What is the iland difference? They are designed for resilient businesses. Founded in 1995, iland is a global cloud service provider of secure and compliant hosting for infrastructure (IaaS), disaster recovery (DRaaS), and backup as a service (BaaS).
As a 25-year-old company, iland has a long history of working with channel partners. Managing an increasing number of partners with evolving needs was becoming challenging. Manual processes and homegrown systems can only take one so far before organizations realize there has to be a better way.
“Create once and distribute to many. That’s the mentality we needed when moving beyond our homegrown partner portal. My mentality was to move from the current reactive approach to proactive and eventually a predictive model for our channel partners. We needed a real partner portal platform for Salesforce.” Koorosh Khashayar, VP of Global Channels at iland Cloud.
iland’s team knew what they needed to provide in order to drive successful relationships. Channel partner self-registration, opportunity registration, qualification questions and a central repository to consume content were four of the main requirements when investigating partner relationship management (PRM) portal options in-market.
The business case to executive management was straightforward. Using Salesforce as their system of engagement had already provided the ability to move at lightning speed with direct customers. They needed to look at their indirect channel partners the exact same way using a PRM.
While multiple products evaluated had solid point solutions, none of them had the advanced Salesforce integration, digestible pricing models or channel and alliances partner vendor expertise that a Magentrix Partner Portal for Salesforce offered out-of-the-box.
Khashayar describes the scenario while evaluating PRM solutions “Our business case was simple in that we wanted every partner to be able to securely login to a portal and consume content when and how they wanted. Magentrix stood above the pack not only for their market leading integration with Salesforce and existing customer references but more importantly their expertise in understanding how best to implement advanced channel management systems.”
Single pane of glass
iland channel partners can now self-register with a simple and dynamic form that can take them down one of two paths. If their organization is already an approved partner in Salesforce, they simply fill out a few fields and gain access to the portal. If the company is new then they are presented with a detailed form to fill out more details and enter the existing approval process.
Once logged into the portal the key elements to enable channel partners are front and center. A news feed provides at-a-glance updates for what iland is doing around a particular product, solution or relevant press releases.
Content is king and one of the mainstays of a true channel management system is not only how it is presented but also how easily updates are communicated. Relevant sales and marketing tools such as handouts or datasheets are organized by common categories such as stages of educating and nurturing prospects or by product and solution. Having a central repository is only as good as the last update and partners love that they can count on the latest and greatest content being presented to them in a news feed or with a notification.
Modern channel partners need to be on top of their game when it comes to product knowledge and differentiators. Training and certification in a consumable way serves as a solid foundation for iland’s indirect channel partners who compete in a quickly changing market against some mature and much larger competitors. Based on one of four tiers, channel partners can go through individual or paths of learning modules and need to complete courses with tests to reach certification criteria.
At the end of the day partners want to register valid opportunities. iland has taken this a modern approach to this by building out a series of qualification questions. In order for opportunities to be approved, a partner must fill out qualifying questions for iland to review and approve, all within Salesforce. Keeping interfaces familiar without putting in additional barriers is key to customer and digital transformation initiatives. iland can continue to work in Salesforce and their channel partners can work with a modern, 24/7, self-service web portal.
“Investing in any product is only half the journey. The journey to it, as well as the service and support are what make for partners you want to do business with. Listening to our customers is iland’s number one differentiator and Magentrix’s team demonstrated patience throughout our journey along with stellar service and support throughout,” said Khashayar.