Salesforce Acronyms You Need to Know
Acronyms are a norm in corporate America and Salesforce is no exception. In fact, Salesforce lays out 388 of them over 20 pages in the partner portal. Invisory has distilled this list down to the ones you need to know in your go-to market activities to achieve fluency when you’re interacting with Salesforce employees.
(AE) Account Executive – Salesforce AEs are the frontline person who owns an end-customer account and knows what Salesforce Clouds are positioned to solve each customer’s requirements. They work with ISVs when the ISVs solution adds value to a Salesforce Cloud offering. They receive quota credit equal to your PNR % on all deals sold into their accounts. For example, if your deal is $60,000 in ACV/ARR for your company and your PNR rate is 15%, then the AE receives $9,000 towards their quota as if they sold a product directly to the customer for that amount.
(ACV) Annual Contract Value – The subscription contract value between an ISV and their end customer. Example: If a customer signs a 3-year contract for a total of $30,000, the ACV for the would be $10,000 per year.
(AOV) Annual Order Value – Measures the average total of every order placed over a period of time. The formula for calculating AOV is Revenue divided by the number of Orders. It is important to remember that AOV is calculated as sales per order, not sales per customer.
(AVP) Area Vice President – This person is the manager of RVPs in most of the business. Each AVP will have a number of RVPs reporting to her, who have AEs reporting to him.
(BDR) Business Development Representative – A Jr. Sales role that is tasked with calling into new and existing Salesforce accounts. Known as SDRs in other organizations.
CBS – Industry abbreviation for Consumer and Business Services
Chatter – A enterprise communication hub and social network for Salesforce and heavily used internally in “Org62”, what Salesforce calls their salesforce instance. You have the ability to create and curate a chatter group in their org that your PAM can help to amplify for you.
CMT – Industry abbreviation for Communications, Media, (High) Technology
(COA) Channel Order App – This is how you submit orders from your internal Salesforce instance to Salesforce to pay your PNR. There is an option to automate this to limit the manual work required.
Composite Solution – An App created by an ISV that combines the Salesforce Lightning platform with an off-platform solution to provide a combined solution to end-users of Salesforce customers.
CRM – Customer relationship management
(ECS) Enterprise Corporate Sales Rep – These are assigned to large accounts to manage and lead AOVs under $250,000. Unless you are selling massive deals as an ISV (over $1.67M in ARR), you should welcome the introduction from the AE to the ECS rep as they are highly skilled sales people that can help you.
(GRB) General Business market segment – This is used to create territories at Salesforce and encompases companies between 44 and 199 employees.
(GENERAL CMCRL) General Commercial market segment – This is used to create territories at Salesforce and encompases companies between 1000 and 4499 employees.
GS – General Services
(ISV) Independent Software Vendor – A product partner that builds an application on the Salesforce platform. The typical PNR for these types of applications is 15%.
Instance – The cluster of software and hardware represented as a single logical server that hosts an organization’s data and runs their applications. The Lightning Platform runs on multiple instances, but data for any single organization is always stored on a single instance.
(Large ENTR) Large Enterprise market segment – This is used to create territories at Salesforce and encompases companies between 25,000+ employees.
(LMA) License Management Application – An App provided by the Salesforce ISV team that enables each ISV to control the number of users who have access to their ISV App on a per customer basis. Example: The LMA allows the ISV grant access to 100 users in one Salesforce customer’s Org and 1,000 users in another Salesforce Org.
MAE – Industry abbreviation for Manufacturing, Automotive, Energy
(MID CMCRL) Mid-Commercial market segment – This is used to create territories at Salesforce and encompases companies between 200 and 999 employees.
(MID ENTR) Mid-Enterprise market segment – This is used to create territories at Salesforce and encompases companies between 4499 and 24,999 employees.
Native – An application that runs fully on Salesforce’s servers and is a delivery decision for ISVs. Salesforce account teams have a preference to native solutions as they inherit Salesforce’s security model and keep the customer on the platform. The other option is a composite app which can be built on AWS with a connector in Salesforce.
(NPO) Non-Profit Organization – Consider adopting the 1% pledge that Salesforce started their company with. This includes 1% of time for VTO (Volunteer Time Off), 1% product by donating 10 licenses to qualifying NPOs and higher education organtions, and 1% equity which is how they fund Salesforce.org (commonly referred to .Org) which has a separate GTM team from the commercial side of the business.
Object – Objects represent database tables, their security and access permissions, page layouts, and more. Salesforce includes native objects such as Account, Lead, Contact, and Opportunity. You can also create custom objects to represent your own data model.
Org – Short for Salesforce Organization – An org is the space provided to an individual customer of Salesforce (including the defined set of licensed users). Your org includes all your data and applications and is separate from all other orgs. Each org has a specific OrgID that can be found in Setup -> Company Information. These can also be used to grant login access to customer or demo orgs.
(OEM) Original Equipment Manufacturer – A license type that allows your App to work with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, but also allows you to service net-new customers or users not already on the Salesforce platform. An OEM license grant allows an ISV to sell their App to an end-customer first and then Salesforce can then sell Sales Cloud or Service Cloud into that org. The PNR rate is typically 30% for these types of applications.
(PAM) Partner Account Manager – A PAM is the primary contact you work with as an ISV Partner to help you navigate and understand Salesforce and the requirements for building and licensing your App. Your PAM experience level and focus will increase as your Trailblazer score increases.
Partner Community – Connects Salesforce customers, partners, product specialists, and employees to answer questions and share new ideas. This is also where you will go to manage your AppExchange listing(s). It can certainly be overwhelming but the search functionality is very good to getting to content you need, chances are your question has already been answered. Read about 2024 Salesforce Partner Program updates.
(PNR) Percentage of Net Revenue – Also known as revenue share. The Salesforce revenue model assigned to your App within your license distribution agreement.
PS: Industry abbreviation for Public Sector and shorthand for Professional Services, the work that SIs do.
RCG – Industry abbreviation for Retail & Consumer Goods
(RVP) Regional Vice President – This person is the manager of AEs in most of the business. Each RVP will have roughly 6-8 AEs reporting to her.
(SB) Small Business market segment – This is used to create territories at Salesforce and encompases companies between 21 and 44 employees.
(SE) Solutions Engineer – Solutions Engineers work to conduct discovery with the client and then demonstrate technology to meet their needs. These people will be your best friends as they often look to the AppExchange to fill product gaps required to meet requirements and are critical members of the account team that typically start all demos they are building from the SDO.
(SI) Systems Integrators – These are independent organizations that implement Salesforce products and AppExchange applications. There are over 1000 of these globally that vary in region, products deployed, size of customer, and vertical. They are classified based on tier – Global Strategic, Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Registered.
(SDO) Simple Demo Org – An advanced demo tool for use on pre-sales opportunities. Contains demo tooling, scripts, and demo data. These predictable environments represent the building blocks used by the thousands of SEs to deliver tailored demos.
SVC – Service Co-Prime/Service Prime
Success Community – A place where Salesforce users connect with the community to share ideas, learn, and get inspired that is shared with Salesforce, other partners, and your customers. You have the ability to create a page and can be a useful medium to support your customers. Your support team should own responsibility for monitoring this page, but often times another customer will chime in to help the customer asking the question.
Trialforce – Allows you to offer a free trial of your app from the AppExchange. Each time a trial is requested, Trialforce creates a lead in your Salesforce production Org. A thoughtful Trialforce strategy can enable your sales teams as well as partners to deliver highly tailored demos with minimal effort.
Wall-to-Wall – Related to capturing every employee of a company to use Salesforce for all of their business processes. This is the high watermark for any Salesforce account team and if your app helps get new teams to buy Salesforce licenses from their AE, you have a better chance of getting their attention.
Whitespace – Salesforce has over 180,000 customers, but not every employee within that company has a Salesforce license necessarily. Those teams that don’t use Salesforce today are referred to as whitespace within the account by the Salesforce account teams.
Learning to speak the language of your Salesforce audience is key to connecting. If you’d like to learn more about InVisory and how we could help your organizations journey with Salesforce, reach out at info@invisory.co.
Interested in hyperscaler marketplaces? You can also read our guide on Azure Acronyms and ServiceNow Acronyms.
How Invisory helps ISVs reach cloud marketplace success
The Invisory GTM cloud solution helps ISVs unlock their cloud marketplace potential across platforms like Salesforce, Azure, and AWS. Invisory’s one of a kind platform delivers actionable insights and key go-to-market deliverables to SaaS companies looking to stand out and maximize revenue in crowded marketplaces while reducing risk and accelerating results. For more information contact info@invisory.co.
