Salesforce.com: How to best track a 3rd party relationship

Scenario:
ABC company's sells raw materials and their customer base consist of Fortune 100 companies. XYZ Company is a partner of ABC and brings customer 123 to ABC. ABC’s sales and technical team work with XYZ company on fabrication of parts and ABC ultimately sells the raw materials to 123. There are other partners just like XYZ who bring customers to ABC and ABC wants to track both the end customer and the partner.

From a forecasting and Opportunity perspective, what is your recommendation for setup in SFDC?

Recommendation:
The recommendation for this depends on how many partners might be included in a sale.

If each sales of raw materials can have only one partner involved, then the solution is fairly simple:

• Create two Account record types: Customer/Prospect and Partner
  • XYZ would be a partner
  • 123 would be a customer
• Create a lookup field on the Opportunity object that looks up to Account and call the field Partner
  • Set a filter on the lookup to filter to the record type of Partner
• To track the deal, create an Opportunity record associated with 123 and set XYZ as the partner
  

This simple solution will allow you to generate pipeline reports for partners or end customers.

If more than 1 partner may be involved in a deal, then the solution is a junction object called Partners. This object would have 3 fields:

1. Partner (Master Detail to Account)
2. Opportunity (Master Detail to Opportunity)
3. Type (Picklist)
   • Primary Partner
     
   • Secondary Partner