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What makes a Salesforce Partner Platinum?
What is a ‘Platinum’ Salesforce Partner?
Salesforce are ranked as a worldwide number one CRM provider, offering a range of cloud-based solutions that cover all elements of a business’ operational catalogue. This includes elements of sales, customer service, marketing and more.
The Salesforce partner program allows companies to gain access to over 1000 partners, worldwide. This makes finding and selecting a Platinum Partner a powerful touch of added value for your business and one of the reasons why looking for ‘Salesforce consultants near me’ is growing in popularity as a ranked search term in an increasingly complex and competitive marketplace.
What does it take to become and maintain a Platinum Partner status?
The Salesforce partnership program is highly exacting and bracketed into four key areas – Registered, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.
These are awarded by adhering to a strict evaluation program, requiring the partner to acquire a set number of certifications, empirically show a capacity to deliver sales and business growth, rank highly on a customer satisfaction table, and secure feedback from customers.
The process is highly demanding and requires a long-term commitment to quality from the partner and the ability to show empirical evidence that the Salesforce partners have passed all key criteria.
How rare is Platinum Partner status?
The Partnership Program is highly competitive and stands out in the market through its commitment to acquiring theoretical knowledge and providing results in the ‘real world’. When you decide on a Salesforce Platinum Partner, you are genuinely working with an expert practitioner who can provide your business with results, and who has the track record to prove it.
To put this in perspective, as of 2019, Salesforce has 1237 worldwide partners and out of that number only 95 have managed to produce the results that allow them to become an accredited Salesforce Platinum Partner.
4C is one of the 95 Salesforce Platinum partners and has more than 200 certified consultants working across the group.
Why does the Salesforce partner programme exist?
The partner programme allows Salesforce to enjoy a symbiotic relationship with their partners and clients. Salesforce do a very limited amount of technical implementation themselves, they leave this to the extensive partner network. In short, everyone benefits – from the customer, to the partner that implements the solution, to Salesforce themselves.
What will business benefit from working with a Platinum Partner?
One of the positives of choosing a business that is certified Platinum Salesforce Partner is that the benefits are encoded into the partnership program itself.
Expert implementation
All partners are highly trained in the use of the Salesforce software solution and know how to ensure your unique needs are quickly and correctly met.
Concrete benefits
Whether you are looking to increase sales, improve growth, or more – your chosen partner will work with you to bring that required added value to your organisation.
Rigorous process
Each implementation partner will have a highly formalised approach to providing your Salesforce solution with a set timeframe, key deliverables, and regimented testing and Go-Live process. These will help get your platform ‘on its feet’ quickly and reliably – a powerful benefit in the modern marketplace.
Why 4C recognises (and invests in) maintaining this status as a differentiator
At 4C, we understand that being a Platinum-Certified Partner is a powerful tool for helping us demonstrate the quality of service that we provide.
In order to continue to support this, we have made a company-wide commitment to maintaining our current status as a Salesforce Platinum Partner.
This has led to over two-hundred 4C staff securing over seven-hundred Salesforce Certifications. We also have a number of experts certified in each of the platform’s core cloud products, including Service, Sales, Marketing, Pardot, and Communities.
This has enabled us to hold our Platinum status for over five years and enables us to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
What evidence to look for in a Platinum Partner and how to choose between them?
When it comes to finding the right provider amongst the shortlist of Platinum Salesforce Partners, we would recommend that you follow these tips.
Certifications:To make the grade as a Platinum Salesforce Partner, it’s important that the partner has the expertise and certifications to do the job to the highest possible standard. The number of certifications held by the employees of a partner will be considered when Salesforce is deciding if they should be certified as platinum. A wide and varied base of certifications shows that the partner is in a better place to serve their clients - and 4C has over 700 Salesforce certifications and over 180 certified consultants across our group.
Customer success stories: Take a look back to their previous case-studies and – if appropriate – contact the businesses directly and seek a reference about how the deployment of their solution went and the end-results they enjoyed. 4C has over 42 customer success stories, the highest number in the entire Salesforce eco system.
CSAT: This is the customer satisfaction score that a partner has, and this is determined independently by Salesforce. The partner team at Salesforce establishes the customer satisfaction score of a partner by surveying past and current clients, allowing them to determine who is providing the best levels of customer service and thus going into their decisions on who can be classified as Platinum Partners and who falls into the Silver and gold categories.
Record of delivery and sales: The basic premise here is that the more sales a partner has, the more successful and experienced they are. The number of sales a partner has made and the growth they demonstrate makes up a large portion of whether they become certified platinum or not. Salesforce recognise those who have either worked on a wide variety of accounts and therefore understand how to best implement the software, or partners who have chosen to specialise in an industry.
If you want to learn more about our work with Salesforce or our capacity to meet your unique needs, please get in touch with us directly and let our team of Salesforce experts know exactly what you need.
