The Doyle Report: Salesforce Prioritizes Partner Enablement in 2016
Never a dull moment. That’s the world of Salesforce (CRM) these days. One minute it’s opening a New York regional headquarters. The next it is taking a stand against Georgia’s religious liberty bill, which was just vetoed by Gov. Nathan Deal. In another moment the company is unveiling a tool to help support teams provide better service to their customers.
Could the new Desk 360 help MSPs provide more personalized service to their customers—the kind that only dedicated Professional Services Automation (PSA) tools provide today?
You might be surprised.
Amid the flurry activity at Salesforce, I wanted to get a better understanding of the state of the company’s ecosystem. No better place to start than with the woman in charge of it, Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, senior vice president of partner programs. She’s been at the company for six and one-half years, working with partners for the last two. Her team reports up to what is known as the “distribution organization” within Salesforce, which reports up to Keith Block, the company’s chief of operations (COO).
Taychakhoonavudh oversees the program, plus all of the systems, infrastructure and operations that support it, and the enablement efforts that help propel it. (Think education and training). MSPmentor caught up with the busy Taychakhoonavudh on a day when she was working from home due to traffic snarls caused by a strong El Niño storm. She was in a perfect mood, in other words, to share her plans for 2016 and beyond.
Before we got rolling, here’s some background on the company, which is the world’s No. 1 provider of CRM solutions. The company wrapped fiscal 2016 on Jan. 31 and reported annual revenue of $6.67 billion—an increase of 24 percent year-over-year. The company’s fiscal guidance for 2017: $8.12 billion in sales.
With each passing day, the company is attracting more customers, more partners and competitors. But the latter are struggling to keep up. One reason? The company’s diverse and vibrant ecosystem, which includes developers, consultants, MSPs, resellers and more. The company boasts the largest cloud ecosystem in the industry, and some of its most progressive partners. The two largest groups that the company works with are consultants, otherwise known as systems integrators, and ISVs.
The company has thousands of these. But it also has a number of reseller partners, digital agencies and management consultancies.
One thing different about Salesforce compared to other vendors is that it has one single partner community in which all partners are included, despite their vast differences. At any one time, more than 35,000 partners are logged into the Salesforce ecosystem and roughly half of its partners log in at least once per week.
Another uniqueness: Salesforce almost always takes deals direct, meaning that it has a 1:1 relationship with almost all of its customers, regardless of whether they engage a business, implementation, technology or consulting partner or not. As a result, the company takes a greater interest in customer satisfaction than most.
Almost every one of its customers, for example, are surveyed to see how well a business partner performed on Salesforce’s behalf. The company, in fact, invests a great deal in post sales customer management. The company has an entire team devoted to that effort with the ultimate focus on securing renewals.
Taychakhoonavudh started her career at Salesforce on that team and works closely with it to this day. The company measures partner success with customers on several levels. First are the direct customer surveys. Then the company analyzes user adoption. If customer utilization falls short of expectations, Salesforce will actually put a partner on probation until the company’s performance rises. In this way, the company ensures that its partner ecosystem is the healthiest, strongest and most competitive possible. Taychakhoonavudh likes to say her program has both carrots and sticks.
“Do the right things, qualify for a certain number of points and you can move up tiers in the Salesforce program. Don’t do the right things and we actually have a number of sticks that culminate in the termination of a partnership,” she says.
Today, the fastest growing constituency in the company’s partner program is the ISV community. The company has several programs for companies that produce their own intellectual property, including those whose primary revenue stream is not software development. Salesforce, Taychakhoonavudh notes, is keen on providing a home for developers who work inside channel companies that generate the bulk of their revenue from resale, managed services and the like. Sooner or later, Salesforce figures, they will turn to intellectual property (IP) with greater gusto. When they do, Salesforce want to be their go-to ally.
In all, there are a whopping 1.5 million participants inside the Salesforce ISV program. One popular adjunct is Salesforce for Startups, which provides business tips for newcomers. Topics include distribution, market sizing, etc.
One area where Salesforce is very dependent on partners is emerging markets, where Salesforce’s popularity has outstripped its employee headcount. In many emerging market economies, the company depends on third party partners—implementers, consultants and companies with special technology skills such as business analytics, in particular—to represent its interests to customers.
While Taychakhoonavudh thinks about new programs for channel companies, she has thus far resisted creating a bevvy of new initiatives. Existing programs are flexible enough to accommodate partners with different business models, and re-architecting any one initiative to suit a specific trend or demographic would largely be a game of chasing one’s tail due to the rate at which the market and business models are shifting. She says Salesforce may spin up a number of new options, but not right now.
“One of the things we are really focused on is not overly categorizing partners,” says Taychakhoonavudh. “We have seen some consulting firms realize, for example, that they have some great IP that they have repeated, such as solutions that solve particular problems in vertical markets. They have decided to take these solutions and productize them like an ISV. Partners engage in different ways to take advantage of various opportunities, and we are trying to create the right programmatic and legal infrastructure [to help them,]” she says.
What’s new for 2016? Don’t expect massive changes, she says, especially after the company’s move in 2015 to launch specializations. In addition to the tier a partner climbs to, it can also distinguish itself through the number of specializations it achieves.
While the structure of the program is not likely to change, that doesn’t mean Taychakhoonavudh and her team are sitting still. At present, they are trying to figure out how to create some benefits and/or specializations around the Internet of Things. To date, nothing solid has materialized. The company is also trying to harmonize the programs that it uses to manage digital agencies that focus on a very limited number of Salesforce marketing technologies.
One are that is getting additional focus is partner education and enablement. The company has an online learning platform called “Trailhead” that helps partners develop competencies in key areas quickly. Upon completion of these training models, partner can earn badges that go a long way to helping them distinguish themselves in the market. Trailhead participants don’t have to pass proctored exams the way the certified experts do, but they nonetheless must demonstrate a certain aptitude before receiving their recognition.
“The [in-person and online] enablement side of things is our single biggest investment area for this year because the demand just does not give up,” Taychakhoonavudh says.
