Sometimes the simplest solutions are right beneath your nose. We recently stumbled upon a way to deploy a simple Partner Portal that offers 20% of the features found in Salesforce PRM, but delivers 80% of the value (as the Pareto principle would probably dictate).

Most Salesforce.com users are already managing their partners using Accounts and Contacts in Salesforce. Our mid-market channel management portal provides these Contacts with self-service access to Salesforce information with full support for escalation rules, alerts, document management, and campaign management.

But often times all small businesses want is the ability for Partners to register Leads online and allow them to monitor/update the status of their Leads and Opportunities through a portal.

Here are the steps to take in Salesforce to deploy a "Lite" Partner Portal:

1. Ensure the Account Type picklist has a value for "Partner".
2. Create a custom Contact Lookup relationship field on the Lead and Opportunity records. Name it something like "Referring Partner Contact".
3. Map the Partner Contact Lookup fields to user defineable fields in the portal.
4. Map the Lead.Referring Contact field to the Opportunity.Referring Contact so it will persist upon conversion.

With these customizations in place, we then add the "Lite" partner portal "My Leads" and "My Opportunities" web parts to the portal "My Account" page and restrict access to these web parts to those in the "Partner" role.

Finally, a standard Web-to-Lead form is used to pre-populate the referring partners Contact ID when registering a Lead. Internally, you can simply approve/deny these Lead registrations by removing the "Referring Partner Contact" field value. Upon Lead conversion, the referring partner ID will automatically carry over to the new Opportunity.

Could your customer support portal use some flowcharts and diagrams to help customers trouble shoot problems? If you're in the Hi-Tech or manufacturing sectors, the answer is probably yes.

Visio has been my tool of choice for several years, but today I stumbled on a web-based flow chart designer called Gliffy that really impressed me.

I evaluated Gliffy by recreating the channel lead registration workflow I published a few days ago, and as you can see from the image below, the result isn't too shabby for 10 minutes of effort.



Gliffy can host the JPEG images for you. I can easily envision using Gliffy in customer portal knowledge base articles to help with trouble shooting.

I also use Visio when chatting with customers on the phone to help remind me of a customers business process requirements or campaign workflows. With Gliffy, I can simply email customers a link to these flow chart sketches to get some quick feedback.

The site says it's in Beta, but you would have to have some pretty high expectations to even notice. The workspace behaves and reacts just like a desktop application. Even the CTRL-Z undo key combination works! Although, I did find it more useful to rely on frequent saves and versioning as a wiser recovery option.

Gliffy definitely follows the Pareto Principle of determining which 20% of desktop features provide 80% of the value.

Very cool.... I give Gliffy a big thumbs up.

A typical dialogue between channel sales managers and indirect sales representatives is the management of Leads and Opportunities.

The Channel Manager has oversight of each partners opportunities and acts as a referee in situations where 2 partners are pursuing the same opportunity.

i-Dialogue PRM Portal helps to mitigate channel conflict with a database of Channel Registrations that associate Leads and Opportunities with specific partners. i-Dialogue also sends email alerts to partners, such as reminding a Sales Rep that their opportunity registration will expire in 60 days unless updated.

Here is a typical channel registration workflow managed by the portal.

The process is not completely automated. An internal Account or Channel Manager must intervene in the early stages to determine if a submitted registration conflicts with an existing registration.

The ability to identify and resolve conflicts is directly associated with the quality of data collected by the portal. "Company" or "Account Name" is the most common identifier of exclusivity, but territory, industry, or product type may also be used.

To this end, the first report created in the CRM system should be a quick list of all open channel registrations by Company name. The portal could "attempt" to identify a conflict based on Company name, but because of variances in spelling (such as "IBM" or "I.B.M") this task is best left to human intervention.

Once a registration has been assigned, the portal loops 1-N times over step 6, sending out emails every 30 days (this is customizable) to help gently "prod" the partner to touch the prospect and update the CRM record.

What happens if other Partners register the same opportunity? In this dialogue flow, the conflict may be noted as an activity and later re-assigned to other partners on a "first come, first served" basis.

Because the registrations are managed as Opportunities in Salesforce, existing reports can be leveraged for forecasting and demand planning.

Salesforce.com has great Case Escalation rules that give Support Managers peace of mind that cases will not go unattended for too long. But how do Sales and Channel Managers get the same peace of mind that their assigned Leads are not going untouched?

I first started trying to solve this problem using the Salesforce workflow capabilities, which are excellent for initial lead assignment, but I quickly ran into issues trying to escalate a Lead.

For example, if I assign a Lead to a Partner, I want the following rules to apply:
1) The Partner has 48 hours to Accept the Lead (in case they're on vacation)
2) The Partner has 1 week to update the Lead record
3) If the Lead is not converted in 30 days, send the Partner an Alert
4) If the Lead is not converted in 60 days, send the Partner and Account Manager an alert
5) If the Lead is not converted in 90 days, reassign the Lead to Account Manager

I came up with some semi-workable solutions using available tools in Salesforce that were limited to internal users, but didn't work for Partner contacts (of course, now that I post this, someone will probably publish some clever way to accomplish this ).

The solution I ultimately came up with was to develop an escalation rules engine using custom objects and the AppExchange API. The design is patterned after the best features in Salesforce Case Escalation Rules and Workflow and targeted specifically at sending email alerts to Users and Contacts at predetermined intervals when certain criteria are met.

Creating a workflow engine in a forms-based user interface environment presents a unique set of challenges. Graphical flowchart visualizations are usually best for depicting complex Lead escalation rules, but this wasn't an immediate option.

(As an aside, we did develop a prototype graphical workflow engine for i-Dialogue last October using Windows Workflow Foundation, but this lacked a web-based interface. Salesforce Product Managers also have this feature on their roadmap, so who knows... It could be available within 12-18 months from someone.)

As you can see in the screenshot below, the forms-based rule designer didn't turn out so bad. In fact, you could argue that this approach is easier for most business users since the rule reads from top to bottom like natural language English:

"If a Lead is not accepted in 48 hours, reassign it to the Account Manager".