How We Got There

On this episode of How We Got There, I am joined by Rey Perera who is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gridmate. He shares his story as moving from an SDR to an enterprise AE at another Salesforce ISV before jumping into co-founding Gridmate along Hicham El Mansouri. 

Rey talks about how they build a business with diversity as if you look at their team, they are located all across the world and come from a number of cultural backgrounds. It helps deliver outstanding customer support that is clear to see in their AppEx reviews. 

I met Rey years ago but you will see him and his team at many of the Salesforce events around the world. We discuss how they decide on which events to sponsor and the ROI around them from a sales and marketing pov. It’s not all about direct ROI when considering which Dreamin, World Tour/Agentforce, and Dreamforce events to sponsor. 

Their investment in the ecosystem goes deep, working with their team to take at least 3 certifications (that are fully paid and incentivized!) per year to help them in their work and their careers. 

This episode is brought to you by Tequity Advisors . Tequity Advisors is a global sell-side M&A advisory firm with core expertise in SaaS and ISVs, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Microsoft, all things Data and AI, and the hyper scaler MSP cloud ecosystems with a focus on the Salesforce ecosystem and beyond! 

On this episode of How We Got There, I am joined by Alex MacKay, Executive Chairman & Co-Founder of Tequity Advisors. He shares his start in CRM when running Siebel Canada and found his way into sell-side advisory for M&A at Tequity, with deep experience in the Salesforce ecosystem with 28 companies and counting.

*If you are at Dreamforce next week, make sure to reach out to Alex or Mahnoor Naeem if you will be there too*

They take a long-term view of the relationship, oftentimes getting to know a company over a period of 2-3 years to help them get ready to sell. They help demystify the journey, even serving as an informal board member in many cases.

We talk a bit about lessons learned and Alex shares his advice at various stages of an ISV’s journey from first customers, to a couple million in ARR, to scale.  He talks about the importance for entrepreneurs to roll out a management operating system, like EOS, to help set the business up for growth. Alex shares his advice for early-stage ISVs around speaking with customers in their language, not about your product!

This episode is brought to you by Tequity Advisors . Tequity Advisors is a global sell-side M&A advisory firm with core expertise in SaaS and ISVs, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Microsoft, all things Data and AI, and the hyper scaler MSP cloud ecosystems with a focus on the Salesforce ecosystem and beyond! 

I am joined by Melanie Kruger, one of the best people leaders that I ever had the chance to work with. She has deep understanding of helping to scale Salesforce ISVs of all sizes. She actually found her way into the Salesforce ecosystem via networking between her husband and J Manning, bringing her to the Head of People at Conga.

I got to work with Melanie twice at Conga and TaskRay and was so impressed with how she helped set culture and nurture culture so the companies could grow. Melanie shares that when she joined Conga, lots of people were generalists - Conga had a number of Business Analysts that did everything customer facing - Sales, CS, and Support. This can be a really good model of ISVs early on, but eventually specialization is required. Something similar happened at TaskRay and one of their BAs was Jon Barlow who is now a top tier enterprise AE in the ecosystem.

We talk about culture and how it shifts over time, sharing her experience with Red Canary. We explore hiring pitfalls for early-stage ISVs and the importance of job descriptions. We go deep on this topic because it is so, so important to align expectations and help secure top talent as well as touching on some creative perk ideas for employees, like “two weeks to infinity”.

It was a lovely conversation that blended business lessons and life lessons. 

This episode is brought to you by Tequity Advisors . Tequity Advisors is a global sell-side M&A advisory firm with core expertise in SaaS and ISVs, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Microsoft, all things Data and AI, and the hyper scaler MSP cloud ecosystems with a focus on the Salesforce ecosystem and beyond! 

I am joined by Ben McCarthy, Founder of Salesforce Ben, Lab.club and advisor to a number of great companies in the ecosystem like AscendX, Tequity Advisors, and PipeLaunch. We talk about his journey from university to stumbling upon Salesforce and then after being called SalesforceBoy grew into Salesforce Ben. 

We talk about how to approach thought leadership, holding nothing back from the reader. Give back and give value and best practices without selling first. Obviously your offering will help more, but for basic use cases consider helping those salesforce users solve their problem without using your solution. There will be time to position your premium solution once trust is established.

People in the ecosystem will know of Salesforce Ben and Ben himself, but some ISVs might not know that you can actually engage with SFB to help engage the Salesforce community with things like sponsored content, thought leadership, dreamforce activations and more. Their team has data and expertise to help guide ISVs on what works and what doesn’t to drive conversions. 

We talk about the state of the ecosystem around things like events and how it’s changed over the last decade. Experimenting with things like video and shorts vs. things like white papers. Speaking of exploration, Ben also gives his point of view on how and why they launched NowBen, a similar platform to Salesforce Ben but focused on the ServiceNow ecosystem. I think everyone can learn from his point of view on this topic.

Make sure you follow Gearset and Elements.Cloud with Kevin Boyle and Ian Gotts, respectively. Here is the link to Salesforce Ben’s parties and events guide for Dreamforce 2025 next month. https://www.salesforceben.com/official-dreamforce-parties-and-events-guide-2025/ 

This episode is brought to you by Tequity Advisors . Tequity Advisors is a global sell-side M&A advisory firm with core expertise in SaaS and ISVs, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Microsoft, all things Data and AI, and the hyper scaler MSP cloud ecosystems with a focus on the Salesforce ecosystem and beyond! 

I am joined by ⁠Sean Lewis⁠, Director of Partnerships at Vicasso and the Serviceblazer User Group Leader for AMER.   We talk about his journey from customer support to sales to partnerships and everything in between. When he was selling, a Salesforce AE sent them a referral to a F100 company that really opened his eyes to the value of the partnership. Now Vicasso has two FTEs focused on partnerships to drive further top of the funnel growth.

The partner team at Vicasso focuses on Salesforce AEs, SEs and leaders but has started to explore SI partnerships as well since Vicasso no longer provides SI work as part of their business as a pure ISV. 

Sean shares an incredibly valuable learning around focus when it comes to coselling with Salesforce.  One time they found that one Service Cloud RVP has 5x the number of existing accounts and were only in 5% of their total accounts. Hyperfocus means Sean and his team knows where they will provide value to them.

If your app helps add value to Service Cloud users, the Serviceblazer community events might be worth your time to check out. Here is a link to ⁠join the serviceblazer slack community⁠.

We talk a bit about Chris Voss’ book called ⁠Never Split the Difference⁠, which is a sales classic everyone can get value out of. And Sean calls out ⁠Matt Kravitz⁠ as a great person to follow to learn about service cloud.

And thanks again to ⁠Jon Schultz⁠ for the recommendation to have Sean on!

This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Invisory⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Invisory is designed to meet you where you are: in your cloud marketplace journey through a strong go-to-market strategy that helps drive prospect and co-sell opportunities with Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, and Google. 

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I am joined by ⁠Ryan Sieve, the CTO at Accounting Seed⁠. We get to talk about his journey from consulting in the Salesforce ecosystem to his time at Salesforce itself, before heading to Accounting Seed to lead their technology group as CTO. And thank you to Jon Schultz for the suggestion to be joined by Ryan!

We start out talking about positioning products to buyers in ways that focus on solving problems vs. the speeds and feeds of a product. We touch on feature prioritization at a mature ISV like Accounting Seed and how best to collect feedback from internal and external constituents.

Ryan and his team leans into customer and partner feedback to help drive features they build and at the 18:10 mark shares tactically how they execute and track the product feedback in their own internal instance of Salesforce.

Accounting Seed has worked with Agentforce to optimize both collections and accounts payable to drive improved cashflow for their customers, freeing up time on their teams to be more strategic. Ryan shares their experience of how best to align with Salesforce on this new technology but always with an eye on what is going to help their customers as the top priority.

We touch on their team's use of App Analytics from Salesforce, setting up listeners to understand better how your application is being used in the wild. And ISVApp is an option that layers on top of that for even better insights. Accounting Seed leverages Trialforce technology with org creation automation and to keep the data and config up to date via Github repository.

This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠Invisory⁠⁠⁠. Invisory is designed to meet you where you are: in your cloud marketplace journey through a strong go-to-market strategy that helps drive prospect and co-sell opportunities with Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, and Google. 

I am joined by Blakely Graham, who is a board advisor to Left Main REI, host of the Not All Business Podcast, Founder and former CEO of TaskRay⁠. This one was a long time coming. On a personal note, my time at TaskRay was some of my most formative. I found a balance while there between my previous experience of excellence with true work life balance and a focus on values that stays with me. I am so grateful that Blakely and team took a chance in hiring me for a role that I was almost kind of qualified for and her friendship since then.

I'll do my best to summarize this episode, but it's more than worth a listen because I don't have enough characters to summarize it all.

Blakely's Salesforce journey starts in 2001 and spans a ton of roles and experiences. We dig deep into her experience founding TaskRay 15 years ago in 2010 as Bracket Labs as one of the early ISVs on the AppExchange where VCs told her that her business was not investable and it was "a lifestyle business" at best because the Salesforce ecosystem was too small. She grew it in spite of that and by the time they sold the business, they were getting endless inbound interest.

We talk about culture and values and why they were so important to her and the team at TaskRay. One of the core values was Connection that was the inspiration for Project Connection where the founders and I went to 5 cities and sat across the table from over 20 customers without an agenda outside of learning how our customers used the app. It drove focus for years to come that had nearly endless valuable outcomes like clarity of product roadmap, dramatically reduced churn, drove brand/marketing strategy, and much more.

She shares how founder conflict snuck up on her with Eric Wu as well as how they (eventually) resolved it.

As we switched gears to talk about gtm, Blakely shares how TaskRay evolved from the primary source of leads being the AppExchange with mostly SMB customers to more enterprise selling with content strategies, partnership motions, events, and more knobs we turned. The lesson is you are going to try stuff - some will work, some won't but you have to innovate and measure.

We talk about how to select and what you can expect from an advisor. At TaskRay, we rolled an advisor program out modeled after a talk Blakely listened to from Andy Wilson, founder of Logikcull. Shoutout to Phil Stern who was my sales leader advisor at TaskRay who helped me avoid many mistakes.

Show notes:

• Jolene Chan's LinkedIn where she was talking about a personal board of directors: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jolenec/
• Not All Business podcast with Heather Cooper: https://www.linkedin.com/company/not-all-business/
• Podcast with Andy Wilson from Logikcull where he discusses his advisor program that we modeled TaskRay's after: it starts at 14:05 and lasts 4 minutes  starts at 14:05 and lasts 4 minutes -https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/saastr-236-logikcull-ceo-andy-wilson-on-%240-to-%2410m/id1089973241?i=1000439148009

This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠Invisory⁠⁠⁠. Invisory is designed to meet you where you are: in your cloud marketplace journey through a strong go-to-market strategy that helps drive prospect and co-sell opportunities with Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, and Google. 

I am joined by Heather Cooper, the COO at Baker Law Group and the former CEO at Cloud Coach. Heather and I didn't know each other when we competed against each other (TaskRay and Cloud Coach) but have gotten to know each other since, which has been really fun. She is starting a podcast with one of my favorite work people, Blakely Graham, that will launch later this year.

While Heather was at Cloud Coach, they found a great talent pipeline by running an internship program recruiting heavily from the local university near their HQ, Colorado State in Fort Collins, CO. She shares lessons learned regarding sizing of that program.

We talk about her experience working with Tequity advisors, who are a sell-side advisory firm, helped her navigate leading the process where Cloud Coach exited to private equity and how engaging early, way before they were ready to sell, was important along the way.

Even though Heather is A lawyer, she isn't YOUR lawyer. With that in mind, her and I talk through some important concepts for every ISV to consider and hold the line around key contract terms like termination for convenience, multi-year deals, and the importance of educating the buyer on how security works with the Salesforce platform.

This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠Invisory⁠⁠. Invisory is designed to meet you where you are: in your cloud marketplace journey through a strong go-to-market strategy that helps drive prospect and co-sell opportunities with Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, and Google. 

I am joined by Sam Yarborough, the Chief Growth Officer at Invisory and a co-founder at Arcadia. Sam and I met at a New York World Tour years ago where she shared her experience at PFL and taking a much more focused approach to partnerships than is typical in the ecosystem. Treat partners (AEs, SEs, RVPs, SIs, etc.) like customers by leveraging the CRM to track activities for them and give them a great partner experience. 

We talk about being like Tommy Boy and getting overly excited about things like Financial Services Cloud and Work.com when it was good for Salesforce but not necessarily good for us as ISVs. Salesforce can take more risks than small ISVs can with excitement with actionable advice around trusting but verifying stoke you hear from a single RVP.

We touch on how ISVs should be thinking about their Agentforce strategy and how to test your approach to the new technology, but make sure it makes sense for your market and your resources. If you don’t have anything right now, that’s ok but make sure you put an AI concept on your roadmap to make sure you have a narrative at the ready to share.

Sam is a brilliant mind and a good friend and I hope you enjoy this podcast episode.

This episode is brought to you by Invisory. Invisory is designed to meet you where you are: in your cloud marketplace journey through a strong go-to-market strategy that helps drive prospect and co-sell opportunities with Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, and Google. 

In today’s episode of How We Got There, I talk with George Kenessey who is the CEO of Appiphony. Appiphony is a Product Development Outsourcer (PDO) and more recently an ISV themselves with Drive Connect on the AppExchange. George is one of the best humans and business leaders in the ecosystem. This conversation took place wayyyy back pre-Dreamforce but I finally got around to releasing it and it’s one of the most insightful ones. George shares his experience of helping companies launch on the AppExchange over the last 15 years as well as their own apps, taking their learnings from the PDO world to their own AppExchange journey.

He shares tips relevant to new ISVs going through the security process with Salesforce and then moves into GTM lessons from launching Drive Connect. They designed a PLG motion on the AppExchange, including building a way for customers to sign up for a trial and ability to purchase via Stripe on the backend. The best gtm motion they have found is writing specific content to help their customers and partners solve a problem that is related although not fully solved necessarily by Drive Connect. If you help people do their job for free, they will eventually give you money is something I say often and what George and team are doing over there.

Drive Connect has one of the best partner resources pages out there, I encourage you to check it out as you consider how well you are set up to enable SI partners.

Link to the episode in the comments (or on Apple Podcasts)

This episode is brought to you by Invisory. Invisory is designed to meet you where you are: whether you’re looking to list on the AppExchange, are in the process of listing, or listed and looking to accelerate success.

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