Salesforce India MD: ‘The ability to take best practices and execute’ is key for SMB partners

The company is working with a curated group of resellers on its four-to-six-week SMB Growth Kit, with partners expected to bring the right product skills, follow defined best practices and deliver against clear implementation milestones.

Salesforce is delivering its four-to-six-week SMB Growth Kit through a selected group of resellers, with the company requiring partners to have the right product skills and the ability to execute the programme against defined best practices.

The company is currently working with a selected group of resellers rather than opening the programme to its wider partner ecosystem, with the focus on partners that have the required product skills, execution capability and understanding of the Salesforce technologies included in the offering. Salesforce has also said the Growth Kit is available exclusively through select reseller partners in India.

Speaking to CRN India, Salesforce India managing director Mankiran Chowhan said the programme is partner-led by design and that the company has “hand-selected a group of resellers” for the initial rollout.

“We want to make sure that not every partner can attempt it, but we are set for the Growth Kit,” Chowhan said.

She said the approach is intended to create a controlled implementation environment while Salesforce builds best practices and learns how to expand the programme to a larger partner base.

“We're going to expand more as the appetite becomes greater and we see that we can happily expand this more,” she said.

For partners, the model places emphasis on the ability to execute a defined customer engagement rather than simply having access to the products.

Chowhan said the initial partner requirements include experience across Sales, Service, Slack and Tableau, which form the core skill areas around the Growth Kit.

But product knowledge alone is not the only requirement.

“The ability to take the best practice and execute is really most important,” Chowhan said.

The programme is packaged on both the licensing and implementation sides, meaning partners need to be able to take a defined offering into a customer environment and deliver against a structured set of expectations.

Chowhan said customer expectations, governance and checkpoints become particularly important because the implementation is designed around a compressed timeframe.

“There are clear goals and milestones and the level of oversight that we have,” she said.

The company is working with resellers through an onboarding programme to bring customer requirements into the implementation process in a structured way.

That includes understanding what resources partners need and providing support where required, according to Chowhan.

Faster SMB deployments change the partner conversation

The delivery model is closely tied to how Salesforce sees SMB technology buying changing.

Chowhan said SMBs are looking beyond technology adoption itself and asking how technology can produce better business outcomes, including faster growth and improved productivity.

The company has therefore compressed the Growth Kit into a smaller set of solutions and a four-to-six-week implementation cycle. Salesforce's launch announcement similarly describes the offering as a connected platform that combines Agentforce Sales, Slack and Tableau and will help businesses go live within four to six weeks.

“We've focused it into a small set of solutions where we think we can see the fastest acceleration,” Chowhan said.

She said the approach reflects conversations with SMB customers that are looking for quicker results rather than longer enterprise-style technology timelines.

“They're not running the business into analytics or sales, or however we categorise the products,” she said.

Instead, customers are looking at business requirements and how different parts of the technology can work together.

Chowhan gave the example of a fashion brand opening a new store and needing to connect people, collaboration and sales rather than buying separate products simply because Salesforce categorises them differently.

This suggests engagement is less about selling an individual technology component and more about bringing together the capabilities to address a specific business requirement.

Scale and ambition are becoming triggers for SMB technology investment

Chowhan said the trigger for SMBs to move beyond basic tools such as spreadsheets is often either scale or the ambition to scale.

Customers may have high growth plans but find that existing processes prevent them from moving as quickly as they want. Others reach a point where managing increasing numbers of employees, customers, or business activities becomes difficult without more structured systems.

“I find that customers who are saying, ‘Hey, we have high growth plans, but we're not able to execute. We're not able to go as fast as we know we can,” she said.

She also pointed to businesses that want to avoid repeatedly rebuilding their technology stack as they grow.

That is where Salesforce sees an opportunity for a packaged approach that can be deployed faster, rather than requiring customers to undertake a larger technology transformation before they can address immediate business needs.

Chowhan also said smaller organisations have a different relationship with experimentation than large enterprises because they have fewer resources and less room for the cost of failure.

For these businesses, she said, the attraction of AI is linked to productivity and the ability to do more with existing resources.

“If I have five people and I can get five people to do the work of 20 people versus adding more capacity, all those resource limitations compel me as an SMB to do more on the AI side,” she said.

That creates another opportunity for partners to connect technology discussions with the operational constraints SMBs are trying to solve.

We see partners taking on a broader transformation role

While the immediate focus is on delivering the Growth Kit consistently, Chowhan sees the partner role expanding further as AI changes how businesses operate.

“Partners will play different roles,” she said.

She expects partners to help organisations rethink how work gets done rather than simply implement technology in the way it has traditionally been deployed.

“Just because something got done in a certain way, now what's happening with AI is that the same thing doesn't have to be done in the same place,” Chowhan said.

That would require partners to understand both sides of the equation, according to Chowhan: how the customer's business is changing and how technology is changing alongside it.

“How do you bring the best of both to say, okay, now you can accelerate, this is now new, and then how do you constantly transform in this fast-changing space?” she said.

She also sees a closer relationship between implementation and business outcomes as partners become more embedded in customer environments.

“When partners are embedded in the organisation, if you're doing an implementation, you understand. Then tomorrow we have a much closer point of view on the impact and results,” Chowhan said.

For now, Salesforce is keeping the Growth Kit partner base controlled while it establishes the delivery model. But the company's plan is to expand the programme across more partners as demand increases.

That creates a two-stage opportunity for the channel. First, building the product expertise and execution discipline required to deliver the packaged engagement, and then taking on a broader role in helping SMB customers adapt their businesses as technology and AI change how work gets done.