Salesforce Changes Up Cloud Partner Program

Salesforce has updated its Marketing Cloud Partner Program, bringing its reseller, referral and consulting partners into the Salesforce Consulting Partner Program.

The effort is meant to provide partners with more clarity on its program tiers, more enablement tools and support, and ultimately more opportunities to distinguish their unique skills in the marketplace.

Marketing Cloud partners who join the Consulting Partner Program will have access to increased services opportunities for Marketing Cloud deployments. And, they’ll have additional opportunities to increase cross-sell across other clouds. They’ll also be eligible to distinguish themselves as Marketing Cloud Masters. This will be tagged on their AppExchange listings and will be searchable on nextLevel, a new internal Salesforce tool that enables Salesforce account executives to quickly identify the best partner for a particular implementation.

Also, partners will receive Salesforce Consulting Partner benefits relevant to their tier, such as Sales Cloud licenses, technical support case packs, go-to-market support and eligibility for Fullforce initiatives and Fast Forward Boot Camps delivered in-person in key cities around the world.

By June 30, all Marketing Cloud partners will automatically become provisional members of the Consulting Partner Program, with a one-year period to fully transition into the Consulting Partner Program. And, former HubExchange partners will also begin to transition to the Salesforce ISV Partner Program over the coming months.

“At the end of the day, we’re making these changes because of customer and partner feedback,” said Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, senior vice president of partners at Salesforce. “We’ve built the largest enterprise cloud ecosystem in the world, and we believe these investments in our partner ecosystem ultimately translate into customer success. By unifying our partner programs, customers will be able to more easily discover and select partners that match their needs based on expertise and tier, and that means a better experience overall.”