This year’s Partnerforce Kickoff was even bigger and better than ever before and featured a whole host of speakers and trailblazers from across the Salesforce Ohana as they looked ahead to what’s in store for Consulting and ISV Partners worldwide.
The opening keynote set the tone and emphasized the integral role that partners had played in what has been a difficult year for organizations across the world. It also depicted the unique way in which Partners extend and augment the reach of the Salesforce ecosystem and how exemplary partners had allowed the entire Ohana to succeed together as one indomitable ‘Partnerforce’.
One key touch-point was a renewed focus on customer success and allowing products, solutions, and sales enablement to lead the way forward. As a huge percentage of growth will come from an existing customer base, customer success could very well prove to be the deciding force that drives Salesforce’s growth.
Tyler Prince EVP, Alliances explained that the path to 50 billion was an audacious, yet achievable goal with the power of Partnerforce and by harnessing the unique connection that partners have with customers. One scintillating session focused on the acquisition of Slack and the sheer potential for creating an operating system for a new age of growth when coupled with innovative partners.
Other sessions across the two days centered on how partners leverage their expertise to deliver both confidence and success to customers. Bringing in a partner makes it three times more likely to close a deal and that partners enable customers to succeed by growing, innovating, and leading together. The overriding consensus was that while it had been a challenging year it had also presented us with a unique occasion to support our customers in a variety of ways. This was only helped by the fact that Salesforce was in the business of digital transformation even before the pandemic. With a focus on growth and embracing new ways to collaborate and evolve together, the sky is truly the limit for the Ohana as a whole.
Some sessions also focused on various ways to help partners to grow their reach. One way Salesforce is doing this is with a renewed and enhanced focus on the AppExchange as the destination for both partners and customers alike. Over the next year, Salesforce is going to be making a substantial investment in both the App Exchange Marketing Center as well as the Partner Marketing Hub with over 2000 partners already benefiting. Salesforce is also making significant improvements in their Partner Learning Camp with 350 courses already added and over 200 additional to come in the months to come.
To help partners stand out Salesforce is enhancing the Navigator program with a new and improved trailblazer scorecard, verified reviews on the AppExchange and by investing in success for customers adding to advisory services; working better together through transparency, collaboration, and consistent engagement framework.
One of the most important takeaways we gained was the importance of qualitative storytelling through solutions and implementations. While success stories are dime a dozen it’s much more than a numbers game if you want to attract the attention of a prospective customer. It’s far more important to tell stories that people want to hear and to allow these stories to drive even more success for your organization or practice. A good question to ask yourself while creating a story to engage prospects is, “If you did not produce this content would you read it or watch it?” It is imperative to remember that customers engage with people and not brands. Humanizing the stories behind your success and making them relatable is key to sustained success across the Salesforce ecosystem.
Extentia, a Salesforce Consulting Partner, has over a decade of experience across various clouds including Sales, Service, Marketing, and Community Cloud with a strong focus on Health Cloud and Financial Services Cloud implementations. Extentia strives to consistently deliver value to customers with experience-centric transformation, design-led solutioning, and Customer 360 implementations, with a particularly impressive track-record in building Salesforce solutions with Lightning Web Components (LWC), Einstein Analytics, Heroku, and third-party integrations.
As Salesforce certified PDO Experts, Extentia has proven expertise in Salesforce’s security review processes, and works with ISVs across the globe to define, wireframe, develop, package and list products on the Salesforce AppExchange.
To know more about Extentia’s Salesforce Practice write to us at salesforce.consulting@extentia.com
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