4 Benefits of Building a Company in the Salesforce Ecosystem
Anyone who has run a business (or any human being, for that matter) can understand how hard it is to simply stay focused. At LevelEleven, we’ve built a system that enables sales leaders to keep salespeople focused on the activities that matter to closing business. This is vitally important because when salespeople are not focused properly or aren’t prioritizing their most critical key sales activities, sales opportunities are lost.
As a CEO or other leader in any company, you’ve made massive investments in your people and resources. You’re always thinking about ways to ensure everybody’s time and energy is focused on what truly matters to move the needle. Good leadership is very much about effective resource management.
A lot of smart sales leaders we work with execute careful market segmentation, defined sales territories and targeted account lists. But beyond sales, you also need to consider how to focus other parts of your team. This can include what technology your development team should build around, and what you need to educate your customer support team on so they can be trusted advisors to your customers. This begins to highlight some of the key benefits to being a part of the Salesforce ecosystem:
1. The Salesforce ecosystem provides focus.
Salesforce has such a massive base of customers that you can build a company solely focused on that base. With more than 150,000 customers (and growing quickly), there’s an immense opportunity to go after that as a market — and even to sub-segment that market into companies of certain sizes, industries or geographic locations. Targeting that ecosystem helps your company focus on the right market.
2. The Salesforce ecosystem promotes a network.
There’s also an entire ecosystem around that market, which makes it easier to understand which people or companies you should partner with, network with, get to know, etc. For example, with a company like ours, we want to be familiar with different sales technologies out there because we are all — collectively — trying to help the sales leader. It’s helpful to get to know Salesforce consulting firms because they’re helping companies get more out of their use of Salesforce, and we can play an important role there.
3. The Salesforce ecosystem enables connections.
The third major benefit is building a tight partnership with Salesforce. We’ve been fortunate in that we’ve quickly grown to be one of the top global partners to Salesforce — particularly considering we have less than 50 employees.
Salesforce Ventures has made multiple investments in our company, but an investment doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be introduced to all the people and products you need for success. You still need to put in a lot of effort and make those connections personally.
Being a Salesforce partner enables us to identify and focus on the people we want to build relationships with: Salesforce’s go-to-market teams, product marketing teams, AppExchange teams and even the sales organization. It allows us to target our efforts in getting to know the ecosystem and, specifically, the Salesforce community.
4. The Salesforce ecosystem brings instant technical credibility.
The last (but certainly not the least) benefit is that your company has instant credibility and robustness. For companies that aren’t built natively on Salesforce, a prospective customer would need to get familiar with a new set of APIs that won’t have been tested through the rigor of Salesforce. They’ll have separate logins, a separate user experience, a new reporting system to get used to, and another potential failure point in their business systems.
Being built on the Salesforce platform means our technology automatically has the most robust security, highest uptimes in the world, an enterprise-class reporting system built-in, as well as well-documented, robust and secure APIs to pull any data from any system into our system.
When we’re talking to prospects, even though we’re a small company, we can show that we’re ready to handle the largest of global enterprises. When we work with large enterprise like HPE, Comcast and American Express, we instantly have complete credibility from the IT team and CIO to know that they can trust our platform.
As you consider your own business, remember that focus matters. The good news is that in 2017 and beyond, focusing on the Salesforce ecosystem also gives you a very large market to pursue that allows you to build an important and lasting company.
