Salesforce Community Cloud is recognized as a strong performer by Forrester Research in its report, The Forrester Wave™: Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Platforms, Q3 2016. In both the strategy and the market presence categories, Salesforce received the highest scores among all vendors.

Here’s what the report had to say:

Salesforce is the gorilla in the PRM market today, having more customers and ecosystem partners and global support resources than other PRM vendors by an order of magnitude. Salesforce’s PRM solution, an extension of its Community Cloud offering, is strongest in some of the foundational elements of PRM. The product leads with its clear, comprehensive identity and access management capabilities, an important capability for customers wanting to segment and track many thousands of channel partners. And Salesforce’s Force.com development environment lends itself well to the specific customization requirements of larger channel organizations.

We couldn’t agree more! By seamlessly connecting partners more closely together, Community Cloud helps companies of all sizes build deeper relationships and accelerate channel sales, to the tune of a 43% increase in partner sales for Community Cloud customers.

So what sets Community Cloud apart from other partner relationship management systems also in the market today? It’s a four-step system: visibility, flexibility, connectivity, and mobility.

1. Visibility

When two businesses partner together, one of the biggest minefields for potential conflict is lack of transparency. In order to work well as one unit, partners must be able to have visibility into the 360-degree view of the partnership. With Partner Community, every step of the partnership process, from establishing goals of the partnership, to onboarding, to training, to co-selling and co-marketing can be accomplished in one unified, secure location. No need to toggle across multiple systems to find the resource you need to close the deal, all the CRM data you need is located in Partner Community and everyone is working off of the same real-time information.

2. Flexibility

With easy-to-use Lightning Bolt Framework, companies can quickly build a custom community on the secure, reliable, and scalable online platform, including integrating third-party and custom apps. As the community grows and changes, you can easily tailor and extend the Partner Community to support specific partner needs. A partnership is continuously evolving, and the community should too.

3. Accessibility

When working with partners, just like with your own sales organization, analytics is a critical part of hitting your sales targets because decisions must be grounded in data for shared forecasting. Partner Community not only makes data sharing simpler than ever before because both partners have access to the same CRM data — it’s also designed to make parsing through all of that data easy and accessible for clear pipeline visibility. Partner Community centralizes all of your most important information into one feed for easy, collaborative access to the data you need to keep your business moving. Plus, the data is always secure, and you can set permissions to control the visibility of data  — so only the right people see the right analytics.

4. Mobility

Your partners are mobile, and your community should be too. Give partners the tools, resources, and contacts they need to close the deal from anywhere. Partners can post questions and access critical documents from anywhere with the Salesforce1 Mobile App, in addition to registering deals, updating opportunities, or even requesting funding — all from any mobile device.

Want to learn more about why Community Cloud is apart from the rest of the field? Download the free e-book, How to Transform Your Community With Seamless Partner Management.