AppExchange 2.0 Secrets Unleashed for Salesforce Partners

Had Marc Benioff not gifted the phrase “App Store” to his mentor and friend, the late Steve Jobs, the AppExchange would have been known as the Salesforce App Store today.

With 4000+ solutions, 5 million+ app installs and 87% of Salesforce customers using AppExchange apps, the 2005 born, 11-year-old AppExchange has come a long way from merely being an apps listing service to a powerful community of business apps, customers and partners. Its recent makeover unveiled on 24th Oct, 2017, therefore, is nothing short of a rebirth, making it 'The AppExchange 2.0'.

The Salesforce partner ecosystem is one of the pillars and the largest contributors fueling the Salesforce economy, which is forecasted by IDC to drive 3.3 million jobs and in excess of $859 billion in revenue by 2022. Hence, awareness of how this Appexchange makeover empowers Salesforce Partners by marrying their interests, is of essence.

Defining App USPs Was Never Significant Than Now

Powered with an intelligent search which recommends all the relevant and similar apps to the customers, the new Appexchange provides them with a la carte menu of apps to choose from in a particular category. For e.g. when I search the term “documents”, the search results consist of all relevant apps, consultants, industry solutions around document generation or a similar feature.

This makes it imperative that ISV partners clearly define their application’s unique selling point, from that of your competitors, thus enabling customers to make informed buying decisions.

Tighten Loose Industry Specific Nuts With Lightning BOLTS

With Lightning Bolts, ISV Partners now have the power to package industry specific process flows, apps and lightning components as predefined solution templates, leading to faster deployments and go to market, without having to reinvent the wheel. A great example of this is a promotion management and communications Lightning Bolt solution for the Retail sector offered by Appirio.

This enables ISV Partners to carve their niche within an industry vertical, and helps them emerge and be recognized as industry leaders rather than just application providers.

Brand Your Product And Industry Expertise

AppExchange 2.0 brings in two important perspectives of categorizing solutions with their relevance to industry vertical using Industry collections, and with relevance to a specific Salesforce product using Product Collections. This provides Salesforce Partners, with an opportunity of being recognized as not only an expert in the relevant industry vertical, but also, in a respective Salesforce product umbrella.

For e.g. Product collections for Sales Cloud provides solutions addressing A to Z needs of the sales process, starting from unlocking sales channel to driving sales rep productivity.

Shorter Application Issue Resolution Cycles

Dealing with technically aware and well informed customers is a dream come true for product support reps and AppExchange 2.0 has made this a reality. AppExchange 2.0 not only provides a wide array of apps to thee Application users to choose from, but also goes a step ahead and empowers them through recommendations of relevant and applicable Trailhead self-learning modules.

This inevitably results in a smarter and cognizant generation of application users along with shortened issue resolution cycles.

Show Them The Money

Business plans sculpt the blue print of your apps by pushing Salesforce partners to ponder over key aspects such as target audience, potential revenue forecast, customer pipeline etc. thus enabling you to build an awesome business app.

As it is rightly said “Don’t just build a product, build a business around a solution that solves business problems” and staying true to this, AppExchange 2.0 empowers partners to not just think about the application architecture and design, but also a sustainable long term business plan, blending it beautifully within the listing setup of the Partner Community.

Last but not the least, the Appexchange makeover is a force to reckon with, which complemented with the powerful partner ecosystem, will prove a game changer in times to come.




Written by Jigar Shah, Enterprise Solution Architect at Eternus Solutions