How the Partner Advisory Board Helped Shape Commerce by Contract

One of the things I appreciate most about working in the Salesforce ecosystem is that the relationship between partners and product teams isn’t one-sided. It’s collaborative. When something isn’t working, or when customers are running into the same friction over and over again, we get to bring that insight forward — and Salesforce brings their roadmap, engineering depth, and long-term vision. Somewhere in the middle, good things tend to happen.

“Commerce by Contract” is a great example of that dynamic.

Where the Conversation Started

For years, we’ve seen B2B customers rely heavily on contracts to drive their business: pricing, assortments, entitlements, renewals, allocations; the whole picture. And at the same time, we saw how often that contract logic got lost between quoting and ecommerce. No one was doing anything wrong; the systems simply weren’t speaking the same language yet.

When we began sharing real customer scenarios with the Salesforce team — everything from contract switching to entitlement-driven visibility — it wasn’t about pointing out gaps. It was about exploring possibilities. Their product leads were already thinking about how to make commerce more intelligent and more aligned with revenue operations, and our field experience helped complement those conversations.

This Is What Partnership Looks Like

On the Partner Advisory Board, those discussions became working sessions. We’d bring examples from the field; Salesforce would bring architectural options. We’d think through edge cases; they’d think through scalability. None of it was a “big reveal” — just iterative design between teams who care about getting it right.

What I appreciated most was how open the product team was to feedback and how willing they were to share early thinking. It felt less like lobbying for features and more like co-designing a solution that would work for a wide range of customers, not just the ones we happen to work with.

What Commerce by Contract Enables

The end result is a model where contract context becomes a natural part of the commerce experience, not an afterthought.

Commerce by Contract allows for:

• Contract-aware product visibility

• Contract-specific pricing

• The ability to select and shop against a given contract

• Multi-cart models that respect contract boundaries

• Request-for-quote flows for items outside contract scopeCleaner alignment with ARM’s contract structure

It’s flexible by design, because the needs across manufacturers and distributors aren’t uniform. But it’s also grounded, so the patterns don’t get overly complex.

Why This Matters Moving Forward

The real win here isn’t just the feature set, it’s the way it came together. Salesforce brought the platform vision and technical blueprint; partners like us brought lived customer experience; and collectively, we built something that elevates the B2B commerce journey in a meaningful way.

That’s what a healthy ecosystem looks like: not one side leading the other, but teams working together, sharing context, and pushing toward solutions that make the whole platform stronger.

Commerce by Contract is just one example but it’s a promising direction for what the right partners can accomplish in collaboration with the Salesforce team.