AppExchange Customer Lifecycle Modern Marketing Salesforce Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Why Build on Salesforce?

by AJ Macht -

Article Overview

As a business leader, you have to find ways to acquire more customers, engage in business more efficiently and differentiate your offering.  These are constant challenges that can sometimes feel like immovable boulders; yet they must be solved for the business to evolve and grow.  

In this article, we’ll discuss what the Salesforce AppExchange Ecosystem is and how it has helped its engaged participants solve those challenges.  We aren’t just talking about startups that want to bring an application to market, but Fortune 10 companies that want to integrate their data and functionality to where their customers already live.  Even during the global pandemic, AppExchange companies continue to grow.  In a time where a lot of businesses are struggling to hang on… the AppExchange continues to thrive.

Salesforce Overview

“Salesforce is the world’s #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform. We help your marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT teams work as one from anywhere — so you can keep your customers happy everywhere.”  

The key stat that everyone wants to know is that Salesforce has over 150,000 customers using their SaaS product.  Whether it’s sales, service, marketing or a community… or most likely a combination of those, the world has chosen Salesforce as where they do business and keep their data. Small business and up to the Fortune 100 use Salesforce.  

The accolades of Salesforce pile up.  From Innovator of the Decade to Forbes most innovative companies (many years by the way), most admired companies, best places to work… and so on…

The main point here is Salesforce is where your customers are and more of your customers will be joining them. 

Salesforce Platform

The Salesforce Platform is made up of different “clouds” that are for different business purposes.  For instance, Sales Cloud helps your Sales team track leads, contacts, opportunities and more to drive the deal cycle forward in a more effective manner.  Service Cloud (built on top of Sales Cloud – so you get all that functionality as well) allows you to service those customers through case management and ease of use for historical data at your fingertips.  In 24 hours, the Salesforce platform (all in the cloud) powers trillions of B2C and B2B interactions.  Emails sent, orders, social posts, AI predictions, commerce page views, reports generated, cases logged, opportunities created, leads created and more. 

Statistics on the customer benefit for using Salesforce are staggering.  Here are several: 

  • 23% increase in opportunity win rate using Sales Cloud
  • 35% increase in customer satisfaction using Community Cloud
  • 35% Faster Deployment using App Cloud

Any C-level person would gladly take any of those statistical improvements.  (Obviously).

The platform itself is what all the different clouds of Salesforce sit on top of.  This shared infrastructure drives a lot of power especially when multiple clouds of Salesforce are utilized.  A point of note, with some of the Salesforce acquisitions some of the clouds are not natively attached to the platform but instead have integration points to connect to the platform.  A key example of this is Marketing Cloud.  While technically it is a different platform, a Salesforce Partner like Martek Ventures has a vast history in connecting Salesforce Core (Sales / Service / Community) with Marketing Cloud and the ability to not only drive data back and forth but build applications that harness both Salesforce Core and Marketing Cloud simultaneously.

What is AppExchange?

In 2005-2006, Salesforce made a pivot that changed the Salesforce Ecosystem forever.  The beginning of AppExchange.  The best way to describe AppExchange is an antidote that Marc Benioff (Co-Founder of Salesforce) shared.  

Everyone owns a mobile phone.  If you have an iPhone you can download additional apps to your phone by visiting the AppStore.  If you have an Android, it’s the same thing but called the Google Play Store.  The phone is the hardware, software, infrastructure and operating system.  Companies can build apps and launch them in the AppStore.  When they do, Apple takes a 30% revenue share of the purchased app.  

In the same way, Salesforce is the SaaS platform that is the operating system, security and cloud applications.  Through AppExchange you can download different apps to use inside of and to integrate with your Salesforce instance.  A big difference though is that for companies that build apps on Salesforce… Salesforce takes less than the 30% revenue share of the app  that mobile companies do. 

A fun fact is that Steve Jobs was actually the mentor of Marc Benioff.  So in appreciation to Steve, Marc gifted him the name and domain of AppStore.  

Companies that have apps on AppExchange are called ISV’s (Independent Software Vendors) in the Salesforce Ecosystem.  An ISV can build an app completely on Salesforce or integrate with portions of Salesforce.  Martek commonly sees ISV’s that have functionality or data which their customers want to use inside or with Salesforce.  As we already pointed out, their customers are already using Salesforce and that’s where their data is, so building the integration to Salesforce as an app and launching that in AppExchange brings about loads of customer visibility and adoption.  The access to the Salesforce install base is one of the largest reasons why companies dive into the ISV game and build on Salesforce.  The other main areas are getting to market faster (since building on Salesforce and the tools/infrastructure they provide greatly speeds up what can be done)  as well as creating new revenue streams for your business.

As a quick plug, this is where Martek can help out potential ISV’s or even current ISV’s.  We have been building apps since prior to HubExchange (the Marketing Cloud version of AppExchange that is now a part of AppExchange) and have been building AppExchange core applications for many years.  We have taken the Salesforce App Lifecycle Methodology and broken it out even further into planned and programmatic steps to give an ISV faster business benefit with intentional and iterative development towards business success. 

Power of AppExchange

Even as far back as 2014, Forbes wrote an article about why you should build your company on Salesforce.  Not just build an integration, but your COMPANY.  This should clearly tell you that if your company isn’t built on Salesforce, then you should drop us an email and let’s start talking about the type of integration app your company needs. 

From 2015 to 2020, the Salesforce Ecosystem has created over $100 billion in new revenue.  AppExchange itself, in the past 2 years, has experienced just under $100 billion in acquisitions of AppExchange companies (companies with an app on AppExchange).  So not only is the Salesforce ecosystem creating loads of new revenue streams for businesses but the businesses that are integrating to the Salesforce ecosystem are creating enough value that they are acquired.  The world is taking note as well.  In 2020, AppExchange investment (venture funding to build AppExchange apps) rose to over $4b from 3.7b in 2019.

100% of the Fortune 100 have installed an AppExchange App.  It’s not just the mom and pop companies that are using AppExchange. It’s the juggernauts of global business that see the value of extending their Salesforce instance with new functionality and data applications.  Of the 150,000+ Salesforce customers, 86% of them have installed a Salesforce AppExchange App.  

How Martek can help?

As we previously mentioned, the folks at Martek have a long history of success with the entire App Lifecycle from Plan, Build, Distribute, Market, Sell and to Support.  You can learn more about what separates Martek from other PDO’s (Product Development Outsourcers) or SI’s (System Integrators) by reading here.  We’ve taken the Salesforce methodology and expanded upon it to build a planned and programmatic methodology towards iterative customer success.  

Send me a note at aj@martekventures.com and let’s discuss how Martek can help you go to market with Salesforce and AppExchange.

References for this blog

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