Win Big as an ISV: Strategies That Drive Success in the Partner Ecosystem [Part 1]
The Salesforce ecosystem offers ISVs the opportunity to supercharge growth and accomplish key business objectives. The challenge, however, lies in aligning all the key pieces necessary to establish and maintain strong partnerships with Salesforce.
Leveraging our 13+ years of work on the AppExchange, CodeScience partnered with business leaders from across the Salesforce ecosystem to define what it takes to become a leading ISV. The result was our Acting Like a Top 25 ISV webinar series, and we’ll be sharing insights from our webinars in this three-part blog series.
For our first installment, we’ll be covering alignment, positioning, and go-to-market strategies. Let’s dive in.
Embrace a Culture of Alignment
One of the most fundamental pieces for driving success as an ISV is ensuring your internal teams are aligned and working toward a common goal. What may sound like a relatively simple task can often become very complex, especially as it relates to launching Salesforce products.
Every ISV has two key areas of focus for functional alignment: internal operations and operations within the context of the Salesforce ecosystem. The internal pieces represent strategy, finance, sales ops, marketing, and legal. As it relates to selling into and alongside Salesforce, some of these stakeholders have different responsibilities. While roles and responsibilities will vary from business to business, the key points for success remain:
- Focus on a single Salesforce cloud and develop a deep understanding of product roadmap and areas for opportunity
- Drive early wins by launching your product on a single cloud, internalizing user feedback, and refining from there.
- Expand the product functionality and suite to apply to multiple clouds in the Salesforce ecosystem.
By aligning your business around the focused approach, instead of trying to win on every cloud all at once, you can better equip your teams for long-term success. In the words of our webinar co-host Steve Jacobson, founder and CEO of Appinium, “For us, it was really focused on doing some things in Salesforce Experience Cloud. It wasn’t trying to solve everything for all these clouds and all the different people out there. It was being very targeted, very direct. Just do one thing really, really well.”
View the entire webinar to learn how Appinium scaled its product across multiple Salesforce clouds.
Put an Emphasis on Product Marketing
Getting — and staying — on the same page organizationally is just one piece of the puzzle ISVs must solve. Another key piece relates to product messaging. From a product marketing standpoint, how you communicate about your product’s values and how you communicate this value to your customers and Salesforce matters.
Effective product marketing messaging requires alignment across multiple levels in your business to create the message and getting it out into the world. Developing a sound core message and aligning internal teams around that singular value story makes rollout much easier and more effective.
“Going out with a tight message that aligns all disciplines elevates the performance of our growth channels,” said panelist Steve Malone, Director of Demand Generation at OwnBackup. “This has helped us turn good channels into great channels, which has had a positive impact on our pipeline and brand.”
As it relates to selling alongside Salesforce, there are some key steps that can help ensure success, including:
- Develop a provocative point of view. Finding a compelling angle and communicating it clearly is fundamental for getting buy in across the board.
- Don’t get comfortable. Aim for agility and be ready to adapt messaging if necessary.
- Leverage the power of AppExchange Reviews. This content is gold for selling to customers and Salesforce and builds trust with both audiences.
- Work closely with Salesforce AEs and SEs. Show how your Salesforce solution helps Salesforce AE/SEs drive customer success to crush their numbers.Start by taking this Trailhead module.
For more insights just like these, check out the full webinar on product marketing and messaging alignment.
Set Your Sights on GTM Alliances Teams
Strong alliance programs can be the difference between thriving ISVs and companies who struggle to break into the Salesforce ecosystem. From a growth perspective, and to ensure a mutually successful relationship with Salesforce, it’s important for ISVs to say “yes” to Salesforce whenever possible. Why? Because doing so can present more opportunities in the future.
As Ken Cavallon, Head of Global Alliances at Conga explains, “You should think about how you help make Salesforce more successful. Because if you can help make Salesforce more successful and you can help Salesforce sell more software, you’ll sell more technology yourself as well.”
But successfully partnering with Salesforce relies on a specific recipe for success. According to Ken, alliances success with Salesforce hinges on these steps:
- Align. Focus on aligning your internal teams as closely as possible to the way Salesforce does business. This applies to team structure, the terminology you use, and strategic objectives. Start by taking this Trailhead module.
- Engage. Lead with the customer segments within Salesforce you want to pursue. Doing so will lend focus and intent to your efforts and drive more successful outcomes.
- Create predictable outcomes. These outcomes can take the shape of strong relationships, significant pipeline and, best of all, closed ARR or ACV.
From the ISV’s perspective much of the initial work to accomplish the three key steps above hinges on segment identification. With this in mind, it’s essential to spend time understanding which market segment or vertical you would most like to target.
As Ken adds, “Salesforce thinks about the market in terms of the employee size of their prospects and customers. And they generally align and organize their teams and their sellers sell that way. They have different motions, different sales cycles, different product sets that they sell to those segments, all the way from small business through the growth business, mid-commercial, general commercial, up to mid and large enterprise. And then vertically that they organize around industry.”
The deeper you understand how Salesforce approaches your target markets and customers, the better you can tailor your engagements with the Salesforce team. But this is just the tip of the alliances iceberg. Check out our full webinar for all of the insights Ken shares for driving successful partnerships with Salesforce.
That does it for the first installment of our series. Check back soon for part two — we’ll cover optimizing the buyer and seller’s journeys for business growth.
To learn more about go-to-market strategies with Salesforce, visit the Salesforce Partner Community.
