While CodeScience is typically involved more in the design and development of products for our ISV clients, we’ve learned a few things over the years about taking that product to market on the AppExchange. My colleague, Natalie Chin, recently blogged about how ISV partners can best use the AppExchange listing to their benefit, emphasizing a call to action to get the visitor to install your app or complete a lead capture form. In this post I’m going to share some ideas that are equally as critical as getting an admin to install and try out your app: adoption, support, and how you can leverage platform tools to which every ISV partner has access. First, it’s important to note that every ISV partner gets an ISV edition org and the newer ones have the License Management App installed already. This is the app provided by salesforce.com that allows you to manage the actual use of your product. You can check out the guide here, but the short story is that you’ll get custom object records for:
- Your Package – a child of which is,
- Package Version – every version you’ve uploaded from your dev org, a child of which is
- License – where you can expire or suspend a license, shutting off access for that org
- Lead
The important ones are Licenses and Leads and the question is: What are you, as an ISV, doing with those incoming Licenses and Leads? These are actual people who have installed your package or filled out the lead capture form if your package is not available on your listing. When you sign up for new cloud services, you usually get a welcome-type email, right? You can do the same thing here, very easily with Lead Auto-Response Rules. You can easily set up a rule that looks for Leads with a Lead Source = Package Installation. There’s also Package Installation – Sandbox. Those Lead Sources mean that was a result of an actual installation of your package. Then, make a professionally-formatted email template that’s full of helpful support links, ideas of how to get started and other content that a brand new user would want to have in hand and connect it to that Auto-Response Rule. Some other ideas of steps to automate are:
- Notifying your internal salesperson of the new prospect
- Setting a follow up Task for the Lead Owner based on the trial expiration date + 30 days
- Schedule a follow up for Support based on License Status = Uninstalled.
The platform tools are all there for you to configure to fit your needs. I also want to mention a tool that CodeScience released on the AppExchange, the LMA Install Tracking Dashboards. It’s a set of dashboards that aggregate your install data over time. You can schedule it to be refreshed and emailed to you on a regular basis which, I have to admit, is pretty fun to watch on apps like MailChimp for Salesforce. Leave a comment and let us know how you’re leveraging Licenses and Leads in the LMA!
