The SaaS Leader's Playbook for Driving Scale
The SaaS Leader’s Playbook for Driving Scale
What’s Inside Things are moving fast and although we have the same hours in a day as before, more is expected in a shorter amount of time. Consider time as an investment. You wouldn’t invest in every stock on the market, so why spend time where it’s not providing the greatest returns? In this guide, we outline the strategies all leaders must invest in to drive business growth efficiently: How to scale your go-to-market beyond your company, getting ahead of innovation and building a pillar of trust. By implementing these strategies, you’ll be on your way to acquiring new customers without sacrificing time and resources. You’ll learn the approach to each strategy, but also the execution so you can start taking action. Let’s get started. 2
Table of Contents Scale Your Go-to-Market Team 4 – How They Did It: Metazoa 5 Innovation Is Your Biggest Competitor 6 – How They Did It: nCino 7 Trust Is Your Best Asset 8 – How they did it: Tenfold 9 3
Scale Your Go-to-Market Team The Strategy Working smarter, not harder, is the key to driving business growth without depleting your Access resources. To stretch your sales, it’s important to reach outwards and develop a strategic 150,000+ partnership where you can create an extension of your sales team. customers Build a sales team that extends beyond your company to not only work efficiently, but also in the get access to new customers, expand to new regions, and build synergies. Distributing your Salesforce solution on your own may allow you to reach your goals, but forming a joint partnership will take you to the next level. ecosystem. The Execution The AppExchange Partner Program allows you to form a joint partnership where both parties win. By joining the partner program, you’re able to fill whitespace in the Salesforce product portfolio in addition to accessing a base of 150,000+ customers across the globe. These opportunities allow you to get plugged into joint product strategies and sales plays, creating exponential business growth and exposure. Especially if your solution fills an untapped market or aligns with a new Salesforce product, there may be a chance to go to market first with Salesforce. Extend your sales team by aligning with Salesforce employees to get additional visibility across regions, events, and deals. You can do this by developing relevant customer success stories alongside Salesforce AEs, sharing your value-add across the internal sales cycle, and building a drumbeat around your solution. By nurturing your relationship with Salesforce, you’ll not only open the door to distribution opportunities, but also receive guidance and best practices along the way to ensure you’re on the right path. As a revenue-generating channel, the AppExchange Partner program only succeeds when you succeed. 4
How They Did It: Metazoa Metazoa, an AppExchange partner specializing in org management, is no stranger to the partner ecosystem. Metazoa’s founders were one of the first to list on AppExchange with their previous company, DreamFactory, back in 2006. After a successful run with their initial venture, they decided to partner with Salesforce a second time. As they were attempting to engage with third-party marketing channels to promote Snapshot, their leading org and release management tool, they received mixed success trying to attract their target audience. Their turning point arrived when they began driving 100% alignment with the Salesforce marketing and sales team, with an emphasis on the Salesforce Platform. Their multifaceted approach included tapping a variety of Salesforce resources such as: • AppExchange Marketing Program: Program that helps partners reach Salesforce customers, employees, and influencers via co-branded content and turnkey Metazoa is a 1O-person marketing opportunities. company enabled to sell into • Salesforce Accelerate Program: Virtual program designed to provide insights, the Fortune 100 and 500. support, and executive access, allowing companies to strategically align with Salesforce and grow with AppExchange. % “It’s an incredibly powerful 52 ecosystem. AppExchange is • Salesforce Technical Enablement Team: Metazoa was able to tap Salesforce’s lead technical consultants to guide them from a product and innovation a major part of our sales and perspective. total revenue marketing plan and the brand growth year-over-year allows us to sell into some of It was then that Metazoa began maximizing its visibility and closing deals the biggest customers.” with some of its largest accounts. JENNIFER MERCER CEO AND CO-FOUNDER 5 Revenue growth since listing 2Oxon AppExchange including several Fortune100 wins More than 2X AppExchange lead conversion compared to tenfold’s average across other inbound sources
Innovation Is Your Biggest Competitor The Strategy We all know what our competitors are doing and what they’ve done. However, the future of technology and what our peers will do with it is unknown to everyone. How can you get in front of innovation before you’re too far behind? Keeping up is your biggest competition. It prevents you from doing what you do — but better. And it’s the variable that can change your position as a market leader. Being on the forefront of innovation will allow your business to deliver on what your customers need and will need. Focus on automation and efficiency in order to concentrate on your point of differentiation, rather than the infrastructure that all products require. The Execution Time to ROI is the secret to getting a head start right out of the gate. Building on the Salesforce Platform speeds up product development 4-10 times faster than other technologies, allowing you to bridge that gap between you and your competitors. Because the Salesforce Platform provides out-of-the-box functionality and tools to build % your solution, you’re able to innovate much faster, beating the competition and allowing 52 you to stay laser-focused on your customer needs. total revenue In addition to quicker development, building your product on top of the Salesforce growth Platform means you’re leveraging the same tech stack as Salesforce’s entire product year-over-year portfolio. You’ll get access to hundreds of innovative features Salesforce releases three times a year. This not only means that innovation is continually baked into your product, but the foundation of your infrastructure is supported by Salesforce’s rigorous security standards. * “State of IT Report,” Salesforce Research, June 2017. 6 Revenue growth since listing 2Oxon AppExchange including several Fortune100 wins More than 2X AppExchange lead conversion compared to tenfold’s average across other inbound sources
How They Did It: nCino nCino, an end-to-end banking solution built on the Salesforce Platform, sought to streamline customer and employee interactions as well as build trust within their highly regulated industry. By partnering with the CRM leader, they were able to fill a gap for 2Ox bankers and their CRM needs. Being able to say that their product was built on a platform revenue growth since listing on like Salesforce, that financial institutions were aware of, streamlined conversations and AppExchange, including several helped generate momentum quickly. Fortune 1OO wins. By leveraging Salesforce’s leading infrastructure, data centers, and security, nCino was able to focus on innovation and scale– allowing them to both grow more quickly and globally. % 52 total revenue “The technical speed to market growth is light years faster, and then you layer on the trusted feeling year-over-year that customers get from Salesforce in our infrastructure.” TRISHA PRICE CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER 7 Revenue growth since listing 2Oxon AppExchange including several Fortune100 wins More than 2X AppExchange lead conversion compared to tenfold’s average across other inbound sources
Trust Is Your Best Asset The Strategy % In a world where trust is more important than ever, it’s also increasingly more difficult to 52 attain. With data privacy and ethical business practice concerns on the rise, fostering a trusted relationship with your customers is essential. total revenue growth Credibility is built over a period of years, but can be shattered in seconds. Which is year-over-year why businesses must weave trust into the fabric of their company culture to ensure authenticity is prevalent in everything they do. Ensuring that trust is your #1 value will keep your customers feeling safe, and therefore stay committed to their relationship for the long-term. The Execution Over 150,000 businesses entrust Salesforce to safeguard their data in the cloud. Since the first day Salesforce was founded, trust was instated as its #1 value. Aligning your Revenue growth since listing brand with Salesforce further demonstrates your commitment to transparency and on AppExchange including innovation. By building your app on the Salesforce Platform, you’re adopting the same 2Oxseveral Fortune100 wins security measures and secure infrastructure that is used in our main product portfolio. Any customer data that is stored in the Salesforce database is taken care of, so your More than 2X AppExchange lead conversion compared customers can be rest assured that they are in good hands. to tenfold’s average across other inbound sources When it comes to your own security, once a partner’s code has been added to a managed package, your APEX code is hidden from the customer. This means that your IP is protected and cannot be viewed, modified, or copied by a user. All of the security measures put in place are to protect the personal information, the hard work, and innovation that our ecosystem is driving every day. We are only successful because of our customers and partners, so it is our duty to protect the relationships that they have invested their trust in. * “State of IT Report,” Salesforce Research, June 2017. 8
How They Did It: TenFold Tenfold, a computer telephony integration (CTI) solution for inside sales teams and contact centers, had a strategic need to build credibility with the enterprise market in order to close higher tier deals. It was once they noticed an uptick in Salesforce customer interest that they realized the benefit of joining the AppExchange Partner Program. Becoming an AppExchange partner not only helped bring in TenFold’s largest enterprise customers — including seven-figure deals — but it also provided a layer of trust because of the diligence Salesforce does in vetting new partners through the security review. The fact that Salesforce conducts a rigorous review of all products before publicly listing them on AppExchange brings a sense of reassurance to prospective customers. “Prospects feel confident in their purchasing decision when buying an AppExchange 2Ox solution. Being certified via revenue growth AppExchange’s security review since listing on process has helped us support AppExchange, over a dozen Fortune 100 including several clients that rely on Salesforce’s Fortune 1OO wins. commitment to trust and transparency.” DAN SINCAVAGE CO-FOUNDER AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER 9
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