Say Hello to Partner Cloud: Power Your Ecosystem | Dreamforce 2025

You.

Welcome, everybody. We are here to talk about partners. It's time to say hello to Partner Cloud. So let's dig in. I want to start off by getting you to think a little bit. What do partners do for you? What do partners do for your business? I can even speak to how partners help me. As a product marketer at Salesforce, I work with partners all the time and they unlock new expertise for me. They share insights, they share leads and opportunities, they open new markets. And I don't even work with partners full time. It's not a huge part of my job, but it's an important part of my job. The agility that I have as a product marketer when I get to work with a partner is huge. And I'm sure many of you can speak to the power of partners in your own ecosystems, in your own spaces. Okay, that's what we're going to be talking about today. But before we go any further, I want to say thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for taking the time to think about your partner ecosystems, for chatting with us, for sharing about your partner ecosystems. As always, we're a publicly traded company, so please make your purchasing decisions based on currently available products. I am Adrienne McCrory. I am the product marketer for Partner Cloud, and I'm joined today by Martin Alejandro Gomez, who is the senior Product director of Partner Cloud. We're going to be taking you through a couple of things for Partner Cloud. Before we get into that, I want to remember what I said about how partners are a key to growth. You can think about how partners help all of us across all different types of needs. I'm sure if we were to go around the room, there would be many, many different use cases and types of partners. But one thing that is definitely true is that partner ecosystems have not maintained the same level of rigor in terms of technical advances that sometimes our internal teams get to have. Too often it's kind of managed in a black box. You don't know what data is out there or if the bright partner has the right data. There are just too many layers. It's all disconnected. You don't have visibility, especially if you have inventory involved in this process. I don't want to get even get into that. That's a whole nother beast. And then also, you can't communicate effectively and your partners don't have visibility. So we want to share with you about how we think we can help. What will help partners today? It turns out most companies are using partners, right? 89% of you, if you just came from the keynote, you know that for sure. And this is not just traditional companies or companies that have turned to partners in the past. This is everybody. AI companies, Siemens, we have all different kinds of companies using partners. So what can we do to help meet the need of partners today? Well, what if I told you that you could scale partnerships with real time support? What do I mean by this? I mean what if you could pull guidance, what if you could pull enablement agent force into your partner experience and embed it there so that partners don't have to go looking for things, they just have it right there in front of them. What if you could turn partner leads into pipeline that actually closes? What if you could give them access to the potential that they have with pipeline inspection? What if you could give them access to dashboards about incentives or opportunities? And then lastly, what if you could motivate every partner to come back and sell more? And we have a suite of functionality for this from rebates to incentive compensation management to loyalty. So I have shown you enough screens. How about we see it in action? And to do that I'm going to hand it over to Martin who is going to walk us through a demo of partner cloud. Take it away, Martin.

Thank you so much, Adrian. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to show you how to set everything up. You might be wondering, okay, how easy it is to start deploying this partner portal, these tools. The first step, imagine in your org, what you will do is go to setup and you can use there are Salesforce Go, which is our latest framework. In there you can go, for example, as you can see here we have a partner experience action that you can take. And this will literally be able to publish your first portal in three clicks. So pretty easy. And it only takes three clicks. Of course we already set this up for this demo so I'm going to show you how that looks like. This is that basic portal I published in the previous step. Of course we customize it further with different colors and branding. You can do the same for each of your partners. And as you can see, you have all the actions you might be familiar with in Salesforce Live, Opportunity leads, pipeline management. We will be looking at that in a minute. You can have that, give that access to your partner. So you have all those menus there. Of course, as I was saying, you can customize everything here, all the icons, fonts, branding. You can make it match your brand for each of those partners. But what is even cooler than just browsing the portal is using Agent Force. You probably saw Agent Force in different sections so far. So for example, imagine I'm a partner and this is the first time I'm accessing this portal. I can ask what is my MDF balance? For example, I want to learn or know how much I can use or how much I use in the past. So it's that really gives me an answer straight away. Of course I can go and navigate the site and find it by myself, but I can ask HNforce, which is pretty cool and faster. Another things we can do is not only just ask questions and get answers, but we can also take actions. With Agent Ford, for example, I might be wondering if I just became a partner for this run. I can say, okay, how do I become a Voltaire partner? This is exactly what I'm asking here. And as you're going to see in a minute, not only Agent four is providing me the exact steps that I need to take to become one of those partners. Gold partners in this case. But at the end it's asking me, would you like me, Agent Force, to enroll you in the program that will convert you to let you be a gold partner? Of course I will say yes. And well, and this is the agentic layer you probably heard about. It's not only, as I was saying, text that you get output from your questions, but actual actions that the agent can take for you. In this case, as you can see here, it says you have been successful enrolling this program. So let's go and take a look how that program appears in the partner portal. Of course, it's key to keep those partners engaged. So these programs are really an essential tool there. As you can see, the last one I'm enrolling is exactly the one I asked about. Okay, how do I become a gold partner in this partner? Also, if you're familiar with Trailhead, it's the similar concept where you have different actions that you need to take to. In the trailhead example, close that trail. But in here, to reach the goal partner status, of course we will have different actions you can take. We can include static content, different videos, really whatever you need to enable that partner. And again, it's not only text or videos that I can put here, it's also actions. As you can see in the last step, you can take a look back here, we're requiring for example, for the partner to register 10 leads before they can achieve that gold tier. So that is pretty cool. Okay, now I'm enabled. I'm a partner and I learned how to become a Gold partner. What I want to do next is of course register deals, start selling so I can go back to the homepage and as you see here, we added a shortcut just to register a deal. If you're a part of this, it's pretty easy. Imagine you come maybe from the past, you were sending emails back and forth as a partner with different deals. Well now everything lives in the same platform real time. You get real time visibility on everything that's going on. So I can go and register a deal and this will push into the channel manager that I will show you at the end of the demo so you can take a look how it looks like from the back office if you want. Okay, now I enter a deal. My first deal maybe imagine I enter like several deals. I have several opportunities going on. Another cool thing I can do as a partner is take a look. Okay, how my pipeline is looking at do a pipeline inspection. And again if you're familiar with Salesforce, these are the same tools you will find in typical statescrow fashion. So for example here I can show these different charts, I can do different filters by month, quarter, everything you might be familiar with. And not only that, but we can also take a look at the AI scoring that we give to each of these opportunities. I only have three in this example, but this uses the power of AI to show you. Okay, maybe you need to take a look into these specific factors that will help you close this opportunity faster. Now I look had my pipeline, how is it going? One thing just to mention that you can add here. If you're a partner and you're already using Salesforce, you can use what is called partner connect to select different opportunities in this case or leads that you might want to bring to a CRM. So that is also pretty powerful because now that will be sync and you will have a single source of truth there going on. So okay, now I already registered some deals, I took a look at my opportunities. Another very important thing to do with partners is to keep them engaged. So we have a whole different set of incentives that you can give them. I'm going to show today the loyalty management part of it. You can set up points for your partners, you can set up different promotions as you can see on the top. For example, let's say if you sell more than a certain amount, we're going to give you tickets to some event for example or different discounts to certifications you can take. So there you can set up different variables to whatever you want to give to your partners. And another very important and really valuable stuff for them is that they will be able to take a look in real time the last transactions that they have took with the brand. So this is pretty powerful to keep that partner engaged because they will actually see what they, the actions they are taking are actually impacting the platform. And that is again everything in the same platform, real time and one single source of truth. So, okay, now I show you the partner loyalty management. Let me show you, as I was saying before, how everything looks from the channel manager point of view. This is a part, let's say if you're the admin of the order, if you're managing the channels that you will pretty much be working on a daily basis here you will have your KPIs, how the partners performing, the opportunities that they are bringing in. As you can see on the right side of the screen, these are the leads. Remember the lead I registered a few minutes before here, as a channel manager, I will be able to see those leads and approve them or reject them. So that is a great view. Really. As I was saying, you will have the KPIs in the main part of the screen as to see how your partners are performing. But if you want to dig even a little bit deeper, you can go into the enablement section. And here, remember the partner program I enrolled, how to become a gold Partner. Here I can actually see how my partner is performing on that end. So are they actually following the programs? Are they engaging with it? Should I reach out individually to see what's going on if they're not participating in them or even if you want to streamline, let's say you have 2000 partners and only like 500 are really active. While you may be wanting to shorten that list in the future just to close the demo out, everything you saw on the site, which I only cover like two or three things, but you have a lot of extra stuff there. Everything can be managed from this single point of view. So again you as a channel manager will be able to from here create those loyalty programs, enablement programs. Everything you need to do, you can do from the same view. So that's it. So I'm going to bring back to Adrian. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Martin. Can I give him a hand for his wonderful demo? Thank you, Martin. All right, so remember I said everybody is interested in working with partners. A lot of people work with partners. Don't just take my word for it. Let's actually talk to a real life customer. I'd love to welcome Kevin Jordan to the stage. He Is the head of partner enablement, head of sales enablement, I think right at Anthropic. Welcome.

Howdy, partners.

Howdy.

Did that work?

Okay, thank you.

Of course.

Awesome. Kevin, we have a couple questions for you. How does Anthropic use partners?

We have a growing ecosystem of partners, whether it be cloud providers, system integrators, technology providers, what have you. And it's a growing ecosystem, especially as we're expanding into new markets. So Europe and apac, and they're really integral to everything that we do. They're really core to our go to market strategy. So whether it be co marketing, building enablement together, building sales plays on how we package solutions, and even building solutions themselves, partners are really important for us.

Okay, okay, so they're important for you. Why are they baked into your go to market strategy so much or why are you thinking about partners so much for your go to market?

Yeah, I would say the key word there for us is integration, both from a technical standpoint, of course. And so with a lot of our customers, they need guidance. I think you said that in the beginning. They need to have more help and understanding, especially as they're navigating AI in trying to figure out how it can integrate into their stack or integrate into their current technology. The other piece of that, which I also think is equally as important is how it integrates into their strategy. And so these customers are trying to revamp how they think about AI and how it influences their core initiatives that are impacting their business. And partners a lot of times are already talking to those customers and those companies for those different use cases that we don't have privy to. If they're able to make those introductions and they're able to integrate and understand their technology stack, then it makes it much easier for us.

That's amazing, and I think that's so true that they can really unlock some new spaces for us. Can you speak a little bit more to how we have it up on the screen too, how you all are thinking about using partner cloud or some of the things that you're very excited about. I know you're at the start of your journey, but would love to hear.

Well, I mean, it was obvious from the demo because that was a lot of the things that we saw just now or what we were attracted to. And so having everything just in one place that we're able to collaborate and understand what our partners are doing and how we can better serve them so that way they can serve our customers was first and foremost of importance for us. Secondly, we Produce a lot of content. Because if you've seen anything that Anthropic has done, we introduce a lot of products and we have a launch almost every week. And so we try to make sure that everyone stays up to date and stays on the message of what we're, how we're bringing AI to companies. But that also means that they have to stay up to date on our messaging. And so whether it be our internal, our sales team is always staying up to date and trying to keep up. But for partners, they want to have the information as well. And so making sure that we have the content to, to serve the right people at the right time, to influence the customers in the right way is important. Then lastly, we are, you know, because we're beginning our journey, we need to be able to track what we're doing and so to make sure it's successful. And so as you can see with, you know, the registering deals and what have you, being able to know if what we're producing and what we're giving to the partners is influential is important. Otherwise we need to pivot or change our direction. Yeah. And so with Partner Cloud, we'll be able to unlock these use cases and possibilities that we never able to do before.

Totally, totally. That's very cool. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for sharing. Let's give them a round of applause.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks for being here. Awesome. All right, so you might be wondering, how can I be like Kevin? How can I tap into the power of Partner Cloud? Well, Partner Cloud is really truly the culmination of a lot of innovation from across Salesforce over the last several years. Some of you might even be users of our partner relationship management functionality. Anybody a current user of prm? Okay, so we've got a few of you. So we love you all and we're so glad you're here. We also now have an enhanced version of PRM that includes a lot of what you saw today that Kevin was alluding to, as well as that includes enablement, a host of incentive functionality, and that agent force functionality as well. And then if you have a physical good, you should look into channel revenue management. And I'm happy to talk with you all more about that. It's functionality that really helps you track your inventory so that you can incentivize your partners when you have a physical good out in the market. Okay, so that's it for our content. We are so happy you're here. We have lots more, lots of other ways for you to engage. So tomorrow we have a really robust conversation happening around. TABLE it's five strategies to make a partner plan your C Suite values. Easy way to find it in the Agenda app is C Suite. You can also go to the campground to get hands on with partner cloud and we have a workshop as well tomorrow morning at 10am so so I'm not keeping you from Dreamfest or anything. These are all tomorrow when you can come back and learn more and we'd love to see you there. Awesome. One other quick thing, Feedback matters. We love feedback. Tell us how we're doing and thank you so. Oh I'm sorry. Go ahead, take the QR code. And thank you so much for being here today. We are so glad to be talking about this. Thanks so much.