Salesforce to award partners status points for training
Partners have struggled to keep up with innovation, Salesforce claimed
Salesforce will start awarding points toward partner status for training completed on its Trailhead developer and administrator online training platform, it announced during its Dreamforce event in San Francisco this week.
Traditionally, Salesforce awards partner status - Gold, Silver or Platinum - based on certifications, using a point-based system. In the new fiscal year, the vendor will start awarding points for Trailhead training.
During Dreamforce, Salesforce also rolled out myTrailhead, which allows businesses to add personal branding and content, including customised onboarding lessons and company-specific enablement skills, to Trailhead.
The offering is especially appealing for channel partners because they can create their own internal learning environments, Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, SVP of worldwide alliances and channels partner programs and marketing at Salesforce, said at the event.
Indeed, channel partners have struggled to keep up with Salesforce technology and updates, Taychakhoonavudh said. Salesforce promises customers three releases per year.
"You listen to Marc [Benioff, Salesforce CEO,] and there's so much new stuff, then our partners feel their heads are going to explode. When we do our partner surveys, they tell us all the time, ‘Innovation is the thing we love most, and then we're super stressed out about keeping up,'" she said.
Taychakhoonavudh said Salesforce will continue to invest in building Trailhead as a "global learning platform" and enhancing it with content geared toward partners.
Keeping a focus on training, Salesforce also announced a new worldwide training tour starting in February that will focus on practice lifecycle. The shows will target midmarket partners who are just starting to enter the cloud space and offer training around developing their Salesforce businesses and managing customers post-deployment.
The move is also an effort to drive subscription-based models among Salesforce partners, Taychakhoonavudh said.
"We want our partners to really develop lifelong relationships with their customers because that idea of a subscription-based service, where you're in there every month - maybe helping with change management or running a center of excellence of some kind - is a great way to build, essentially, a subscription services business as well," she said.
The shows will also share with partners strategies Salesforce's internal customer success team uses.
"It takes a little bit of negotiation to get some teams inside Salesforce to release their methodologies to partners, but we've been working on this for six months and they're very excited," Taychakhoonavudh said.