Creating Real Partnership with Our Customer Success Organization
I joined our Customer Success Group (CSG) a little less than six months ago, and during that time I’ve had a lot of opportunities to meet with and talk with our partners. Over the years, we’ve developed excellent relationships with many of our partners, and our ecosystem — in all of its depth and breadth — is critical to our customer’s success.
And it’s my job to make sure that we are working with each other every single day in every single market. More than 70% of our customers leverage our partner ecosystem to lead their implementation, and we have a tremendous opportunity to further succeed by taking a partner collaboration mentality.
Look how fast the CRM space is growing. It’s the fastest growing and biggest enterprise software category today. Our potential market is huge, and we can’t do it all ourselves. In fact, according to IDC, Salesforce and our ecosystem of partners will help create 3.3 million new jobs by 2022, helping to spur more than $859 billion in new business revenues worldwide.
We need the ecosystem that’s built itself around Salesforce to keep engaging and driving towards the same goal: to make every customer on Salesforce successful, period.
And to do that, we have to focus on simplification — making it easier than ever for partners to work with us — and making it easy for them to get the help they need so that every customer project delivers business value.
That’s going to mean evolving our approach to increase the positive impact that each and every employee and partner has on creating exceptional experiences for our customers. One of the great opportunities we have at Salesforce is to work with partners to pilot and test some opportunities. Here are some areas we’re looking at innovating in the coming months.
Embedded Expert Support
We have great knowledge and ability around the entire Salesforce platform, and so our team wondered, would we be able to help accelerate partner competencies and reduce project risk by adding expert services? We’ve engaged with three partners to test this concept and find out how having that expert service resource makes it easier to deliver projects that delight customers.
Turnkey Resources for Partners at Capacity
No matter how quickly our partners grow, the growth of Salesforce means there is an increasing number of projects requiring our partners to staff — and sometimes, partner benches run thin, or our partners need very specific expertise. We’re talking with our SI community now to determine how we can be there for them when they need us — in the form of deployable resources, and expert advice.
These are just two of the ideas that have already gained traction in the previous months, and of course, it’s an iterative process. We’re getting a better sense of the type of resources the partner needs and at what stage in their project process they need our resources to engage. Once those pilot projects are over, we’ll have the feedback and learnings we need to create scalable solutions to take us into FY20. For instance, we’re actively working on ways to ensure ISVs get to the right people with the relevant skill set when an inquiry is raised via an upcoming “Premier for ISVs.”
We also know well that we have to continue to build trust and provide transparency for all of our partners as we move forward so that we can engage properly — so we’ll be working to build those rules of engagement with our partners.
I’m committed to ensuring FY20 is the year that we are able to align more fully to help each and every partner as they work to make our customers more successful. And I look forward to hearing how we can continue to evolve our work — together.
