Telling Your Story as an ISV Partner
Selling like Salesforce means selling with stories. It is difficult skill to master for technical founders and reps alike who are cursed with excitement for and knowledge of their technology. Customers purchase outcomes so practice ending every feature you show with “so you can….” as it forces you into story-mode lite. As an example, if I were demonstrating lead de-duping in Salesforce I would show how it worked and then say “so your team can make sure that they are not impacting the customer experience by sending too many emails and making too many calls that would frustrate the buyer.”
Codescience, a leading PDO (Product Development Organization) that helps ISVs build out their technology has been hosting a great webinar series called “Acting like a Top 25 ISV”. This installment focused on demo orgs using Trialforce technology and is worth a watch. Trialforce is one of the most powerful, yet underutilized tools in the ISV toolkit from Salesforce and offers a plethora of value for ISVs but it’s just the tip of the iceberg in enabling you to tell your story to the masses.
A Fictitious Customer Journey
Let’s look at Ohana, a Salesforce customer that is looking for an app just like yours. Below you can see their journey and how much an experienced Salesforce buyer, like Ohana, does before ever engaging your team.
Starting on the AppExchange, the prospect named Ohana starts by clicking Watch Demo
Next they take a Test Drive
They like what they see so they get approval to install in their Sandbox with Get it Now.
Ohana is unresponsive to the calls and emails from your sales team at this point
They ask their Salesforce AE about the ISVs app and their competitors. That AE posts searches in Org62 Chatter and finds your application. They double-check your AppExchange listing before recommending you and see the plethora of five-star reviews that are recent.
From there, the SE grabs the ISVs application and puts it into their SDO and demos for Ohana.
Ohana loves what they see, ignores reaching out to the competitors due to the recommendation from Salesforce and now reaches out to Sales at ISV for discovery call, after that the AE spins up trialforce and tailors it to Ohana’s use case. The demo shines to the exec sponsor by leveraging user switcher (coming soon from CodeScience – it allows for easy persona switching in your demo environments). Closed Won, repeat.
Invisory can help you tell your story by working with you to design the talking points throughout these tools. If you’d like to learn more, let’s connect!
