Don’t Lose What Makes You Great: Hard-Earned Salesforce ISV Advice
Tips on investing in human capital while drinking your own champagne.
In 2016, we launched our first Account Based Marketing (ABM) campaign. We used a batch and blast direct mail approach: we sent direct mail to everyone on the list. We did this despite the advice we dish out to our customers. Why? All the amazing value that our very own solutions bring to Salesforce was unavailable to us.
We know we aren’t alone! Resource constraints squeeze so many Salesforce ISV partners into the same corner. Here is our hard-earned advice for ISVs that want to drink their own champagne.
- Be True to Yourself
For years, direct marketers have sent mass mailings to customers of all shapes and sizes. There was often little to no customization, regardless of company size, industry or buyer profile. Our Tactile Marketing Automation solution turns this on its head, using Salesforce data to personalize, automate and intelligently trigger direct mail. Those are the three pillars of our entire ideology, the core of who we are.
We had our app, but we didn’t have Salesforce CRM. At the time, we simply couldn’t find the resources to on-board our own Salesforce instance and keep it running smoothly. We decided just to send the same direct mail pieces to everyone on our list, which was a big, fat red flag. We would never let our customers do that!
We later realized that we’d not just given up on having the right tech: we had given up on ourselves. Even without Salesforce, we could have still delivered a true PFL experience to our prospects. We should have sacrificed automation, relying on manual processes that would have preserved the personalized approach that make us who we are.
Don’t shatter the pillars that make you who you are, just because you don’t have the tech you need.
2. Learn to Prioritize Resources
Like many ISVs, PFL lacked the resources to integrate and maintain our own Salesforce instance. For us, this meant an inability to find human talent to run the ship. We overcame our talent shorting by reevaluating our internal priorities. And believe me — that was a much harder task than it sounds.
For you, it might mean a budget shortfall, talent gap, scalability challenge or other resource constraint. Thinking about the big picture early on may help prevent growing pains down the road. Sip your champagne; don’t gulp it! Adjustments may boil down to more accurate expectations of time, budget and complexity.
By hiring an experienced Salesforce System Integrator and a Managed Services Provider, you will identify shortfalls and gaps before they happen so you can better plan and prepare as well as keep up with changing business demands as you grow. We hired Traction On-Demand and went live 45 days later. We also invested in a managed services relationship with Zinovo. Both partners now serve as an extension of our CRM dream team.
3. Never Assume You Don’t Need Human Capital
We thought we could scale our ABM program from 150 target accounts to 2,500 without adding any more of us humans to run the show. Ha! No way. While technology and automation are invaluable to our business, there is still a great need for our human minds and collective knowledge.
I bet if you were to look around, you’d agree that over-reliance on tech and automation is a common pitfall for ISVs.
If you can make your product work with just a little manual effort for a few hundred customers, then you can make it work for tens of thousands. Right? The assumption is that little additional effort is needed; but in reality, that manual effort has a way of scaling exponentially.
Best selling writer and entrepreneur Dan Schawbel, one of America’s leading authorities on the workplace, argues that what he calls “people capital” is the real killer app in our innovation economy. A great company, he says, exists because of its great people. Without strong human capital, he suggests, any company, irrespective of its technological resources, will struggle.
Lesson learned. At PFL, we now truly believe that investing in human capital and drinking our own champagne is one of the best ways to grow as a Salesforce ISV and stay true to what makes us great.
What is your #1 tip on this topic? Let me know what you think in the comments below.
