5 Things ISVs Can Do Now to Reach Your ’22 Revenue Goals
Building your business on Salesforce can be one of the best ways to get to market faster, reduce risk, and sell into the enterprise. But what does it take to achieve the double-digit growth that some ISVs gain from their partnership with Salesforce?
Through our work with dozens of highly successful ISVs, we’ve seen that one thing they all have in common is a solid plan for building, operationalizing, commercializing, and supporting their product. There’s a lot that goes into building a thriving business on the AppExchange. The most successful ISVs break the journey down into manageable steps, craft a plan to execute each step, and reach out for outside assistance when they need it.
Whether you’re just getting started on your AppExchange journey or you’re an established Salesforce partner looking to expand your product offering, there are several small but key steps you can take now to set your business up to hit your most ambitious goals for revenue growth in the coming year.
1. Plot Your Course
One of the most critical steps you can take toward achieving double-digit growth is to carve out your niche within the Salesforce ecosystem. It’s one thing to build a product, but what gap does your product fill and how does it fit into the vast ecosystem? To achieve market fit and gain traction with Salesforce customers, you’ll first need to find your buyer and be able to clearly communicate the problem your product solves on the platform. But you can’t stop there; you’ll also need to align your product roadmap with Salesforce.
With three big releases per year, the Salesforce platform is constantly evolving and improving, and you want to ensure your product is evolving with it. By taking the time now to do a thorough analysis of your product roadmap against the backdrop of the platform, check for parity or competition with your app, and plot your course accordingly, you can ensure alignment with Salesforce’s technology trajectory and make smart investments in your application. You’ll also want to make sure you’re leveraging the latest ISV-ready technology so you can continue to enhance your solution and win new customers — otherwise, you might find yourself left in the dust as your competitors overtake you.
2. Prepare for Security Review
If you’re expecting to submit your product for Security Review in the coming year, you should start preparing now. While all Salesforce ISVs go through Security Review as the final step to getting their solution into the market, it’s surprisingly common for ISVs to fail on their first attempt. For many, it can take two or three more tries to pass. Preparing now can help ensure Security Review doesn’t turn into a roadblock for your business.
ISVs who plan ahead, leverage the available technology (such as Checkmarx and BURP scans), and partner with some expert assistance typically pass Security Review sooner and get to market faster. Developing a plan for submission, getting your false positive and solution architecture documentation in order, and consulting with experts for a preliminary analysis of your managed package code quality and any potential security issues will minimize delays and help the process go smoothly when you’re ready to submit.
To learn how to successfully navigate the Security Review process and improve your chances of passing on your first try, check out our Ultimate Guide to Security Review.
3. Configure Your AppExchange Listing
You don’t need to wait until you’ve passed Security Review to start preparing your AppExchange listing. If you’ve submitted your app for review, now is the time to implement your operational strategy, including setting up and configuring your listing. By doing this now, you’ll be able to go live as soon as your app passes Security Review and start rolling out licenses to new customers.
Salesforce offers a lot of helpful tools and technology to partners, but it can be confusing at first when you don’t know your LMA from your COA. Not knowing which tools to use or how to configure them to drive your desired business outcomes can negatively impact the launch of your product offering and needlessly stall your success.
Taking the time now to learn the proper use of your License Management App (LMA) and Channel Order App (COA) will ensure you’ll be able to accurately manage licenses and report revenue — which is critical to maintaining a positive partner relationship with Salesforce. You’ll also want to make sure you properly configure your listing so that your leads route correctly to your Salesforce Partner Business Org (PBO).
Again, you might want to consider getting a little outside help from a Product Development Outsourcer (PDO) to get a jump start on these operational steps. A PDO can help you quickly set up, configure, and optimize your listing to drive leads and revenue, as well as maximize your use of all the available tools Salesforce provides to effectively promote and sell your product.
4. Optimize Your Sales Demo
You probably know that a well-crafted sales demo that tells the right story to the right prospect at the right time can have a major impact on your win rates. But if you’re leading with features and failing to connect personas to business outcomes, your demo could be doing more harm than good. Additionally, many ISVs struggle with optimizing their demo environments for consistency and scale, which results in your Sales Engineers spending an inordinate amount of time creating, configuring, and tweaking demo environments instead of focusing on the content of the demo and preparing for the demo meeting with your prospect.
Taking a hard look at your existing demo and doing the work to optimize your demo org will help you crush your ’22 revenue goals. Take the time now to create a narrative that speaks to the daily tasks and routines of your prospects instead of listing features. A great way to do this is to map your personas to your product’s business outcomes through impactful reports & dashboards that effectively convey your product’s value to those personas. You’ll also want to examine how long it takes your SEs to spin up a demo environment and work on streamlining this process so they can focus on telling the right story to your prospects.
5. Resolve Technical Debt
This is a big one! Getting buried under a mountain of technical debt can have dire consequences for your product roadmap. It stifles your ability to keep up with new Salesforce technology and can make it impossible to innovate to meet new customer demands — all of which can lead to churn.
Engaging an expert PDO for a comprehensive analysis of your product’s architecture can help you resolve technical debt and create space for innovation, without taking time away from your product team. For ISVs who have built a combined solution on the Salesforce platform, addressing technical debt can help ensure compatibility with the new technology that arrives with each Salesforce release, reduce rising or unpredictable deployment costs, and make it possible to sell into a larger segment like enterprise accounts. Taking this step now enables your business to improve customer retention and innovate for new market opportunities in the coming year.
Hopefully, we’ve given you some good ideas of concrete steps you can take now to ensure your success and reach your revenue goals in 2022. Now let’s get started!
Additional Resources
Learn more about how working with a Product Development Outsourcer (PDO) can help you build and grow your business on the AppExchange.
For more insights and advice from CPOs at leading ISVs, check out our CPO’s Guide to Winning as a Salesforce Partner.
To connect and collaborate with other ISVs at every stage of the partner journey, visit the Salesforce Partner Community.
