It’s been just a few weeks since Salesforce overhauled its apps marketplace AppExchange – and the reception so far from the partner community has been a positive one – but the cloud giant has promised more good things to come as it has already got a 10-year plus vision of change.
What’s more, the company wants to make it clearer to companies of all sizes that it has something to offer them, regardless of their industry or legacy.
“You’re going to see more unification of our messaging of start-ups and AppExchange. Come one, come all – big companies, small companies," Leyla Seka, executive vice president of Salesforce's AppExchange told Channel Pro at the company's annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco this week.
"I want to put a welcome mat out in front of the AppExchange and let everyone who’s building enterprise SaaS know. I want my customers to have them as an option if they’re building something awesome.”
Seka has been at Salesforce pretty much since AppExchange was launched some 11 years ago. After a stint at Desk.com, she was excited to come back to the app marketplace to give it a makeover and plan for the future.
“The AppExchange is 11 years old. We’ve reinvented it a number of times. But people now have just higher expectations, from applications, from sites, from marketplaces etc. I was working on the AppExchange for six years and then I ran a totally unrelated business, Desk.com, for three years. When I came back we it really struck me that we needed to evolve the site from an intelligence perspective,” she told Channel Pro.
“We needed to reimagine the site and turn it into the Salesforce store. Back in the day it was apps and now we have components, datasets and community templates and a host of other types of inventory. So we needed to broaden the definition for it to be more like the Salesforce store.”
The latest iteration of the AppExchange goes big on personalisation and proactivity, rather than just letting the user come and look around, it will now suggest things to consider based on knowledge or preference, according to Seka.
Trailhead is now also on the AppExchange so learning is also embedded into the site alongside the apps themselves. There’s also been an extensive re-categorisation of the marketplace itself, as well as a focus on industries, to make it much easier for people to find the things they want and need to.
Seka also said it was worth noting that Salesforce “has put a tonne of energy into search.”
“Search is one those things that is like the foundation of your house. It’s expensive and you have to fix it and keep it wonderful, but it’s not like the pretty new window,” she added.
The AppExchange has some 4,000 apps on it currently – the majority of which are partner-created. It’s believed to be the largest SaaS ecosystem in the world. Approximately 89% of the Fortune 100 are using some kind of solution from the AppExchange further demonstrating its popularity.
“The Salesforce community member, customer, can go to the AppExchange and very quickly find things to help them run their business, options to understand what they can or can’t do, templates, consulting partners, developers – whatever it is they’re looking to get they can find it and get it right there in a contextual experience that makes sense to them,” Seka added.
“[When it comes to our partners] these people are not resellers, they’re technical partners so it’s a different relationship. We’ve learned how valuable and important that is for Salesforce so we’re also learning how we mature that relationship and how we view it and work together with partners to help them meet their goals aswell.”
She also alluded to something closer on the horizon in the form of the TrailBlazer Scorecard, which the company is currently trialling and plans to launch in early 2018.
This Scorecard will measure partners against certain values and core attributes that go beyond just revenue and traditional metrics, including but not limited to customer satisfaction and ethics.
“I stole this saying from my CFO ‘Better, better, never done.’ We’re a big company, we have lots of processes, and we’re working with our partners to make sure they don’t feel that and have a seamless experience. So we’ll continue working on making that a reality,” Seka said.
“We’re really working on facilitating the processes that partners either felt unclear about or frustrated and working on solutions with them and the customers. The thing about running an ecosystem is you can’t do it in a vacuum. There’s so many participants and so many stakeholders in how it all unfolds so it’s very important to get everyone’s perspective.
“We look at optimising for the customer, optimising for the partner and optimising for Salesforce too. We really look at making that trifecta relationship as solid and as seamless as possible.”
