In my conversations with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Partners, I’ve heard their need for more clarity on our program tiers, more enablement tools and support and ultimately more opportunities to distinguish their unique skills in the marketplace. Customers have also asked for more insight into partner capabilities and for more consistency across programs so that it’s easier for them to find the right partner for a given project. That’s why I’m excited to announce that today — at the Salesforce Connections Partner Summit in Atlanta — we’re bringing all Marketing Cloud resell, referral and consulting partners into the Salesforce Consulting Partner Program.

These changes will provide amazing opportunities for Marketing Cloud Partners to expand their sales opportunities to include other Clouds, while also being able to highlight to customers the unique expertise that comes with deploying Marketing Cloud solutions. In fact, with this approach, partners will benefit in three big ways:

• New opportunities: Marketing Cloud partners who join the Consulting Partner Program will have access to increased services opportunities for Marketing Cloud deployments. And, they’ll have additional opportunities to increase cross-sell across other clouds.

• New designations: They’ll also be eligible to distinguish themselves as Marketing Cloud Masters. This will be tagged on their AppExchange listings and will be searchable on nextLevel, a new internal Salesforce tool that enables Salesforce account executives to quickly identify the best partner for a particular implementation.

• New program benefits: They’ll receive Salesforce Consulting Partner benefits relevant to their tier, such as Sales Cloud licenses, technical support case packs, go-to-market support and eligibility for Fullforce initiatives and Fast Forward Boot Camps delivered in-person in key cities around the world.

By June 30, all Marketing Cloud partners will automatically become provisional members of the Consulting Partner Program, with a one-year period to fully transition into the Consulting Partner Program. And, former HubExchange partners will also begin to transition to the Salesforce ISV Partner Program over the coming months. More information on these requirements can be found at the Salesforce Partner Community website: http://partners.salesforce.com/.

At the end of the day, we’re making these changes because of customer and partner feedback. We’ve built the largest enterprise cloud ecosystem in the world, and we believe these investments in our partner ecosystem ultimately translate into customer success. By unifying our partner programs, customers will be able to more easily discover and select partners that match their needs based on expertise and tier, and that means a better experience overall.