How Partnering with a Salesforce App Developer Can Benefit Your Business [Q&A]

Published by Julia Sine at November 4, 2015

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Differentiating your business and fostering client relationships are critical to growing your Salesforce consulting practice. However, with time, money, and other resources at a premium, achieving these goals is easier said than done.

Enter the strategic partnership. In many cases, businesses leverage strategic partnerships to decrease costs and reach more customers through resource sharing or joint product promotion. In fact, businesses can gain a significant competitive advantage by partnering with a Salesforce app developer to augment their Salesforce professional services.

To get a better understanding of the benefits of a partnership with a Salesforce app developer, I turned to Stephen Wood, our Partner Liaison. Steve shared his thoughts and experiences on the advantages of a strategic partnership with a Salesforce app developer, how such a partnership can help to improve a client’s Salesforce adoption, and what to look for in a partner.

Steve Wood runs the IC Partner Program and is our resident strategic partnership expert.

What are some of the advantages of a strategic partnership with a Salesforce app developer?

A partnership with a Salesforce app developer can help you grow your business without additional development or operational costs. Through partners, you can increase your offers to your customers, which increases your opportunities to build deeper customer relationships.

Partnerships also give you access to benefits that you can either pass on to your clients or use to provide them with better service. For example, our partners receive complimentary app licensing, exclusive discounts for their clients, early access to release notes and product roadmaps, and direct access to our product teams and support staff.

How can a partnership like this help to improve a client’s Salesforce adoption?

Adoption increases with efficiency. In other words, users will use Salesforce more when they become more efficient in their everyday tasks. What we’ve seen with both our customers and our partners’ customers is that implementing efficiency-boosting apps for your clients improves their Salesforce user experience and increases adoption.

Say I’m in the market for a potential Salesforce partner. What should I look for?

What you look for in a partner depends on your specific business goals, but in general, you want a situation that mutually benefits both partners. You’d look for a partner who has similar goals and who works with the same customer base.

In our case, we look for partners who are already Salesforce consultants and who are looking to grow and expand their offerings. Partners who use Salesforce as well get even more out of their partnerships with us.

Businesses that offer Salesforce services tend to get the most out of partnerships with us because they can offer our apps on top of their services to help their clients gain even more value out of Salesforce. We’ve had a lot of success with our partners who are focused on Salesforce Service Cloud and case management in particular because that’s where our apps provide the most benefit.

What would you say is the critical enabler of a successful partnership?

I would say trust in your partner is the most important thing. Without trust, communications break down, you lose confidence that the partnership benefits you both, and the partnership fails.

We want to make sure that there’s trust in our partnerships. We understand that some businesses may have concerns about sharing a customer with us. That’s why we don’t provide Salesforce implementation services for our referrals, even though we also offer those services. We want our partners to use those implementation opportunities to nurture their relationships with their customers.

What differentiates the IC Partner Program from most partner programs?

In some partner programs, the party giving the referral receives an incentive or monetary reward for the referral. We don’t do that because we want our partnerships to be mutually beneficial, beyond just the monetary gain. It’s not about trading money for a referral; it’s about leveraging opportunities to grow our respective customer bases and enabling our partners to build long-lasting relationships with their customers, while also providing customers with value-add Salesforce solutions.

Say someone wants to partner with Internet Creations. Where should they start?

You can start the process by registering on our website. We review every application we receive, and if we think it’s a good fit, we’ll reach out.

Have questions for Steve? Share them in the comments!