3 Key Reasons Why Joining an Ecosystem Just Makes Sense
(No matter how you choose to partner)
Today’s providers of Cloud solutions face an enormous opportunity. Not only is the concept of Cloud quickly becoming mainstream and rapidly moving up-market, but as more and more enterprises move to implement wall-to-wall SaaS solutions, Cloud solutions are spreading across new departments and into new industries — opening up entirely new markets.
On the AppExchange in particular, we’ve had a front-row seat to the resulting innovation, witnessing the ever-growing ecosystem of SaaS solutions that have sprung up around and integrate with Salesforce. As AppExchange EVP Leyla Seka emphasized at Dreamforce, ‘everyone can become an AppExchange partner.’ The Salesforce channel partnership program continues to expand, accommodating new, emerging tools — including bots and components — as well as offering more options for how businesses choose to partner.
So, we recently caught up with five of our partners that are leveraging different types of partnerships with Salesforce, to understand how joining an ecosystem has benefitted their businesses. Check out a few of their key takeaways below, and be sure to download 5 Stories of AppExchange Partner Success to learn more.
Access to new customers
Joining an ecosystem can open the door to a wealth of new customers, even if you only build an integration. For Tenfold, a realtime customer experience management solution, the choice was an obvious one: “The integration just made sense as it aligned directly with the needs of our customers and target market,” says Dan Sincavage, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Tenfold. “We have seen a meaningful and growing number of opportunities coming from this alignment.”
An ecosystem of resources
Conga takes advantage of several of Salesforce’s partnership options, offering some apps that are natively built on the platform and some that use Salesforce Platform API frameworks. For them, one of the most exciting benefits of joining an ecosystem was access to resources: “[The ecosystem] operates as a community of people looking to help each other,” says Eric Wong, VP of Marketing at Conga. “This means there are resources available; if you use them, you can mitigate risk of future challenges and make the entire process of building an integrated solution a positive experience.”
Ability to launch faster
Joining an ecosystem often provides access to technology and technology experts that can help you get products to market faster. For Absorb LMS, once they decided to integrate Salesforce, they enlisted the help of a Product Development Organization (PDO) to help them build and launch an app in a matter of months (and just in time for Dreamforce). “Leveraging a PDO allowed us to get an app in the AppExchange faster than doing all the heavy lifting in-house,” Jennifer Kennedy, Director of New Product Development at Absorb LMS. “Many of our prospective and current clients use Salesforce as the hub of all their information; this allowed us to capture that market.” (Learn more about Jennifer’s story in her recent webinar.)
In all partnerships, the most important thing to consider when joining an ecosystem is building the right app for your customer — but in some cases that may begin with a simple integration. To learn more about how these partners (and others) have built their successful partnerships, check out: 5 Stories of AppExchange Partner Success.
