How We Got There

Yeva Roberts, Director of Strategic Alliances at AllCloud, shares her journey into the Salesforce ecosystem starting with Taylor, PFL, and Yotpo before switching from ISVs to SI alliances with AllCloud. AllCloud is a platinum Salesforce SI and one of the fastest growing ones out there. 

Yeva shares her perspective on the value exchange between ISVs and SIs by creating a compelling story to demonstrate how your application can close a gap for them or help them meet their revenue goals. Great tip is to check the SI’s LinkedIn to see if they have a full-time ISV Alliances person and if they don’t, it is likely they will only care about you if you help them close a gap in their offering.  I could have spoken with Yeva for hours as she has so much experience to share!

This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Andrea Maliska, Founder of Rebel Learn joins the podcast. Rebel Learn is a learning and development consultancy. Andrea has taken her learnings from working at Conga to many companies inside and outside the ecosystem. She shares a few examples but is most proud of the CTA bootcamp she worked on with Sebastian Wagner called Flow Republic.

She shares how to start small on internal and partner learning and development. It’s important to identify and lean into your internal subject matter experts (SMEs) who will be key to getting to your finished goal. 75-80% of the content you will produce for enablement of internal employees and partners should have overlap so feel comfortable upcycling the content you already have.

This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Max-Michael Mayer, CEO & Founder of ISVApp joins the podcast. Salesforce ISV/OEM partner since 2008, starting with PropertyBase before solving his own problem and founding ISVApp to help other Salesforce ISVs/OEMs with a toolbox to understand your usage analytics, flagging churn risks in the customer-base.

He shares which usage metrics every ISV needs to track, specifically around the diligence process with potential investors giving them confidence in how you run your business (beyond just simple reference calls!) and much more about his experience building out a high-performing leadership team to help scale and eliminate key-man/key-woman risk as a founder.

This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Maria Pergolino, CMO at ActiveCampaign, after working with Marketo, Apttus, and Anaplan has built much of her career in the ecosystem.

From giving away a car at Dreamforce to trials in the enterprise, Maria shares some of her learnings from Marketing to the Salesforce ecosystem. I really enjoyed her thoughts on trialing while balancing self-serve and sales-led to improve the overall health of the pipeline.

Sharing her journey as a woman executive and how she has reflected on helping other women around her in their careers. Follow Leyla Seka and Leslie Tom, which Maria calls out as people to pay attention to. 

And thank you for the introduction, Eric Dreshfield!

This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Casey Karp is the Director of North America ISV GTM Strategy at Simplus. She shares her journey from an ISV in the ecosystem to running ISV alliances at Simplus a platinum SI.

If you’ve listened to the podcast, you are likely picking up on a theme - that Systems Integrators are a key reason why the ecosystem is so attractive to ISVs building product. Casey shares her POV that will help you as an ISV think through the WIIFM in terms that the SI can understand. She shares actionable tips and a lens to review your existing partner program to make them resonate more strongly.

My personal highlight was when she shared how she reacts when she gets 2-3 emails from ISVs each week like clockwork and what gets an ISV noticed.

This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Melanie Fellay, CEO & Co-Founder of Spekit shares her journey into the Salesforce ecosystem starting with owning a Salesforce instance and feeling the pain of adoption & documentation that inspired her to start a company to modernize how it’s done. Melanie shares best practices around validating an idea using the Ideas Exchange and connecting with people in the ecosystem directly to harden your approach.

Melanie shares a plethora of founding Sales tips - you need resiliency as you will fail, persona flexibility, knowing that budget ownership is important, pain vs. actual ROI, and trying to avoid a parade of features in your demo. Showing cool technology doesn’t lead to sales!

This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Ben Asfaha, CEO & Co-Founder of PipeLaunch, shares his founding story and reflects on the time he has spent at various ISVs like Nintex and Conga as well as Salesforce itself. He provides some tips around how to go about launch the app by taking a detailed mockup to customers & partners to refine their product prior to building out the brand and the value he saw by focusing on the challenge first.

This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Maritina Tsembelis is the Strategic Partnerships Manager for Salesforce at Gearset. Maritina is an American in England and has been active in building community for ISVs in the ecosystem in the UK as the founder of the Salesforce ISV Meetup with over 700 members. She created this community out of a way to learn about the ecosystem that she found herself creating alliances during her time at Data Dwell. At Gearset, she shares how she approaches aligning with the technical customer-facing teams at Salesforce to help learn where she should spend her time and some successes in aligning with SEs and SIs while at Data Dwell.

Drew Quinlan, Vice President, Strategic Alliances (ISV & GSI) at Ring Central, is a long-time ecosystem member (and big US Soccer fan) who has built his career on building and improving alliances programs. Drew shares his perspective on how founders need to take a focused approach to building an alliances motion and how to vary the volume of potential targets when talking technology partners (2-3) and services (20-30). He shares about his time at Conga where they invested in web-based education and technical enablement in the form of top-tier technical resources to build meaningful services partners.

Drew is a board member for the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals and encourages any alliance professional to look into getting their certification.

This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Lucy Mazalon, Head Editor/Operations Director at Salesforce Ben & The DRIP, is a long-time ecosystem member who offers a unique voice via Salesforce Ben & The Drip that helps Salesforce practitioners up-level their careers. Lucy shares her perspective of how ISVs are adjusting their strategies as in-person events have come to a halt due to COVID. Lucy walks through how to run effective experiments in driving leads, sharing best practices like looking at time on page and impressions but not getting too caught up on vanity metrics and focusing on results. Learn about the rule of 7 and how it drives action from your customers.

This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.