The latest of our Acting Like a Top 25 Salesforce ISV webinar series covers one of the most popular topics — designing your alliances team and ensuring ROI. To cover this topic, CodeScience CRO Sean Hogan was joined by Conga’s Head of Global Alliances, Ken Cavallon.

Both Sean and Ken bring a track record of success for building Alliances teams for Salesforce ISVs, and in this hour-long session, they explore how to understand and measure the impact of Salesforce as a channel partner, what it takes to design an Alliances team that creates ROI, and what any partner can put into motion today to make a difference.

Register now to watch the recording and get a copy of the slides.

Building Your Relationship With Salesforce

Large, well-established ISVs and upstart ISVs alike may struggle to develop their relationships with Salesforce and create fruitful Alliances programs. Ken explains when working with Salesforce (or when working to deepen any partnership), you want to say “yes” when you can back it up and deliver — you should because it opens the door to future opportunities.

The fundamentals of a successful Salesforce Alliances program can be broken down into these 3 components: Align, Engage, and Create Predictable Outcomes. Ken explains Conga measures each of these components as well as understanding how these Alliances map back to ARR.

As the Alliances leader in his company, Ken fosters how to build an alliances mindset. For Salesforce, because their partner ecosystem goes so deep, you have to be strategic in the ways in which you develop your relationship. Because your voice is being joined by another 3,000+ voices, you need to enable Salesforce and showcase how you can help them sell more.

“Never reach out (to Salesforce) with your hand open. Reach out with some tidbit of knowledge, some insight, something you bring to the table.”

Enabling Salesforce and Customer Success

Alliances with Salesforce is grounded in how you and Salesforce mutually provide value. And as partners better understand this concept, the next question confronted is “what do I provide them?”

Ken showcases a handful of assets Conga regularly updates and provides to the Salesforce team. He emphasizes it isn’t a one and done either, “you must continually invest and develop new materials for what’s going on today.”

Creating materials about your solution that highlight Salesforce’s value and the value you provide is tremendous for AEs because they can easily forward this collateral over to prospects and clients. Additionally, regularly posting this collateral or having your collateral posted on your behalf to Chatter groups is a great way to stay top of mind.

The next most-important thing you can do to drive a successful Alliance program at Salesforce is to create compelling customer success stories. By enabling your customers to speak to your application and Salesforce’s success, you will immediately place yourself in the top 10% of Alliances programs.

“Salesforce loves to tell the stories of success from its customers’ point-of-view,” adds Ken.

The benefit of creating an ongoing selection of new customer success stories is two-fold — you can showcase your wins to Salesforce, but you also are now staying better connected with those using your product and understanding how your product impacts their business.

If you want to learn how Conga creates executive alignment on their Alliances program, what metrics they track to understand the effectiveness of their program, and the reason demo optimization drives better business, you’ll have to register here: https://learn.codescience.com/top-25-salesforce-isv-designing-a-gtm-alliances-team


For CodeScience, our clients’ success goes beyond product success. We want to ensure that our partners build their business on Salesforce. If you want to find your opportunity in the Salesforce ecosystem, get in touch today!