The most critical ingredient to drive success for a Salesforce ISV

What a great event! – the Salesforce ISV London meetup held on Tuesday November 6th where I spoke about ‘The most critical ingredient to drive further success for an ISV’.

A BIG THANK YOU!! to Chris Harvey & Third Republic Recruitment for hosting, and also Maritina Tsembelis of Data Dwell for inviting me and also organising and running this ISV meetup group.

I wanted to share the topic wider – so here’s a cut down version.

In my experience of the Salesforce ecosystem collected over various interactions such as Dreamforce, and Salesforce World Tour,  my main observation is that ISVs are missing the critical ingredient that I feel would really help them succeed more.  What I have seen is a number of things that I feel are actually reducing their success chances.

I have collated these into a top six ‘No-Nos/Fails’:

Coming in at No. 6 is ‘Y% gain‘ – this is the one where an ISV is claiming something like ‘customer N achieved a massive 110% gain in …’.  Sounds great – but usually it is just not backed up or relevant….or, as in one case, it was achieved in a company that was set up by a friendly ex employee!! – can you really believe it?

No. 5 is ‘Me too’ – the issue here is that there are now thousands of apps on the AppExchange, so your solution is unlikely to be unique.  For example in the electronic signature category there are at least 25 listings on AppExchange. So what ‘differentiates’ your solution?

No. 4 is ‘Just download‘ – this relates to being listed on the AppExchange.  I hear ISVs saying ‘it’s easy, just download’.  In my experience it is just not that easy..and in some cases the app has just not worked!!

No. 3 is ‘It’s only x$ per month per user’ – the issue here is that Salesforce customers are already paying significant sums of money for license costs for the platform and the various clouds…so having to pay more on top…well that is tough to take!!

No. 2 is ‘Talk to the Ref’ – you might think I am referring to some sport when I mention Ref.  No what I am talking about is the Reference customer – the company that is using your solution.  What I have experienced is that when you talk to these references, it does not always paint a very rosy picture.  One notable example was with solution touting AI as feature in engaging customers – when the reference call was done, it was learned that the company was not only using an old ‘on premise’ version of the software, but also that the key AI component was NOT being used, because the client was using its own ‘predictions’ which were being manually entered!!  No surprises as to what happened to that potential sale!!

And No. 1 and top of the charts is ‘Let’s do it our way‘ – I have seen this quite often and it is a complete turn off for the customer.  What I am referring to here is that ISVs get so caught up in their ‘great features’ that they forget to show how their solution specifically resolves the clients issues or problems.  Customers really get upset about this – no wonder – the ISV has not listened!

A great example of this was during a demo (in a competitive process) – the ISV had been provided with specific scenarios to cover – so what does the ISV do – fail to follow the scenarios or indicate how what they were solving the issues in the scenarios.  The attendees from the customer company – many of whom were business users – were incensed, and felt that the ISV was being arrogant – and consequently they received much lower scores than their competitors!