Have you noticed how contacts added to partner accounts sometimes behave differently from contacts linked to regular accounts? They look the same, they are created in the same way, but they can be used very differently in Sales Cloud. Let me explain 3 flavors of partner contacts and how they can be used in Oracle Sales Cloud.
Let me start by showing what normal contacts are all about and from there highlight the differences with the different flavors of partner contacts.
Account Contacts
Account contacts are the contacts we all know and use in Sales Cloud. Linked to accounts or not, related to other contacts or households, these are the people we deal with when trying to win an opportunity, the people we invite through appointments for meetings, target with marketing campaigns or deal with when handling service requests. These are regular Sales Cloud contacts. We can document the relationship we have with them and use them to build influence maps.
Partner Contacts
Partner contacts are different though. They are not the people we sell to, these are the people we sell with. But that does not mean we want to know less about them. A channel manager will want to use partners contacts in the same way a salesrep will use account contacts e.g. a channel manager will want to know who-is-who within a partner organization and how to reach them.
Partner Resources
When a partner is participating in a sales process, the channel manager can assign a role to each partner contact transforming them into a partner resources. As of that moment, the channel manager can document which resources within a partner organization are working on which accounts or opportunities by adding them to account or opportunity teams.
In order to do so, on the contact detail page, all the channel manager has to do is use the ‘Manage User Details’ link …
… and assign the partner contact a role.
Partner Users
If partners agree to use the Sales Cloud instance from the brand owner to manage their accounts and run their opportunities, we have to give them more privileges.
By using the same screen, partner resources can be transformed into partner users after which they can log on to the Sales Cloud instance from the brand owner and run opportunities and manage accounts alone or together with the inside sales organization.
These are the 3 types of partners contacts we can implement in Sales Cloud. You do not have to use all 3, just choose the one that fits your requirements best !
