Partner strategy is a sometimes overlooked aspect of building success in the Salesforce ecosystem, but it is the key to innovation for companies of all sizes. Strategic partnerships can help catalyze and build momentum behind new initiatives and drive new revenue.
This webinar, moderated by CodeScience Chief Revenue Officer, Sean Hogan, followed the partnership journey of Sparta Systems, an enterprise quality management system provider for the health and life sciences sector. Sean sat down with Judy Fainor, Chief Technology Officer at Sparta Systems, and Brian Rash, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Sparta Systems, to explore how collaborating with Salesforce has positively impacted their engagement strategy, driven technology innovation, and accelerated their go-to-market.
Watch the webinar now and read up on a few of the highlights from their chat below.
Digital Transformation in Health and Life Sciences
As a research and development organization, Sparta was very deliberate about the way they moved to the Salesforce platform. According to Brian, “the way we had trained the customers for 25 years to buy our software needed to change in a SaaS environment, especially being on the Salesforce platform.” Since over 90 percent of Sparta’s customer base is pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotechnology companies, they knew that they would be encountering regulatory bodies from across the world.
Similarly, Sparta realized as they built out their virtual cloud infrastructure that they were also going to need certain certifications to keep up with the rigid set of regulatory standards in the life sciences industry — certifications that were already built into Salesforce. Judy recognized the benefit that Salesforce could bring them and stated that “a lot of the time we were spending in foundational work and investing, we got those things out of the box with the Salesforce platform.”
Increased Revenue and Partner Growth
After making the significant shift to invest more on the Salesforce platform, Sparta cultivated their partnership with Salesforce and saw tremendous success growing their business. As Sparta grew and deepened their Salesforce partnership, their opportunities to drive commercial success expanded, along with their revenue.
Leveraging both the technology and the distribution sides of Salesforce to gain commercial success in a new market is sometimes referred to as “the Blue Halo” effect. After a partner begins to add value to the ecosystem, Salesforce will begin to reward that effort and assist that partner to help further drive their growth.
As Brian described it, “reaching the Summit level, you really feel the full force of how much Salesforce is willing to partner with you for your success. For partners that aren’t there yet, I encourage you to manage that program actively, all the pillars. Because it’s a commitment to the platform that Salesforce likes to see.”
Success with Salesforce
If you’re just starting out as a SaaS business, you might be wondering how some Salesforce partners, such as Sparta, are able to achieve such impressive growth and what lessons you can learn from their success. Sean dove into this, stating that “partners are driving a new wave of growth for Salesforce. And what that means for new ISVs is that Salesforce is heavily investing in its partners in an effort to enable ISVs to be more successful in the ecosystem.”
Salesforce has a target to grow to about $50 billion and they realize they can’t get there alone. They need partners to help them drive growth and achieve that goal. That opens up tremendous opportunities for ISVs like Sparta to come into the market, contribute, and grow in the ecosystem. Sean pointed out that “over 90% of Salesforce customers rely on ISVs to add value to their solutions and that momentum in the market is tremendous. Salesforce wants to help ISVs continue that momentum.”
To hear more from Sean, Judy, and Brian and get a copy of the deck, register and watch the webinar here.
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