. That's the one that has over 31,000 members and we add you to that question and answer group so that you can go in immediately and start asking questions in those groups so you can auto add people into groups as soon as they come into the community or they can join on their own but as far as the auto adding we do it for two of the groups.

Thank you. All right before we finish up I would like to leave you with a few additional resources that you will have available to you to learn more about partner communities you can Access our partner community 101 ebook that highlights the top five benefits of a partner community can offer. You can view and check out our Partner Community demo that highlights how to onboard train and empower your channel partners and for further questions you can connect with the sales rep. I want to thank you for your time today and as well to John Richter for educating us on partner communities. We hope that you found this session valuable today. Thank you.