Podcasts about salesforce appexchange

In this episode of Between Product and Partnerships, we sit down with Indy Sen, Product Marketing Manager for Ecosystem at Canva, to explore what it really takes to build a thriving SaaS platform and developer ecosystem.Indy shares hard-earned lessons from his career shaping ecosystems at Salesforce, Box, MuleSoft, Google, and now Canva. From launching on the early Salesforce AppExchange to scaling developer engagement at global companies, Indy dives into what's changed (and what hasn't) when it comes to partnerships, platform strategy, and developer marketing.By the way, Indy is running the London Marathon and raising funds for cancer research. Support the cause here:https://secure.acsevents.org/site/STR?fr_id=109250&pg=personal&px=59788306--To access more resources and content on technology partnerships, integrations, and APIs, check out our blog and resources page belowBlog: https://www.pandium.com/blogTech Partnerships & Product Management Resources: https://www.pandium.com/resource-center

In today's episode, we're joined by Matt Robison. Matt is the founder of Lightbox Logic and the creator of Marketing Cloud Connect Toolbox, which has recently been listed on the Salesforce AppExchange. Matt came back on the show to tell us all about his journey of building the Marketing Cloud Connect Toolbox, where the idea came from, how he approached building it whilst being in employment, what the AppExchange process was like,and tips he would share with others looking to build a product.   Make sure you're following Matt on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-robison-salesforce/   You can find out more about Lightbox Logic here: https://lightboxlogic.com.au/   You can find more content from us at Talent Hub, here:   LinkedIn@ https://www.linkedin.com/company/talent-hub-global/ YouTube@ https://www.youtube.com/@talenthub1140 Facebook@ https://www.facebook.com/TalentHubGlobal/ Instagram @ https://www.instagram.com/talenthubglobal/ Twitter X @ https://twitter.com/TalentHubGlobal   We hope you enjoy the episode!  

In today's episode, we welcome back Jakub Stefaniak, Salesforce CTA and now-published author. We discuss Jakub's new book, the Salesforce AppExchange Success Blueprint, and Jakub shares years of knowledge on building successful applications for the Salesforce AppExchange.

En una actualización que mejora la seguridad y ofrece compatibilidad con múltiples nubes, Veeam Software ha lanzado Veeam Backup para Salesforce V2 en Salesforce AppExchange. Esta versión está diseñada para proteger contra la pérdida y corrupción de datos ofreciendo opciones de implementación tanto local como en la nube, además que promete mejorar significativamente la gestión y recuperación de datos.

Peter Ganza, the 'AppExchange Whisperer', and tech veteran Janeen Marquardt join me, Vanessa Grant, to share their insights on navigating the complex world of ISVs, product management, and the power of the AppExchange. We unravel the challenges and opportunities that Dreamforce presents for ISVs and explore alternative strategies that might be the game-changer for your business. Enter the world of product marketing through the experiences of our seasoned guests. From localizing messaging and developing compelling customer stories to transforming marketing strategies in small ISVs, Peter and Janeen lay the stepping stones to success. We dive deep into the effectiveness of Dreamforce and how it compares to smaller, more targeted events. We also shed light on the role of partner ecosystems and their undeniable contribution to Salesforce's success. Stay tuned as we shift gears toward career growth and personal resilience. We tackle the daunting reality of toxic work environments, drawing from our experiences and challenging you to prioritize your mental well-being over any job. Peter shares his invaluable advice on successful career pivots and the art of maintaining a positive attitude. Not one to shy away from life's curveballs, he recounts his own journey of unexpected challenges and the resilience that saw him through. From product marketing, and ISV partnerships, to personal growth within the Salesforce ecosystem, this episode will accompany your roadmap to success. 

Intelligent Assistant to Manage Salesforce Orgs with AI, Launched, Metazoa Podcast: Enables Salesforce Administrators to remove technical debt Recently, Metazoa, the leading provider of administrative tools for Salesforce, announced the launch of Intelligent Assistant on the Salesforce AppExchange. Jennifer Mercer is the CEO of Metazoa, discusses this announcement and gives us an overview of her company. Metazoa's mission is to build, support and sell the world's finest Org Management application for Salesforce Administrators. We learn in this podcast that not only are customers enthusiastic about the new offering, but they are discovering new ways to use it. Metazoa is an AI pioneer who recently debuted their tools at Dreamforce. Intelligent Assistant includes Metadata Studio, a prompt engineering platform, and Intelligent Search, an administrative thinking partner. These new tools give Metazoa customers the ability to virtually expand their administrative headcount using artificial intelligence. This one-two punch represents the most significant use of AI on the Salesforce platform to date. Metadata Studio is a prompt engineering platform (PEP) that seamlessly integrates AI with customer metadata. The use of grounding data, best practices, and few-shot learning make these prompts practical workhorses capable of solving difficult administrative problems. Examples include coding Apex Classes, documenting Flows, building Validation Rules, writing SOQL Filters, and creating Formula Fields. Metadata Studio helps customers manage their prompts. About Metazoa: Metazoa provides a comprehensive suite of AI empowered tools that enable Salesforce Administrators to remove technical debt, optimize security, improve compliance, increase productivity, and lower the total cost of org ownership. Technical debt can result in slow performance, reduced agility, sluggish adoption, and the failure to meet business requirements. Metazoa Snapshot can help you discover technical debt problems and then fix them. When your org is back up and running, Snapshot can also help you maintain the org so that technical debt does not return. Learn about https://www.metazoa.com/ More news on AI

Episode #85 Building startups on SalesForce – Place RevOps automation and connectivity   Fireside with a VC talking to Brandon Metcal, CEO of Place, about RevOps (revenue operations) to solve financial forecasting and cash management with sales starting in 2020. Also discussing automating and synchronizing sales to finance, to human resources and other components to streamline SaaS companies that run on SalesForce and now SalesForce CPQ.   Talking about lessons learned from both Place and his previous business where Brandon raised $28m in funding and sold the business making a profit for investors, founders and employees. We also take a deep dive on how to partner with SalesForce and lessons learned from over 20 years of working within the SalesForce ecosystem. Place has also carved out a slice from their last funding round for investors on WeFunder to increase the network of support for the company.   Wefunder: https://wefunder.com/placetechnology/  SalesForce AppExchange: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=5e950d92-8476-4461-af88-eea66e55485c (new listing) RevOps: https://www.placetechnology.com/solutions/revenue-operations (offering) Place Cash and Burn Podcast, stories of SaaS growth: https://www.placetechnology.com/cash-and-burn-podcast  https://www.linkedin.com/in/metcalf/   Find this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Nt11xrPdKCM.   Find this and all episodes for Fireside with a VC here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/FiresideVC   andrew@7bc.vc https://www.linkedin.com/in/romans/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/firesidevc/message

On this episode, Christine Li, VP of Partnerships and Enablement at G2, discusses the importance of reviews and social proof in the software industry. G2 is a platform that gathers social proof through customer reviews to help buyers make informed decisions. G2 has a unique role in the marketplace ecosystem. They function as a marketplace themselves, as a vendor in other marketplaces (such as Salesforce AppExchange and AWS Marketplace), and as a syndication partner for marketplaces. Its syndication program helps amplify reviews and social proof for vendors across multiple marketplaces, making it easier for buyers to find valuable insights. Christine shares three key takeaways from their syndication program: Firstly, B2B review collection is challenging, but G2 has invested in AI and human resources to ensure the authenticity and reliability of reviews. Second, negative reviews are essential as they provide valuable insights and build trust with buyers. Responding to negative reviews professionally is crucial for addressing concerns. Finally, offering syndicated reviews for free didn't yield desired results; monetizing the service helped drive partner prioritization. The discussion highlights the significance of customer reviews and social proof in the B2B software industry, and how G2's approach to review collection and syndication benefits vendors and buyers alike. Resources mentioned: Christine Li⁠ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinerli/ G2 | LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/g2dotcom/ G2 | Website - https://www.g2.com/ Thank you to our amazing podcast team at Content Allies. Want to launch your own B2B revenue-generating podcasts? Contact them at ⁠https://ContentAllies.com⁠. #saas #software #cloud

Evelyn Grizzle, Senior Salesforce Developer, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the often-misunderstood and always exciting world of Salesforce development. Evelyn explains why Salesforce Development is still seen as separate from traditional cloud development, and describes the work of breaking down barriers and silos between Salesforce developers and engineering departments. Corey and Evelyn discuss how a non-traditional background can benefit people who want to break into tech careers, and Evelyn reveals the best parts of joining the Salesforce community. About EvelynEvelyn is a Salesforce Certified Developer and Application Architect and 2023 Salesforce MVP Nominee. They enjoy full stack Salesforce development, most recently having built a series of Lightning Web Components that utilize a REST callout to a governmental database to verify the licensure status of a cannabis dispensary. An aspiring Certified Technical Architect candidate, Evelyn prides themself on deploying secure and scalable architecture. With over ten years of customer service experience prior to becoming a Salesforce Developer, Evelyn is adept at communicating with both technical and non-technical internal and external stakeholders. When they are not writing code, Evelyn enjoys coaching for RADWomenCode, mentoring through the Trailblazer Mentorship Program, and rollerskating.Links Referenced: Another Salesforce Blog: https://anothersalesforceblog.com RAD Women Code: https://radwomen.org/ Personal Website: https://evelyn.fyi LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evelyngrizzle/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. But what do we mean by cloud? Well, people have the snarky answer of, it's always someone else's computer. I tend to view it through a lens of being someone else's call center, which is neither here nor there.But it all seems to come back to Infrastructure as a Service, which is maddeningly incomplete. Today, we're going in a slightly different direction in the world of cloud. My guest today is Evelyn Grizzle, who, among many other things, is also the author of anothersalesforceblog.com. I want to be clear, that is not me being dismissive. That is the actual name of the blog. Evelyn, thank you for joining me.Evelyn: Hi, Corey. Thank you for having me.Corey: So, I want to talk a little bit about one of the great unacknowledged secrets of the industry, which is that every company out there, sooner or later, uses Salesforce. They talk about their cloud infrastructure, but Salesforce is nowhere to be seen in it. But, for God's sake, at The Duckbill Group, we are a Salesforce customer. Everyone uses Salesforce. How do you think that wound up not being included in the narrative of cloud in quite the same way as AWS or, heaven forbid, Azure?Evelyn: So, Salesforce is kind of at the proverbial kid's table in terms of the cloud infrastructure at most companies. And this is relatively because the end-users are, you know, sales reps. We've got people in call centers who are working on Salesforce, taking in information, taking in leads, opportunities, creating accounts for folks. And it's kind of seen as a lesser service because the primary users of Salesforce are not necessarily the techiest people on the planet. So, I am really passionate about, like, making sure that end-users are respected.Salesforce actually just added a new certification, the Sales Representative Certification that you can get. That kind of gives you insight to what it's like to use Salesforce as an end-user. And given that Salesforce is for sales, a lot of times Salesforce is kind of grouped under the Financial Services portion of a company as opposed to, like, engineering. So again, kind of at the proverbial kid's table; we're over in finance, and the engineering team who's working on the website, they have their engineering stuff.And a lot of people don't really know what Salesforce is. So, to give a rundown, basically, Salesforce development is, I lovingly referred to it as bastard Java full-stack development. Apex, the proprietary language, is based in Java, so you have your server-side Java interface with the Salesforce relational database. There's the Salesforce Object Query Language and Salesforce Object Search Language that you can use to interact with the database. And then you build out front-end components using HTML and JavaScript, which a lot of people don't know.So, it's not only an issue of the end-users are call center reps, their analysts, they're working on stuff that isn't necessarily considered techie, but there's also kind of an institutional breakdown of, like, what is Salesforce? This person is just dragging and dropping when that isn't true. It's actually, you know, we're writing code, we're doing stuff, we're basically writing full-stack Java. So, I like to call that out.Corey: I mean, your undergraduate degree is in network engineering, let's be very clear. This is—I'm not speaking to you as someone who's non-technical trying to justify what they do as being technical. You have come from a very deep place that no one would argue is, “Well, that's not real computering.” Oh, I assure you, networking is very much real computering, and so is Salesforce. I have zero patience for this gatekeeping nonsense we see in so many areas of tech, but I found this out firsthand when we started trying to get set up with Salesforce here. It took wailing and gnashing of teeth and contractor upon contractor. Some agencies did not do super well, some people had to come in and rescue the project. And now it mostly—I think—works.Evelyn: Yeah, and that's what we go for. And actually, so my degree is in network engineering, but an interesting story about me. I actually went to school for chemical engineering. I hated it. It was the worst. And I dropped out of school did, like, data analytics for a while. Worked my way up as a call center rep at a telephone company and made a play into database administration. And because I was working at the phone company, my degree is in network engineering because I was like, “I want to work at the phone company forever.” Of course that did not pan out. I got a job doing Salesforce development and really enjoy it. There's always something to learn. I taught myself Salesforce while I was working at IBM, and with the Blue Wolf department that… they're a big Salesforce consulting shop at IBM, and through their guidance and tutelage, I guess, I did a lot of training and worked up on Salesforce. And it's been a lot of fun.Corey: I do feel that I need to raise my hand here and say that I am in the group you described earlier of not really understanding what Salesforce is. My first real exposure to Salesforce in anything approaching a modern era was when I was at a small consulting company that has since been bought by IBM, which rather than opine on that, what I found interesting was the Salesforce use case where we wound up using that internally to track where all the consultants were deployed, how they wound up doing on their most recent refresher skills assessment, et cetera, so that when we had something strange, like a customer coming in with, “I need someone who knows the AS/400 really well,” we could query that database internally and say, “Ah. We happen to have someone coming off of a project who does in fact, know how that system works. Let's throw them into the mix.” And that was incredibly powerful, but I never thought of it as being a problem that a tool that was aimed primarily at sales would be effective at solving. I was very clearly wrong.Evelyn: Yeah. So, the thing about Salesforce is there's a bunch of different clouds that you can access. So there's, like, Health Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud is the most common, you know, Salesforce, Sales Cloud, obviously. But Service Cloud is going to be a service-based Salesforce organization that allows you to track folks, your HR components, you're going to track your people. There's also Field Service Lightning.And an interesting use case I had for Field Service Lightning, which is a application that's built on top of Salesforce that allows field technicians to access Salesforce, one of the coolest projects I've built in my career so far is, the use case is, there's an HVAC company that wants to be able to charge customers when they go out into the field. And they want to have their technician pull out an iPad, swipe the credit card, and it charges the customer for however much duct tape they used, however much piping, whatever, duct work they do. Like I said, I'm a software engineer, I'm not a HVAC person, but—Corey: It's the AWS building equivalent for HVAC, as best I can tell. It's like all right, “By the metric foot-pound—” “Isn't that a torque measurement?” “Not anymore.” Yeah, that's how we're going to bill you for time and materials. It'll be great.Evelyn: Exactly. So, this project I built out, it connects with Square, which is awesome. And Field Service Lightning allows this technician to see where they're supposed to go on the map, it pulls up all the information, a trigger in Salesforce, an automation, pulls all the information into Field Service Lightning, and then you run the card, it webhooks into Square, you send the information back. And it was a really fun project to work on. So, that was actually a use case I had not thought of for Salesforce is, you know, being able to do something like this in the field and making a technician's job that much easier.Corey: That's really when I started to feel, as this Salesforce deployment we were doing here started rolling out, it wasn't just—my opinion on it was like, “Wait, isn't this basically just that Excel sheet somewhere that we can have?” And it starts off that way, sure, but then you have people—for example, we've made extensive use of aspects of this over on the media side of our business, where we have different people that we've reached out to who then matriculate on to other companies and become sponsors in that side of the world. And how do we track this? How do we wind up figuring out what's currently in flight that doesn't live in someone's head, or God forbid, email inbox? How do we start reasoning about these things in a more holistic way?We went in a slightly different direction before rolling it out to handle all of the production pieces and the various things we have in flight, but I could have easily seen a path whereas we instead went down that rabbit hole and used it as more or less the ERP, for lack of a better term, for running a services business.Evelyn: Yeah. And that is one thing you can use Salesforce as an ERP. FinancialForce, now Certinia, exists, so it is possible to use Salesforce as an ERP, but there's so much more to it than that. And Salesforce, at its heart, is a relational database with a fancy user interface. And when I say, “I'm a Salesforce developer,” they're like, “Oh, you work at Salesforce?” And I'm like, “No, not quite. I customize Salesforce for companies that purchase Salesforce as a Salesforce customer.”And the extensibility of the platform is really awesome. And you know, speaking of the external clients that want to use Salesforce, there's, like, Community Cloud where you can come in and have guest users. You can have your—if you are, say at a phone company, you can have a troubleshooting help center. You can have chatbots in Salesforce. I have a lot of friends who are working on AI chatbots with the Einstein AI within Salesforce, which is actually really cool. So, there is a lot of functionality that is extensible within Salesforce beyond just a basic Excel spreadsheet. And it's a lot of fun.Corey: If I pull up your website, anothersalesforceblog.com, one of the first things that you mentioned on the About the Author page just below the fold, is that you are an eight-time Salesforce Certified Developer and application architect. Like, wow, “Eight different certifications? What is this, AWS, on some level?”I think that there's not a broad level of awareness in the ecosystem, just how vast the Salesforce-specific ecosystem really is. It seems like there's an entire, I want to reprise the term that someone—I can't recall who—used to describe Dark Matter developers, the people that you don't generally see in most of the common developer watering holes like Stack Overflow, or historically shitposting on Twitter, but they're out there. They rock in, they do their jobs. Why is it that we don't see more Salesforce representation in, I guess, the usual tech watering holes?Evelyn: So, we do have a Stack Overflow, a Stack Exchange as well. They are separate entities that are within the greater Stack websites. And I assure you, there's lots of Salesforce shitposting on Twitter. I used to be very good at it, but no longer on Twitter due to personal reasons. We'll leave it at that.But yeah, Dreamforce is like a massive conference that happens in San Francisco every year. We are gearing up for that right now. And there's not a lot of visibility into Salesforce outside of that it feels like. It's kind of an insulated community. And that goes back to the Salesforce being at the kids' table in the engineering departments.And one of the things that I've been working on in my current role is really breaking down the barriers and the silos between the engineering department who's working on JavaScript, they're working on Node, they're working on HTML, they're, you know, building websites with React or whatever, and I'm coming in and saying, like, hey, we do the same thing. I can build a Heroku app in React, if I want to, I can do PHP, I can do this. And that's one of the cool things about Salesforce is some days I get to write in, like, five or six different languages if I want to. So, that is something that, there's not a lot of understanding. Because again, relational database with a fancy user interface.To the outside, it may seem like we're dragging and dropping stuff. Which yes, there is some stuff. I love Flows, which are… they're drag-and-drop automations that you can do within Salesforce that are actually really powerful. In the most recent update, you can actually do an HTTP call-out in a Flow, which is something that's, like, unheard of for a Salesforce admin with no coding background can come in, they can call an Apex class, they can do an HTTP call-out to an external resource and say, like, “Hey, I want to grab this information, pull it back into Salesforce, and get running off the ground with, like, zero development resources, if there are none available.”Corey: I want to call out just for people who think this is more niche than it really is. I live in San Francisco. And I remember back in pre-Covid times, back when Dreamforce was in town. I started seeing a bunch of, you know, nerdy-looking people with badges. Oh, it's a tech conference, what conference is it? It's something called Dreamforce for Salesforce.Oh, is that like the sad small equivalent of re:Invent in Las Vegas? And it's no, no, it's actually about three times the size. 170,000 people descend on San Francisco to attend this conference. It is massive. And it was a real eye-opener for me just to understand that. I mean, I have a background in sales before I got into tech and I did not realize that this entire ecosystem existed. It really does feel like it is more or less invisible and made me wonder what the hell else I'm missing, as I am too myopically focused on one particular giant cloud company to the point where it has now become a major facet of my personality.Evelyn: And that's the thing is there's all kinds of community events as well. So, I'm actually speaking at Forcelandia which, it's a Salesforce developer-focused event that is in Portland—Forcelandia, obviously—and I'm going to be speaking on a project that I built for my current company that is, like, REST APIs, we've got some encryption, we've got a front-end widget that you drop into a Salesforce object. Which, a Salesforce object is a table within the relational database, and being able to use polymorphic object relationships within Salesforce and really extending the functionality of Salesforce. So, if you're in Portland, I will be at Forcelandia on July 13th and I'm really excited about it.But it's this really cool ecosystem that, you know, there's events all over the world, every month, happening. And we've got Mile High Dreamin' coming up in August, which I'll be at as well, speaking there on how to break into the ecosystem from a non-tech role, which will be exciting. But yeah, it's a really vibrant community like, and it's a really close-knit community as well. Everyone is so super helpful. If I have a question on Stack Exchange, or, you know, back in my Twittering days, if I'd have something on Twitter, I could just post out and blast out, and the whole Salesforce community would come in with answers, which is awesome. I feel like the Stack Exchange is not the friendliest place on the planet, so to be able to have people who, like, I recognize that username and this person is going to come and help me out. And that's really cool. I like that about the Salesforce community.Corey: Yeah, a ding for a second on the whole Stack Exchange thing. That the Stack Overflow survey was fascinating, and last year, they showed that 92% of their respondents were male. So, this year, they fixed that problem and did not ask the question. So, I just refer to it nowadays as Stack Broverflow because that's exactly how it seems.Evelyn: [laugh].Corey: And that is a giant problem. I just didn't want that to pass uncommented-on in public. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to basically—Evelyn: Fair enough.Corey: —mouth off about that crappy misbehavior.Evelyn: Oh, yeah. No. And that's one of the things that I really like about the Salesforce community is there's actually, like, a huge movement towards gender equity and parity. So, one of the organizations that I'm involved with is RAD Women Code, which is a nonprofit that Angela Mahoney and a couple of other women started that it seeks to upskill women and other marginalized genders from Salesforce admins, which are your declarative users within Salesforce that set up the security settings, they set up the database relationships, they make metadata changes within Salesforce, and take that relational database knowledge and then upskill them into Salesforce developers.And right now, there is a two-part course that you can sign up for. If you have I believe it's a year or two of Salesforce admin experience and you are a woman or other marginalized gender, you can sign up and take part one, which is a very intro to computer programming, you go over the basics of object-oriented programming, a little bit of Java, a little bit of SOQL, which is the Salesforce Object Query Language. And then you build projects, which is really awesome, which is, like, the most effective way to learn is actually building stuff. And then the second part of the course is, like, a more advanced, like, let's get into our bash classes, which is like an automation that you can run every night. Let's do advanced object-oriented programming topics like abstraction and polymorphism. And being able to teach that is really fun.We're also planning on adding a third course, which is going to be the front-end development in Salesforce, which is your HTML, your JavaScript. Salesforce uses vanilla JavaScript, which I love, personally. I know I'm alone in that. I know that's the big meme on Facebook in the programming groups is ‘JavaScript bad,' but I have fun with it. There's a lot you can do with just native JavaScript in Salesforce. Like, you can grab the geolocation of a device and print it onto a Salesforce object record using just vanilla JavaScript. And it's been really helpful. I've done that a few times on various projects.But yeah, we're planning on adding a third course. We are currently getting ready to launch the pilot program on that for RAD Women Code. So, if you are listening to this, and you are a Salesforce admin who is a marginalized gender, definitely hit me up on LinkedIn and I will send you some information because it's a really good program and I love being able to help out with it.Corey: We'll definitely include links to that in the [show notes 00:18:59]. I mean, this does tie into the next question I have, which is, how do you go about giving a cohesive talk or even talking at all about Salesforce, given the tremendous variety in terms of technical skills people bring to bear with it, the backgrounds that they have going into it? It feels, on some level, like, it's only a half-step removed from, “So, you're into computers? Here's a conference for that.” Which I understand, let's be clear here, that I am speaking from the position of the AWS ecosystem, which is throwing stones in a very fragile glass house.Evelyn: Yeah, so again, I said this already. When I say I'm a Salesforce developer, people say, “Oh, you work at Salesforce. That is so cool.” And I have to say, “No, no. No working at Salesforce. I work on Salesforce in the proprietary system.” But there's always stuff to be learned. There's obviously, like, two releases a year where they send updates to the Salesforce software that companies are running on and working on computers is kind of how I sum it up, but yeah, I don't know [laugh].Corey: No, I think that's a fair place to come at from. It's, I think that we all have a bit of a bias in that we tend to assume that other people, in the absence of data to the contrary, have similar backgrounds and experiences to our own. And that means in many cases, we paper over things that are not necessarily true. We find ourselves biasing for people whose paths resemble our own, which is not inherently a bad thing until it becomes exclusionary. But it does tend to occlude the fact that there are many paths to this broader industry.Evelyn: Yeah. So, there is a term in the Salesforce ecosystem, we like to call people accidental admins, where they learn Salesforce on a job and like it so much that they become a Salesforce admin. And a lot of times these folks will then become developers and then architects, even, which is kind of how I got into it as well. I started at a phone company as a Salesforce end-user, worked my way up as a database admin, database coordinator doing e911 databases, and then transitioned into software engineering from there. So, there's a lot of folks who find themselves within the Salesforce ecosystem, and yeah, there are people with, like, bonafide top-ten computer science school degrees, and you know, we've got a fair bit of that, but one thing that I really like about the Salesforce ecosystem is because everyone's so friendly and helpful and because there's so many resources to upskill folks, it's really easy to get involved in the ecosystem.Like Trailhead, the training platform for Salesforce is entirely free. You can sign up for an account, you can learn anything on Salesforce from end-user stuff to Salesforce architecture and anything in between. So, that's how most people study for their certifications. And I love Trailhead. It's a very fun little modules.It gamifies learning and you get little, I call them Girl Scout badges because they resemble, you know, you have your Girl Scout vest and your Girl Scout sash, and you get the little badges. So, when you complete a project, you get a badge—or if you work on a big project, a super badge—that you can then put on your resume and say, “Hey, I built this 12-hour project in Salesforce Trailhead.” And some of them are required for certifications. So, you can say, “I did this. I got this certification, and I can actually showcase my skills and what I've been working on.”So, it really makes a good entrance to the ecosystem. Because there's a lot of people who want to break into tech that don't necessarily have that background that are able to do so and really, really shine. And I tell people, like, let's see, it's 2023. Eight years ago, I was a barista. I was doing undergraduate research and working in a coffee shop. And that's really helped me in my career.And a lot of people don't think about this, but the soft skills that you learn in, like, a food service job or a retail job are really helpful for communicating with those internal and external stakeholders, technical and non-technical stakeholders. And if you've ever been yelled at by a Karen on a Sunday morning, in a university town on graduation weekend, you can handle any project manager. So, that's one thing that, like, because there's so many resources in the ecosystem, there's so many people with so many varied backgrounds in the ecosystem, it's a really welcoming place. And there's not, like… I don't know, there's not a lot of, like, degree shaming or school shaming or background shaming that I feel happens in some other tech spaces. You know, I see your face you're making there. I know you know what I'm talking about. But—[laugh].Corey: I have an eighth-grade education on paper. My 20s were very interesting. Now, it's a fun story, but it was very tricky to get past a lot of that bias early on in my career. You're not wrong.Evelyn: Absolutely. And like I said, eight years ago, I was a barista. I went to school for chemical engineering. I have an engineering background, I have most of a chemical engineering degree. I just hated it so much.But getting into Salesforce honestly changed my life because I worked my way up from a call center as an end-user on Salesforce. Being able to say I have worked as a consultant. I have worked as a staff software engineer, I have worked at an ISV partner, which if you don't know what that is, Salesforce has an app store, kind of like the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, but purely apps on Salesforce, and it's called the Salesforce App Exchange. So, if you have Salesforce, you can extend your functionality by adding an app from the App Exchange to if you want to use Salesforce as an ERP, for example, you can add the Certinia app from the App Exchange. And I've worked on AppExchange apps before, and now I'm like, making a big kid salary and, like, it's really, really kind of cool because ten years ago, I didn't think my life was going to be like this, and I owe it to—I'm going to give my old boss Scott Bell a shout out on this because he hired me, and I'm happy about it, so thank you, Scott for taking a chance and letting me learn Salesforce. Because now I'm on Screaming in the Cloud, which is really cool, so—talking about Salesforce, which is dorky, but it's really fun.Corey: If it works, what's wrong with it?Evelyn: Exactly.Corey: There's a lot to be said for helping people find a path forward. One of the things that I've always been taken aback by has been just how much small gestures can mean to people. I mean, I've had people thanked me for things I've done for them in their career that I don't even remember because it was, “You introduced me to someone once,” or, “You sat down with me at a conference and talked for 20 minutes about something that then changed the course of my career.” And honestly, I feel like a jerk when I don't remember some of these things, but it's a yeah, you asked me my opinion, I'm thrilled to give it to you, but the choices beyond that are yours. It still sticks out, though, that the things I do can have that level of impact for people.Evelyn: Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the things about the Salesforce community is there are so many opportunities to make those potentially life-changing moments for people. You can give back by being a Trailblazer Mentor, you can sign up for Trailblazer Mentorship from any level of your career, from being a basic fresh, green admin to signing up for architecture lessons. And the highest level of certification in Salesforce is the Certified Technical Architect. There's, like, 300 of them in the world and there are nonprofits that are entirely dedicated to helping marginalized genders and women and black and indigenous people of color to make these milestones and go for the Certified Technical Architect certification.And there's lots of opportunities to give back and create those moments for people. And I spoke at Forcelandia last year, and one of the things that I did—it was the Women in Tech breakfast, and we went over my LinkedIn—which is apparently very good, so if you don't know what to do on LinkedIn, you can look at mine, it's fine—we went through LinkedIn and your search engine optimization in LinkedIn and how you can do this, and you know, how to get recruiters to look at your LinkedIn profile. And I went through my salary history of, like, this is how much I was making ten years ago, this is how much I'm making now, and this is how much I made at every job on the way. And we went through and did that. And I had, like, ten women come up to me afterwards and say, “I have never heard someone say outright their salary numbers before. And I don't know what to ask for when I'm in negotiations.”Corey: It's such a massive imbalance because all the companies know what other people are making because they get a holistic view. They know what they're paying across the board. I think a lot of the pay transparency movement has been phenomenal. I've been in situations before myself, where my boss walks up to me out of nowhere, and gives me a unsolicited $10,000 raise. It's, “Wow, thanks.” Followed immediately by, “Wait a minute.”Evelyn: Mm-hm.Corey: People generally don't do that out of the goodness of their hearts. How underpaid, am I? And every time it was, yeah, here's the $10,000 raise so you don't go get 30 somewhere else.Evelyn: Yeah. And that's one of the things that, like, going into job negotiations, women and people of marginalized genders will apply for jobs that they're a hundred percent qualified for, which means that they're not growing in their positions. So, if you're not kind of reaching when you're applying for positions, you're not going to get the salary you need, you're not going to get that career growth you need, whereas, not to play this card, but like, white men will go in and be, like, “I've got 60% of the qualifications. I'm going to ask for this much money.” And then they get it.And it's like, why don't I do that? It's, you know, societal whatever is pressuring me not to. And being able to talk transparently about that stuff is, like, so important. And these women just, like, went into salary negotiations a couple weeks later, and I had one of them message me and say, like, “Yeah, I asked for the number you said at this conference and I got it.” And I was like, “Yes! congratulations.” Because that is life-changing, especially, like, because so many of us come from non-technical backgrounds in Salesforce, you don't know how much money you can make in tech until you get it, and it's absolutely life-changing.Corey: Yeah, it's wild to me, but that's the way it works. I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Evelyn: So, I am reachable at anothersalesforceblog.com, and evelyn.fyi, E-V-E-L-Y-N dot F-Y-I, which actually just links back to another Salesforce blog, which is fine. But I'm really [laugh] reachable on LinkedIn and really active there, so if you need any Salesforce mentorship, I do that. And I love doing it because so many people have helped me in my career that it's really, like, anything I can do to give back. And that's really kind of the attitude of the Salesforce ecosystem, so definitely feel free to reach out.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:30:27]. Thank you so much for taking the time to, I guess, explain how an entire swath of the ecosystem views the world.Evelyn: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me, Corey.Corey: Evelyn Grizzle, Senior Salesforce Developer. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that I will one day aggregate somewhere, undoubtedly within Salesforce.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

In this week's episode, Navid and Sonia sit down with Mehmet Orun, Sr. VP of Product at PeerNova, to announce the launch of Cuneiform for CRM, a business data quality application now available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Mehmet answers the following questions: What is the largest data quality challenge that organizations face today?What are the current gaps in today's data quality for CRM applications?What is Cuneiform for CRM?What does it mean when data is fit-for-business purpose?How is it different from current data quality applications on the AppExchange?Read the AnnouncementDownload Cuneiform for CRM in the AppExchange

Episode OverviewIf you have thought about launching an app on the Salesforce App exchange or are in the process, this podcast is for you. Andi covers:Why use an outsourced dev team for app developmentDifferent types of apps - hybrid and native How to get the best out of Indian developers How Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning will develop and how to get ahead of the curveAbout Andi GiriAndi Giri is an IT entrepreneur with about 35 years of experience. He completed his BE degree at the College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, India, and an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park. He launched Softsquare in 1998 as an IT staff augmentation firm and pivoted the company towards managed services in 2008. In 2021, Andi drove the product practice toward delivering several commercial products, strengthening recurring revenue for Softsquare. He served as the President of Greater Washington Tamil Sangam in 1998 and as the Founder-President of AIMS India Foundation from 2000-2003. Andi has mentored and invested in startups since 2020 via Native Angel Network in Madurai, India, and Guindy Alumni Angel Network in San Francisco, CA, USA.Links471 - Show Notessoftsquare.bizAndi's LinkedIn profileReach Andi through email at asgiri@softsquare.bizPaulhigginsmentoring.comScaling BlueprintThe Workflow AcademyCloud Consultants CollectiveThe Cloud Consultants ShowSendSparkJoin our newsletterConnect With PaulOn LinkedIn

The convergence of the pandemic-induced shift to online shopping, global supply chain disruptions, and a labour shortage have created a perfect economic storm that has significantly impacted the eCommerce industry. However, amidst these challenging times, SMBs have found themselves uniquely positioned to take advantage of the surge in online sales during the holiday season. We recently got the chance to chat with the CEO & Founder of StoreConnect, a Salesforce AppExchange solution that, along with Salesforce, provides the Worlds Most Powerful SMB eCommerce solution. His experience ranges from network infrastructure design to VOIP and telephony to custom web application development and running successful SaaS businesses.In this episode, Mikel shared his thoughts on how e-commerce is the best way for small businesses to meet customers.

How the two of us met. What problems I (Don) was solving, what problems you (Mike) were solving? What led you to form PIMLY? Why do you feel this time is now for PIMLY? Can you tell us more about Pimly and what led you to create this app on the Salesforce AppExchange? How did your experience in the Business Builders program help shape the growth and development of PIMLY? As you prepare to attend various events such as Shoptalk and Dreamforce, what are you hoping to achieve and what message do you hope to convey to attendees? Can you give us a sneak peek of what attendees can expect from this event and why it's important for those interested in Omni-commerce, PIM, and CRM to attend?

Tom Melbourne is the Founder of OpnMkt (pronounced Open Market) which is a Salesforce-Native utility app on the AppExchange for a marketplace approach to the distribution of new leads or new opportunities. OpnMkt is more than just a sales effectiveness tool. It's completely reimagining the status quo when it comes to maximizing sales capacity.Tom has had an incredible career on his way to starting OpnMkt. He started out as an Account Executive where he was very successful and then went on to leading sales teams for companies like CareerBuilder, Citrix, MixPanel and Sendoso. He's been a VP of Sales 3x over and is also an angel investor and a strategic advisor.In this episode, Tom challenges the way we think about sales structure in terms of pre-defined territories and/or named account lists. He offers an innovative alternative to traditional SDR to AE routing/distribution that can inherently open up more sales capacity.#salesconsultantpodcast #salescapacity #leadrouting #accountdistribution #sdr #salesdevelopment #salesterritory #namedaccountsTime Stamps:[2:00] Tom starts by telling the story of starting a wedding DJ business at 12 which he ran all the way through college. This led to him and a partner creating a wedding planning app right out of college that they sold to companies. [8:00] Explains what he attributes his progressive career to. Tom gives some advice to people who might be earlier in their career; nurture your network.[10:23] Nobody cares about a lead until someone wants to buy something + the origin story of OpnMkt.[13:00] The one thing missing from lead distribution platforms today is involvement from the Account Executive. The more excited a rep is about working a lead the better that lead will be worked.[15:00] The current model of SDR to AE opportunity routing is inherently inconsistent due to the AE's expectation varying based on the health of their funnel. [19:00] Pre structured territories limit the ability to dynamically route leads. We talk through an example where a lead surfaced that was generated via a rep's brand building/social media activity and how unless an exception was made that rep most likely wouldn't get the lead.[22:30] Tom helps us understand what “Sales Capacity” even means. Then he gets into how we inherently limit capacity through the traditional approaches to structuring our orgs and our territories.[26:00] We unpack an alternative approach to just defaulting to the same ol ‘assign everything to the salespeople/Account Executives'. The approach is innovative ad creates optionality which leads to increased sales capacity.[37:00] He explains the inherent challenges to the traditional SDR/AE pod model (i.e., personality conflicts, inconsistent SDR development, etc.) [41:30] The tension between quality and quantity and how SDR compensation changes for the better in this new model. [47:00] Why and how creating optionality in your distribution helps maximize sales capacity.Mentions:OpnMkt - https://www.opnmkt.ioSendoso - https://sendoso.comConnect with us:Tom's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommelbourne/OpnMkt - https://www.opnmkt.ioOpnMkt on the Salesforce AppExchange -

The Salesforce AppExchange is a marketplace for cloud-based applications that can be used with Salesforce's customer relationship management (CRM) software. No matter where you are on your Salesforce journey, you'll have access to tried-and-tested apps, that will help you tackle your particular business challenges and speed up your digital transformation. Luca Benini, COO and co-founder at Nativevideo a Salesforce AppExchange Partner and features in today's episode of the Salesforce Posse podcast to share his incredible experience at Salesforce. Luca has been in the Salesforce ecosystem for many years and was MD of Europe for Buddy Media, a social media tool that Salesforce acquired in 2012. Today, we started the conversation by discussing how Luca got into the Salesforce ecosystem and the world of App Exchange apps. We delve into the many types of Salesforce App Exchange apps, the creation process at a high level, the various ways in which you may monetize your app, and the best practices for making a successful app. Furthermore, Luca elaborates on why he enjoys participating in Demo Jams. Also, we discuss our favourite audiobooks, and Luca shares some words of wisdom he would give his younger self if he could travel back in time. Resources Connect with Luca: linkedin.com/in/lucabenini/ Audiobooks we talk about: Born to Run: audible.com/pd/Born-to-Run-Audiobook/B002V8KTYG Shantaram: audible.com/pd/Shantaram-Audiobook/B00GT1240I The Phoenix Project: audible.com/pd/The-Phoenix-Project-Audiobook/B00VAZZY32 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/salesforce-posse/message

In this Futurum Live! From the Show Floor at Mobile World Congress 2023, Shelly Kramer is joined by Meredith Alexander, Senior Manager, Product Marketing and Kishore Sannidhanam, Vice President Industry Advisors, Communications & Media for Salesforce for a conversation about what is happening in the communications industry, and what organizations need to know to adapt. The conversation revolved around: New trends in the communications industry How organizations can unlock new revenue streams through NaaS marketplaces A look into the Salesforce App Exchange marketplace What's new from Salesforce that can help communications companies meet their goals and respond to market changes It was a great conversation, and one you don't want to miss. To learn more about the latest communications trends that can decrease churn and boost efficiency, visit Salesforce's website here.

On this episode, Charles Yang, Senior Director of Product Management at ScreenMeet, and Tehsin Daya, Head Of Partnerships at Groove, share their journeys with Salesforce, the leading CRM platform, and how their partner program AppExchange accelerated their kickstart. AppExchange is an enterprise cloud marketplace with more than 7000 apps and certified consulting organizations that work with Salesforce. Charles and Tehsin speak about how they got started with Salesforce, how AppExchange accelerates the journey, and they both offer suggestions for those considering their own path with Salesforce. They discuss the main outcomes of the program, which are essentially networking, good connections and co-marketing. For those wanting to get started on AppExchange, Tehsin says, “First understand Salesforce and their strategy, then align within that strategy in a way that makes sense to you.” Charles Yang - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckyang/ ScreenMeet - https://www.linkedin.com/company/screenmeet/ Tehsin Daya - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdaya/ Groove - https://www.linkedin.com/company/groove.co/ Resources mentioned: Qualified - https://www.qualified.com/ Test Drive widget on AppExchange - https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxContentListingDetail?listingId=a0N3u00000PtX4aEAF Note: SaaS Connect 2023 will take place in San Francisco April 19th and 20th. If you would like to be a sponsor, please contact us at admin@cloudsoftwareassociation.com for information. Thank you to our amazing podcast team at Content Allies. Want to launch your own B2B revenue-generating podcasts? Contact them at https://ContentAllies.com. #saas #cloud #software

Salesforce has quickly risen in the ranks to dominate the enterprise software market, specifically customer relationship management, surpassing even the most recognizable of industry behemoths. Despite this notoriety, few truly know about the ERP offerings within Salesforce.com's AppExchange that are written on the Salesforce Lighting platform, specifically FinancialForce and other sound products, Rootstock and Accounting Seed. In this episode of the ERP Advisor, Shawn Windle provides a full inspection of the ERP offerings of Force.com. Connect with us!https://www.erpadvisorsgroup.com866-499-8550LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/erp-advisors-groupTwitter:https://twitter.com/erpadvisorsgrpFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/erpadvisorsInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/erpadvisorsgroupPinterest:https://www.pinterest.com/erpadvisorsgroupMedium:https://medium.com/@erpadvisorsgroup

In this episode of Agents of Nonprofit, I talk with Matt Frank - Director of Technology Evangelism and Product Marketing at Blackthorn. Blackthorn helps to meet the needs of modern nonprofit organizations in meaningful ways through their Salesforce-native apps.Topics we cover include:What Blackthorn offers to nonprofits to help them succeedThe ethos of simplicity behind Blackthorn appsBlackthorn's Salesforce-native apps that help nonprofits with Payments & Event ManagementEnabling organizations to prevent harmful data from entering the CRMThe emphasis on listening to potential customers to ensure mutual fitsHow Blackthorn predicts what their customers will need 18+ months in advance To learn more about Blackthorn & connect with Matt Frank:Blackthorn.ioMatthew Frank on LinkedInBlackthorn Events on Salesforce AppExchange

In Episode 17 we speak with Tripp Wallace- Head of Global Partnerships and Alliances at SMS Magic a leading SMS and conversational messaging company. Tripp discusses how modern organizations can take advantage of one-to-one messaging across different business cases for sales, marketing, support and commerce. Tripp dives into several industry specific verticals including Healthcare, Financial Services, Legal Services , Higher Education and some interesting Travel and Casino use cases for personal messaging. About SMS Magic: Founded in 2007 SMS Magic is recognized as a Global Leader in the messaging space with key partnerships with leading CRM platforms like Salesforce and ZOHO. SMS Magic rated as one of the most downloaded apps on the Salesforce AppExchange and ZOHO marketplace and trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide. https://www.sms-magic.com/

Sign up for our weekly newsletter, The Technopath Way Tips, here: echnopath.ac-page.com/the-technopath-way-sign-upChris Federspiel began his career at a young age, coding websites in middle school followed by Perl and CGI scripts in high school. He later moved into the field of sales and marketing for Internet Creations and Silverline. His entrepreneurial spirit led him to co-found Plative as a Salesforce Systems Integrator (SI), followed by Brainiac. Chris's latest venture, Blackthorn.io, was established in 2015 and has seen exponential growth and success since then, having received multiple Salesforce.org Partner of the Year awards. Under Chris's leadership, his dedicated teams have worked relentlessly to earn Blackthorn Events the honor of being the highest-rated events app on the Salesforce AppExchange, while Blackthorn Payments now has the most gateways and payment methods available on the platform.Chris's Tips for Taming the Event Tech Overwhelm:* Every event has a message to deliver whether it's a new piece of content, capital campaign or updates to stake holders * Think through what your event's message is and how you'll know if you've conveyed it to your audience/constituents/donors* Answer these questions to help you think through event metrics you'll need * Will this be in person, virtual or hybrid? * Do you know who attended which types of events in the past? * If they were virtual, do you know if they actually attended vs just registered? * Do you know how long they were at your event? (For in person: Did they stay the whole time, leave before the keynote, etc? For virtual: Did they log on early/late? Did they pop in and out of the event? When did they exit the virtual event space?) * Did this person register for and attend more than one of your events? Which ones? * Did they engage with you at the event? Did they type in the chat box, ask a question, participate in a poll? * Have you entered data from past events into your database? * What do you want these attendees to do after this event? (Ie, become a recurring donor, attend more events, volunteer regularly, make a planned gift)* Make your event as easy to engage with as possible * Have multiple ways for attendees to tell you what they're thinking with polls * Focus on making your event's content compelling* Have one system for everything (event attendance recording, donor/attendee information, payment processing, poll results) rather than seperate systems you have to cobble together or remember to update individually* If you're having sponsors consider a piece of technology that integrates with the rest of your system to be able to see if attendees engaged with sponsors, which ones and how * C-vent for virtual, in person and hybrid events with sponsors https://www.cvent.com/* Silent Auction management * Blackthorn.io event management and payment processing apps. They are native to Salesforce so you will skip having to do all of the extra data imports, tech management and typical scrambleOther Interesting Links* Stripe Climate * https://stripe.com/climate * Contribute a portion of the revenue you accept through stripe toward funding companies working toward capturing carbon in the atmosphere* Watsi * https://watsi.org * A nonprofit organization collecting donations to fund vital health care and procedures for people in developing countries.

In this episode, host Kelly Kohlleffel is joined by James Weakley, Co-Founder of Omnata. James and his team are building enterprise integration for the modern data stack. James started Omnata in his spare time while working at NIB, a publicly listed healthcare insurer. NIB introduced Databricks to create predictive modeling which created large data sets. The team quickly faced the issue of storing those 40 million records and being able to access and gain value from that data. Omnata was successfully implemented to solve this challenge as a free app in the Salesforce App Exchange. Since then, James has taken Omnata on full time. They offer an enterprise integration solution with Omnata Connect and a reverse ETL tool with Omnata Push. Listen in to the episode to hear more about how Omnata developed, their GTM strategy, and how James got started from an agriculture technology background. Show Notes: Learn more about Omnata: https://omnata.com Find Opinions, technical guides, and product news from Omnata: https://omnata.com/blog Connect with James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-weakley/ On tap for today's episode: White Russian and a modified "Vegan White Irish Russian" Contact Us: https://www.hashmapinc.com/reach-out

In today's episode, I talk with Ryan Hitchler who is the CEO and co-founder of Centro. He shares how we got into the ecosystem. We discuss building a unique connector between Salesforce and Slack after his time at Conga and CRM Culture (ActionGrid). Ryan is the guy that I go to whenever I have any questions about Slack and is on the leading edge of all things Slack & Salesforce. I really appreciate his honest take of options for ISVs to learn more about Slack and how to integrate to it....with or without Centro! Here's a closer look at the episode: How did you get into the ecosystem? Building a unique connector Salesforce and Slack What's been the best program that you created or been a part of? What types of communication happen in Slack? What are you most proud of from your time in the ecosystem? Advice for founders Sharing mistakes to learn from Any specific KPI improvements? What's been your best performing lead sources? What should other ISVs be thinking about in regards to Slack? Best practices to collaborate Where should you start? Vision for Slack and Salesforce This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Steven Jacobson, CEO & Founder of Appinium, shares his journey to the ecosystem with video and learning on Salesforce with Appinium and prior to that he founded Cornerstone for Salesforce (formerly CyberU) Steve used feedback from Mark Cuban(!) led Steve to not only build a moat but build a river around Appinium. He shares candid learnings around how important having alignment is for a high-performing organization and how Salesforce's V2MOM framework. Shoutout to Tiffany Kreinbrink on his team for rallying the company around V2MOM to drive direction. Appinium now creates a V2MOM with their prespective customers during the sales process that is handed off to the implementation & support teams to hold themselves accountable to what was discussed during the sales process. It's helped improve sales metrics all the way through 118% Net Revenue Retention. Steve shares his experience selling to Salesforce as a customer not once, but twice! It's a journey but it is worth it. He is such an awesome person to follow in the ecosystem and is always willing to help other people out. Tosie.force.org - Steven's children's non-profit. Our mission to help dogs and other animals find their Forever home. This company was founded, named, and run by kids! (With some help from the parents). V2MOM Trailhead - A course to get introduced to Salesforce's organizational framework. Use the V2MOM process to get aligned on goals and strategies across the company. (And maybe sell with it, like Appinium!) This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Yeva Roberts, Director of Strategic Alliances at AllCloud, shares her journey into the Salesforce ecosystem starting with Taylor, PFL, and Yotpo before switching from ISVs to SI alliances with AllCloud. AllCloud is a platinum Salesforce SI and one of the fastest growing ones out there. Yeva shares her perspective on the value exchange between ISVs and SIs by creating a compelling story to demonstrate how your application can close a gap for them or help them meet their revenue goals. Great tip is to check the SI's LinkedIn to see if they have a full-time ISV Alliances person and if they don't, it is likely they will only care about you if you help them close a gap in their offering. I could have spoken with Yeva for hours as she has so much experience to share! This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Andrea Maliska, Founder of Rebel Learn joins the podcast. Rebel Learn is a learning and development consultancy. Andrea has taken her learnings from working at Conga to many companies inside and outside the ecosystem. She shares a few examples but is most proud of the CTA bootcamp she worked on with Sebastian Wagner called Flow Republic. She shares how to start small on internal and partner learning and development. It's important to identify and lean into your internal subject matter experts (SMEs) who will be key to getting to your finished goal. 75-80% of the content you will produce for enablement of internal employees and partners should have overlap so feel comfortable upcycling the content you already have. This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Vamos saber tudo sobre como é publicar aplicativos no Salesforce AppExchange? Trouxemos o Fernando Sousa que é CEO e Fundador da Souforce.cloud para nos clarificar todos os desafios enfrentados como fornecedor de software independente (ISV) na loja de aplicativos mais famosa do mundo! Confira conosco através do link: https://bit.ly/appexchange-csb _ Gostou do conteúdo? Se inscreva, curta e compartilhe nossas redes sociais para não perder todas as novidades! https://campsite.bio/canalsalesforcebrasil _ ⚡ Oferecimento: Innolevels www.innolevels.com.br Flosum www.flosum.com _

Peeklogic Salesforce Connector - an App published on Atlassian marketplace to extend existing app - Peeklogic Jira Connector published on Salesforce AppExchange marketplace.

Max-Michael Mayer, CEO & Founder of ISVApp joins the podcast. Salesforce ISV/OEM partner since 2008, starting with PropertyBase before solving his own problem and founding ISVApp to help other Salesforce ISVs/OEMs with a toolbox to understand your usage analytics, flagging churn risks in the customer-base. He shares which usage metrics every ISV needs to track, specifically around the diligence process with potential investors giving them confidence in how you run your business (beyond just simple reference calls!) and much more about his experience building out a high-performing leadership team to help scale and eliminate key-man/key-woman risk as a founder. This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Maria Pergolino, CMO at ActiveCampaign, after working with Marketo, Apttus, and Anaplan has built much of her career in the ecosystem. From giving away a car at Dreamforce to trials in the enterprise, Maria shares some of her learnings from Marketing to the Salesforce ecosystem. I really enjoyed her thoughts on trialing while balancing self-serve and sales-led to improve the overall health of the pipeline. Sharing her journey as a woman executive and how she has reflected on helping other women around her in their careers. Follow Leyla Seka and Leslie Tom, which Maria calls out as people to pay attention to. And thank you for the introduction, Eric Dreshfield! This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Amanda Nelson is the Senior Director for Comms and Community over at Salesforce AppExchange. In this position, she spends her time helping customers solve their challenges with apps. She listens to their pain points and then creates content to solve their problems.   In this episode, Amanda and I talk about Demo Jams. We discuss what they are, their long history, and most importantly what they can do for you. Demo Jams are one of my favorite things so tune in to hear all about this fun way to learn about apps.   Show Highlights:   What Demo Jams are and how long they've been happening. How Amanda and her team kept them going during the pandemic. Why they give participants three minutes to pitch their app. How they coach their partners to perform well. Why they don't allow people to use slides. How they do live voting. What a Mega Demo Jam is. How Demo Jams benefit partners. How the community can repurpose Demo Jams. How to sign up for Demo Jams.   Links: Amanda on Twitter: twitter.com/amandanelson13 Amanda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandanelson13/ SalesforceLabs Github: https://github.com/SalesforceLabs Register for the Demo Jam/watch past Demo Jams: www.appdemojam.com

Salesforce Product Development Outsourcers (PDOs) - Who are they? What do they do? Why do they exist? Now, I don't mean to make them sound strange; PDO's have been around for quite a while. It's just that not a lot of people are aware of what exactly they do (including myself). In a nutshell: They help companies launch their apps on the Salesforce AppExchange. But this is just scratching the surface. In order to understand them in detail, I decided to do a series on PDO's and I could not have had a better guest to kick things off. George Kenessey is the CEO at Appiphony: A leading design and engineering boutique that specializes in building products on the Salesforce platform for Salesforce ISV partners since 2008. In this episode, George shares with us the many experiences he's had helping folks bring ideas to life in the Salesforce ecosystem. He shares a lot of sage advice for all those who wish to do the same. One of the biggest takeaways for all entrepreneurs who don't know where to start: Find problems that excite you, problems that you're willing to lose your sleep over. From ideation to release, these Product Development Outsourcers are experts in Salesforce product development and will help you get your product into the Salesforce AppExchange in the quickest and most cost effective manner. How, you might ask? Well click the play button and listen on to find out. George's Linkedin George's Twitter george@appiphony.com https://appiphony.com/ Books Mentioned - Creativity.Inc Extreme Ownership The Ride of a Lifetime --- Hey Listener! If you are reading this I just want to take a moment to say Thank you for your constant support. If you wish to advertise with us or are interested in learning how you can promote your product/ service with us head on over to https://forcepreneur.com/sponsor/ to learn more, or email me directly at hausmeister@forcepreneur.com

Casey Karp is the Director of North America ISV GTM Strategy at Simplus. She shares her journey from an ISV in the ecosystem to running ISV alliances at Simplus a platinum SI. If you've listened to the podcast, you are likely picking up on a theme - that Systems Integrators are a key reason why the ecosystem is so attractive to ISVs building product. Casey shares her POV that will help you as an ISV think through the WIIFM in terms that the SI can understand. She shares actionable tips and a lens to review your existing partner program to make them resonate more strongly. My personal highlight was when she shared how she reacts when she gets 2-3 emails from ISVs each week like clockwork and what gets an ISV noticed. This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Melanie Fellay, CEO & Co-Founder of Spekit shares her journey into the Salesforce ecosystem starting with owning a Salesforce instance and feeling the pain of adoption & documentation that inspired her to start a company to modernize how it's done. Melanie shares best practices around validating an idea using the Ideas Exchange and connecting with people in the ecosystem directly to harden your approach. Melanie shares a plethora of founding Sales tips - you need resiliency as you will fail, persona flexibility, knowing that budget ownership is important, pain vs. actual ROI, and trying to avoid a parade of features in your demo. Showing cool technology doesn't lead to sales! This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Ben Asfaha, CEO & Co-Founder of PipeLaunch, shares his founding story and reflects on the time he has spent at various ISVs like Nintex and Conga as well as Salesforce itself. He provides some tips around how to go about launch the app by taking a detailed mockup to customers & partners to refine their product prior to building out the brand and the value he saw by focusing on the challenge first. This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Drew Quinlan, Vice President, Strategic Alliances (ISV & GSI) at Ring Central, is a long-time ecosystem member (and big US Soccer fan) who has built his career on building and improving alliances programs. Drew shares his perspective on how founders need to take a focused approach to building an alliances motion and how to vary the volume of potential targets when talking technology partners (2-3) and services (20-30). He shares about his time at Conga where they invested in web-based education and technical enablement in the form of top-tier technical resources to build meaningful services partners. Drew is a board member for the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals and encourages any alliance professional to look into getting their certification. This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Eric Dreshfield is currently Partner Marketing Manager at ActiveCampaign, his primary responsibility is to drive awareness of ActiveCampaign in the Salesforce ecosystem through various methods including co-marketing with Salesforce, creation of customer success stories, thought-leadership blogging, webinars, etc. He is also responsible for maintaining the company’s listing on the Salesforce AppExchange and representing ActiveCampaign at Salesforce and Salesforce community events. Eric was first awarded the title of Salesforce Community MVP in Spring, 2013 and has been honored with the title every year through 2019. In 2020 he was named to the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame! ActiveCampaign is a cloud software platform for small-to-mid-sized businesses and is based in Chicago, Illinois. The company offers software for customer experience automation, which combines email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM categories. During this podcast episode, Ben sits down with Eric to discuss how Eric has navigated his career and how having built a personal brand has aided this process, we hear advice for others who are looking to make themselves more marketable, with tips and avenues to make this a less daunting process. Ben and Eric also touch upon the different ways we can raise awareness for diversity, equity and inclusion. Whilst you're here, check out Eric and Deepa Patel's Podcast: Untold Stories - No Longer Untold, a podcast highlighting the challenges and successes of many diverse individuals so that others will have hope for the future and so their stories will no longer be untold.

Lucy Mazalon, Head Editor/Operations Director at Salesforce Ben & The DRIP, is a long-time ecosystem member who offers a unique voice via Salesforce Ben & The Drip that helps Salesforce practitioners up-level their careers. Lucy shares her perspective of how ISVs are adjusting their strategies as in-person events have come to a halt due to COVID. Lucy walks through how to run effective experiments in driving leads, sharing best practices like looking at time on page and impressions but not getting too caught up on vanity metrics and focusing on results. Learn about the rule of 7 and how it drives action from your customers. This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Jon Jessup, CEO and Founder of 1440.io, launched his first AppExchange app in 2009 and is an active member of the Salesforce ISV community. His company 1440 has three products listed on the AppExchange today including Commerce Studio, Reputation Studio, and Translation Studio. He shares his feedback on why he builds on the Salesforce platform and some go-to-market tips for more technical founders. This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

Mike Wolff, SVP Global ISV Partners at Salesforce, talks about what he took from his direct sales experience to help guide him in his role with the ISV channel and shares a tip for how ISVs should best work with their PAMs (Partner Account Managers) - leveraging a V2MOM. If you're unfamiliar with V2MOM, it is a technology to drive alignment on top priorities across Salesforce's business. If you haven't already adopted something like OKRs or Traction (with ROCKS), the clarity it will provide is immense because if everything is important, then nothing is. Vision — what do you want to achieve? Values — what's important to you? Methods — how do you get it? Obstacles — what is preventing you from being successful? Measures — how do you know you have it? To get started, check out this blog post about how to your own V2MOM and there is even a trail on Trailhead that helps you walkthrough adopting this technology at your business. This episode is brought to you by Appiphony. Appiphony is a leading Product Development Outsourcer that has been helping AppExchange partners architect, develop and get their apps through the Salesforce security review, since 2009. Appiphony is the only PDO funded by Salesforce Ventures and its customers include Stripe, Slack, LinkedIn, Docusign, and Salesforce. Visit www.appiphony.com to learn more about how Appiphony can help your organization successfully launch their app on the Salesforce AppExchange today.

This episode features an interview with Esther Flammer, Vice President of Demand Generation  and acting CMO of Conga.Esther is a senior marketing executive with nearly 20 years of B2B and agency experience in SaaS, high-tech, and non-profit sectors. Her dynamic leadership has driven success at high-growth B2B technology companies like Conga, Convercent, and Return Path.On this episode, Esther discusses the balance between the art and science of marketing, what B2B can learn from B2C, and the different motions that fuel high-transaction, high-volume inbound pipeline versus the targeted ABM strategies that drive complex, enterprise-level deals.Key TakeawaysMarketing is a delicate balance of art and science, but in demand gen, you’re going to need a lot of data to back up the strategies you employ for generating the pipeline needed to meet the company’s goals.If you sell to SMB and Enterprise, high-velocity, high-transaction deals are going to be very different than complex, enterprise-level deals. Make sure you have distinct go-to-market strategies for each segment and that you’re fueling both engines, but that you also understand the overlap between the two.In-person events are on hold, but virtual events are still a strong tactic. The reach is much larger but you have to be much more focused, purposeful, and intentional about the content to keep audiences engaged.Quotes“We see so much ROI and a lot of the bigger deals and true qualified pipeline coming from [our ABM efforts]. It’s a very multichannel, targeted effort, starting with the technology that provides propensity to buy data…really defining what those target accounts look like, adding in targeted advertising so that we can warm them up and truly personalize…then ensuring that we're delivering the right message to the right person at the right time, that it's personal, that it's relevant and it’s aligned with where they are in their buyer's journey.”“We were invited to be on a pilot to try out Qualified.com on Salesforce AppExchange…and it's been a game changer completely. We've always had high volumes from AppExchange and from each of our product listings, but we were able to see much higher conversions, more qualified conversations and true pipeline come from that. So we’re huge fans.”“Because of the fact that we don't really have live events where you would typically see conversations happening at a booth, [conversational marketing] has been a great addition to our full demand gen strategy and the tactics and channels that we're utilizing.”“I think there's a lot that B2B can learn from B2C–tech and data analysis and neuromarketing and things like that. B2B tech is, I feel like, just starting to do that in a sense, but there's a lot that we can do to actually provide really relevant content to people who are looking to purchase.”“I feel like when you're in demand generation, there's kind of always a target on your back just because you are accountable for the pipeline that the business needs to close in order to hit the bookings goals. Demand generation in most cases is front and center: What are you doing? What is your strategy? How are you producing more pipeline? ...Everything is very much kind of that art and science of marketing…So we use a lot of data and science to figure out how much pipeline we need, and for me, our goal of the demand gen team is predictable pipeline. We put a lot of effort into trying to figure out how much pipeline do we need to create in this quarter in order to hit our goals, both this quarter as well as next quarter and beyond.”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.LinksCheck out Conga's Agents of Change Podcast 

In this special edition of the MSDW Podcast we are featuring a recent conversation between Microsoft MVP Rick McCutcheon and Microsoft global strategic ISV alliance manager John O'Donnell on how partners are utilizing Microsoft AppSource. Rick originally published this conversation as part of his Partner Talks series. Microsoft launched its AppSource ISV solution directory in 2016 as a replacement for a collection of old and fragmented systems. The initial coverage compared it to Salesforce AppExchange and Microsoft promised it would lead to higher ISV solution quality and that it would evolve quickly with. Nearly five years later, AppSource has evolved and grown, though probably not as quickly as Microsoft has wanted. Still, most ISVs in the  Dynamics 365 and Power Platform space list their solutions there, and some partners even list services offerings. Some vendors report closing sales thanks to the platform, others don't. In this conversation, O'Donnell emphasizes several strengths of the platform, from its global reach to its expanding set of offerings, beyond Dynamics 365 and Azure into other areas of Microsoft's business. They also discuss some ways vendors can optimize their listings to get the most out of the platform today.

Sergey (https://twitter.com/sergeyer) told me that I should have Pat as guest on my podcast. Now listen to this episode and you will know why . In episode 3, Andrea gave us the advice, just do it; in this episode we take a step further and say do it now. In this episode Pat shares his years of wisdom that he has gained, first working as a freelance video producer, then as a CMO of multi-million dollar company and lately as a Salesforce Solopreneur. He single-handedly published the Proton Blaster app on the Salesforce AppExchange. He also provides consulting on the side. His main advice to all of us, stop procrastinating and Do it Now! Tune in to listen to this last episode of the Solopreneur series. Pat's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patmcclellan/ Pat' twitter: https://twitter.com/patmcclellan__c Proton7:https://proton7group.force.com/protontext/s/

David, a Navy Gulf-War Veteran, is a seasoned technologist with more than 24 years of experience. He has participated in two IPOs (Rackspace and SolarWinds) and delivered more than 10 applications to market on the Salesforce AppExchange.  Over the last decade, Franklin has focused on cloud computing and machine learning for health care applications. He has studied at Moody Bible, Penn State, and MIT.  He is the founder of knowRX, Inc., as a top nationally ranked Start-up that focuses on empowering patients through medication adherence and clinical research engagement opportunities.

In this week’s special bonus episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re joined by Woodson Martin, EVP and GM, Salesforce AppExchange. He shares some amazing success stories of Salesforce customers that have made transformative adaptations over the past year. Join us as we talk about why a balance of speed and preparation is the key […] The post Admins Unlock Success Using AppExchange with Woodson Martin appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Salesforce Appexchange is a platform upon which people all over the world have built their own businesses. There are entrepreneurs who owe their success to the platform, and of course plenty of other entrepreneurs who want to hear from them for inspiration. So Salesforce created 'Trailblazing Entrepreneurs' - a podcast series that's not about the platform - it's about the people who've used it. What's more, they used their own in-house staff member as a presenter. This is a popular option than can obviously go two ways, depending on how naturally the rookie presenter take to the medium. In this episodes, Fresh Air Senior Producer Anouszka Tate and Tahseen Taj - Senior Manager, AppExchange Marketing at Salesforce - reflect on the success of the series, how they coached the host, and how they've created a valuable asset for the many enthusiastic users of their software.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It has been almost two decades since customer relationship management (CRM) applications began to be adopted as a powerful way to automate sales processes. Meanwhile, we have also seen marketing automation grow rapidly over the past 10 years or so to augment the CRM process experience for direct sales teams. However, the rise of partner relationship management (PRM) SaaS applications like ZINFI's has demonstrated where an application like Salesforce often falls short. While the development of a Salesforce-like CRM applications that can be customer-configured to address many partner relationship management requirements has been a big step forward, companies still need to invest substantially to customize these solutions successfully. The fact that CRM systems also lack built-in applications essential for PRM means they fall short of  providing true Unified Channel Management (UCM). This is why connecting an existing CRM infrastructure like Salesforce to a PRM infrastructure like ZINFI's makes a lot of sense. In this article, we will explore the core common points of connection between a CRM and PRM. When you think about sales automation, the first thing that comes to your mind is the word “revenue.” Yes, sales is all about generating revenue by closing deals from the leads that marketing generates. That's pretty much what a CRM does. CRM takes a bunch of leads that the marketing automation system feeds it, and then allows the sales team to nurture those leads in a systematic way through various sales stages like discovery, qualification, demo, trial, review, agreement, purchase, renewal and support. Sales managers can run various reports across their sales representatives and determine who is most effective, what is working and what needs changing. Automation also allows the elimination of repetitive tasks such as sending out a reminder to a prospect or offering sales collaterals or coming up with automated pricing. There are multiple use cases that a Salesfsorce-like CRM system can address, and its functionality can be extended by using a large number of applications available in Salesforce AppExchange. Some of the standalone applications that plug into Salesforce address other aspect of sales and marketing needs, including rewards, incentives and analytics. This is where ZINFI's partner relationship management (PRM) comes in. ZINFI is an AppExchange-approved PRM application provider. While Salesforce also lists a few other PRM applications, unlike those other applications ZINFI's PRM features an architecture and user interface that closely follows the logic of a CRM system. This allows a seamless flow of data flow back and forth between a Salesforce-like CRM and ZINFI's PRM.  Let's explore three core connection points in more detail here: Lead Management – As I began this article, I mentioned the primary purpose of a CRM system is to generate revenue by systematically managing the entire sales process from lead to close. The automation of this process is the focus of lead management in a CRM. Now, using a CRM for lead management works great for a direct sales team, but the moment you try to do lead management for channel sales using a CRM, things can quickly get quite complicated and expensive. This is where a purpose-built PRM like ZINFI's platform can help tremendously by seamlessly connecting to a Salesforce-like CRM system. The integration allows the direct sales team to use the CRM as they always do, while the indirect channel sales and partners can use ZINFI's PRM for lead managementDeal Registration – One unique use case for channel sales is protecting an opportunity for a specific partner. We have written multiple articles on deal registration, so I won't get in the details of it here. Let me just point out that the entire focus of deal registration is to eliminate channel conflict and allow a specific partner to pursue an opportunity from lead to close. Unlike CRMs,

SFDC Consultant is here to support your Salesforce Career through Interviews, Podcasts, Videos and Articles about and around the best way to grow and develop as a Salesforce Professional. We have a list of fully packed Podcast Episodes with Salesforce MVP, Salesforce Architects, Salesforce Consultants, Directors, Developers and Administrators. Guest Description Welcome to the SFDC Consultant Podcast. Today I am sharing a conversation with Gaurav Kheterpal. Gaurav is the impersonation of a true Salesforce Trailblazer and MVP. He has supported the community throughout his career and I am delighted to share my conversation with him. A number of people have reached out and asked about the best way to start a business with an App on the AppExchange, so today we will be speaking about Product Development Outsources. These are companies that can support you from the app idea stage, through development, security review and continuous support and development. These are some of my favourite SFDC Consultant Episodes:

SummaryWelcome back to another episode of Partner Up! – The Partnership Podcast. Today Kevin and Jared are joined by a very special guest and partnerships legend Bobby Napiltonia - the creator of the SalesForce AppExchange and SalesForce's Enterprise Channel; NotesThere were a few things discussed:· Jared introduces Bobby and talks about Bobby’s early days in Salesforce and asks a question about how it became so successful. Bobby talks about his early days in startup and what decision did his family motivate him to make. Bobby continues to explain how he obtained good customers and how to get big companies to notice you.· Bobby continues to explain how to win trust and methodically make someone successful. He also continues to explain his negotiations with Accenture and how they found customers they could take from Accenture to turn them around! Bobby explains his golden rule on how to make partners cooperate. · Kevin asks about the Day 1 mission and how does it change and Bobby brings us back to the hardships of the first week and what was his motto. Bobby continues to explain his technique on targeting cities. · Jared asks about more details about the packages and Bobby explains the importance of creating a repeatable model.· Bobby further explains what made his go after the financial services and explains how trust is the best attribute to have in a business like that. After Kevin’s question on investments, Bobby explains his technique and provides his insight on the development on the ecosystem. Bobby continues to explain how his reward system helped to build a successful system.· After Jared’s question, Bobby talks about the benefits of partnership and what he finds to be the best attribute in one. Bobby also goes into great detail to explain the process of hiring a partner. Bobby continues to talk about the problem with needed services during his time and the way how they helped the user. · Bobby warns the listeners about some mistakes that he has made in the beginning and talks about the possible solutions to them. He continues to talk about the main struggle with the technology market. Both Jared and Bobby continue to talk about the concept of “poster children”. Jared, Kevin and Bobby discuss channel conflicts and the ecosystem some more. · Jared talks about what he has learned about making your partners famous and the difference of opinion between Bobby and Pete. Bobby shares his philosophy on wisdom and how to use it and share it. · Jared teases out a future episode with Bobby. Jared says where you can find the podcast, which platforms are being used and ends the episode

Today I am sharing the conversation with Pat McClellan. Pat has built his text application (Proton Text) on Salesforce and he shares his experience from idea to publication and clients. In this discussion, we cover subjects such as business models, users, partnership types, and more. If you want to see Pat's application in action, you can visit the AppExchange Website or his own website. AppExchange - https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3A00000EcsYBUAZ Website: https://proton7group.force.com/protontext/s/ Pat's Linked - https://www.linkedin.com/in/patmcclellan/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sfdcconsultant/message

Howard is the Director of Product at Internet Creations which is a Salesforce AppExchange and Consulting partner that empowers organizations to operate efficiently and accelerate success by aligning people with technology. Here are a few of the topics we'll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:  Being an effective product manager in a fully remote capacity Managing a product that is a native component in an ecosystem Aligning your product roadmaps Balancing product experience and product recognition Resources: Salesforce learning platform Trailhead (https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/home) Internet Creations blog (https://blog.internetcreations.com/) Connecting with Howard Email Howard at howard.yermish@internetcreations.com Connect with Howard on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hyermish/) Follow Howard on Twitter @hyermish (https://twitter.com/hyermish?lang=en)

In today's episode we're joined by Kris Moyse who is a co-Founder of Proximity Insight, a Salesforce AppExchange product for the retail industry. We delved into what led Kris into the Salesforce ecosystem having previously launched a successful business in South Australia, and the roles that he initially played throughout his career.  We talk about the Apps that Kris and his business partner, Matt Lacey, initially developed, and how they have got to the point that they are today, specialising in the retail sector. We hone in on the skillsets required for a product company and which specific challenges Kris and Matt have encountered as they grow the business, of building a product on the Salesforce platform. This is the first podcast episode we've captured which focuses exclusively on a Salesforce product business, and it was really interesting to hear more from Kris. We hope you enjoy listening and make sure you follow Kris on LinkedIn to stay up to date with the Proximity Insight growth story! 

Brand reputation. Yes! You’ve worked hard to create an amazing brand over the years that consumers love. One single negative feedback can change all of that in minutes. That is the scale of #ecommerceWhat can you really do to keep it intact and how agile do you have to be? We invited Jon Jessup CEO of 1440 to The CPG Guys to understand if there’s help available and how you can navigate this complex journey. Here’s what Sri Rajagopalan & Peter V.S. Bond asked him:In a pandemic, why is customer engagement so important? What can brands do to reduce the impact of bad reviews?How do Q&A Forums impact purchase likelihood?What channels should a brand be monitoring and responding to?How quickly do customers expect brands to respond?How can brands leverage automation and new technology ?Should brands automate responses?Why is having a solution built on Salesforce AppExchange and Salesforce for Service  game-changing for so many huge brands?What can brands learn about CX and brand engagement from aggregating/consolidating review data?What action do you see brands take to improve ratings learning from their review data?

In this episode, Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) sits down with Eric Berridge (Former Chief Customer Officer, Bluewolf - an IBM Company) to discuss how to transform any company with customer obsession, what to do when business needs and customer needs are misaligned, and more Learn how to onboard customers faster, better, and with higher success. Leading customer support and customer experience leaders share their hard-won onboarding strategies that have enabled them to retain customers and increase their customer's life-time value. On each episode, your host Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) uncovers how leading companies in SaaS, telecommunications, finance, and beyond ensure the success of new customers. Jamie and guests discuss onboarding best practices, innovative strategies, and how to plan a career in customer onboarding. Subscribe today and learn how companies like Dominos, The YMCA, Calix Technologies, and others ensure success for their customers in their first 90-120 days every time. TaskRay, the customer onboarding company, is the maker of the top-rated enterprise customer onboarding solution on the Salesforce AppExchange. Since 2010, we've provided innovative solutions that help companies scale their onboarding and implementation processes, drive greater efficiencies, and create unmatched customer experiences—all within Salesforce. We've also built our business on the belief that providing world-class support to help our customers excel is just as important as our powerful, flexible, and simple-to-use tools.

In this episode, Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) sits down with Shannah Van Winkle (Principle, Van Winkle Consulting) to discuss why companies should hire a specific mix of technical and relationship-centered customer success managers, how to ensure onboarding is prioritized by your post-sales executives, and more. Learn how to onboard customers faster, better, and with higher success. Leading customer support and customer experience leaders share their hard-won onboarding strategies that have enabled them to retain customers and increase their customer's life-time value. On each episode, your host Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) uncovers how leading companies in SaaS, telecommunications, finance, and beyond ensure the success of new customers. Jamie and guests discuss onboarding best practices, innovative strategies, and how to plan a career in customer onboarding. Subscribe today and learn how companies like Dominos, The YMCA, Calix Technologies, and others ensure success for their customers in their first 90-120 days every time. TaskRay, the customer onboarding company, is the maker of the top-rated enterprise customer onboarding solution on the Salesforce AppExchange. Since 2010, we've provided innovative solutions that help companies scale their onboarding and implementation processes, drive greater efficiencies, and create unmatched customer experiences—all within Salesforce. We've also built our business on the belief that providing world-class support to help our customers excel is just as important as our powerful, flexible, and simple-to-use tools.

In this episode, Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) sits down with Bernie Kassar (Chief Customer Officer, Xactly) to discuss why companies should prioritize onboarding within their customer success strategy, what the future of customer onboarding can look like, and more. Learn how to onboard customers faster, better, and with higher success. Leading customer support and customer experience leaders share their hard-won onboarding strategies that have enabled them to retain customers and increase their customer's life-time value. On each episode, your host Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) uncovers how leading companies in SaaS, telecommunications, finance, and beyond ensure the success of new customers. Jamie and guests discuss onboarding best practices, innovative strategies, and how to plan a career in customer onboarding. Subscribe today and learn how companies like Dominos, The YMCA, Calix Technologies, and others ensure success for their customers in their first 90-120 days every time. TaskRay, the customer onboarding company, is the maker of the top-rated enterprise customer onboarding solution on the Salesforce AppExchange. Since 2010, we've provided innovative solutions that help companies scale their onboarding and implementation processes, drive greater efficiencies, and create unmatched customer experiences—all within Salesforce. We've also built our business on the belief that providing world-class support to help our customers excel is just as important as our powerful, flexible, and simple-to-use tools.

In this episode, Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) sits down with Stephen Poppe (Sr. Manager of Customer Success, LabelInsight) to discuss how to design human-centric onboarding practices, fostering creativity from your onboarding team, and more. Learn how to onboard customers faster, better, and with higher success. Leading customer support and customer experience leaders share their hard-won onboarding strategies that have enabled them to retain customers and increase their customer's life-time value. On each episode, your host Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) uncovers how leading companies in SaaS, telecommunications, finance, and beyond ensure the success of new customers. Jamie and guests discuss onboarding best practices, innovative strategies, and how to plan a career in customer onboarding. Subscribe today and learn how companies like Dominos, The YMCA, Calix Technologies, and others ensure success for their customers in their first 90-120 days every time. TaskRay, the customer onboarding company, is the maker of the top-rated enterprise customer onboarding solution on the Salesforce AppExchange. Since 2010, we've provided innovative solutions that help companies scale their onboarding and implementation processes, drive greater efficiencies, and create unmatched customer experiences—all within Salesforce. We've also built our business on the belief that providing world-class support to help our customers excel is just as important as our powerful, flexible, and simple-to-use tools.

In this episode, Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) sits down with Ashvin Vaidyanathan (CCO, Gainsight) to discuss why product and onboarding teams should collaborate, how to hire for onboarding leaders, and more. Learn how to onboard customers faster, better, and with higher success. Leading customer support and customer experience leaders share their hard-won onboarding strategies that have enabled them to retain customers and increase their customer's life-time value. Your host Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) uncovers how leading companies in SaaS, telecommunications, finance, and beyond ensure the success of new customers. Jamie and guests discuss onboarding best practices, innovative strategies, and how to plan a career in customer onboarding. Subscribe today and learn how companies like Dominos, The YMCA, Calix Technologies, and others ensure success for their customers in their first 90-120 days every time. TaskRay, the customer onboarding company, is the maker of the top-rated enterprise customer onboarding solution on the Salesforce AppExchange. Since 2010, we've provided innovative solutions that help companies scale their onboarding and implementation processes, drive greater efficiencies, and create unmatched customer experiences—all within Salesforce. We've also built our business on the belief that providing world-class support to help our customers excel is just as important as our powerful, flexible, and simple-to-use tools.

In this episode, Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) sits down with Dan Steinman (Chief Evangelist, Gainsight) to discuss why 70% of churn happens because of the customer's experience in the first 90 days, how to build a successful hand-off process, and more. Learn how to onboard customers faster, better, and with higher success. Leading customer support and customer experience leaders share their hard-won onboarding strategies that have enabled them to retain customers and increase their customer's life-time value. Your host Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) uncovers how leading companies in SaaS, telecommunications, finance, and beyond ensure the success of new customers. Jamie and guests discuss onboarding best practices, innovative strategies, and how to plan a career in customer onboarding. Subscribe today and learn how companies like Dominos, The YMCA, Calix Technologies, and others ensure success for their customers in their first 90-120 days every time. TaskRay, the customer onboarding company, is the maker of the top-rated enterprise customer onboarding solution on the Salesforce AppExchange. Since 2010, we've provided innovative solutions that help companies scale their onboarding and implementation processes, drive greater efficiencies, and create unmatched customer experiences—all within Salesforce. We've also built our business on the belief that providing world-class support to help our customers excel is just as important as our powerful, flexible, and simple-to-use tools.

In this episode, Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) sits down with Blakely Graham (CEO, TaskRay) to discuss the current state of customer onboarding, how to measure onboarding performance, and more. Learn how to onboard customers faster, better, and with higher success. Leading customer support and customer experience leaders share their hard-won onboarding strategies that have enabled them to retain customers and increase their customer's life-time value. Your host Jamie Cole (Chief of Staff, TaskRay) uncovers how leading companies in SaaS, telecommunications, finance, and beyond ensure the success of new customers. Jamie and guests discuss onboarding best practices, innovative strategies, and how to plan a career in customer onboarding. Subscribe today and learn how companies like Dominos, The YMCA, Calix Technologies, and others ensure success for their customers in their first 90-120 days every time. TaskRay, the customer onboarding company, is the maker of the top-rated enterprise customer onboarding solution on the Salesforce AppExchange. Since 2010, we've provided innovative solutions that help companies scale their onboarding and implementation processes, drive greater efficiencies, and create unmatched customer experiences—all within Salesforce. We've also built our business on the belief that providing world-class support to help our customers excel is just as important as our powerful, flexible, and simple-to-use tools.

In this episode, Anthony Diaz, founder and CEO of Health Hero, joins Virsys12 CEO and founder Tammy Hawes to discuss his entrepreneurial journey of realizing the need for better follow-up in the healthcare industry. After his father’s passing, Anthony discovered a passion for post-visit care, and he created Health Hero to provide personalized follow-up to patients, whether they need services like Uber or just a friendly reminder to take care of themselves. Anthony also shares how the Salesforce AppExchange and the Salesforce Accelerate Program made it easier for him to develop and scale his app.

Leyla Seka is the executive vice president of the Salesforce Mobile platform experience. Over Leyla’s incredible 11 year journey with Salesforce she has seen the team scale from 1,800 to over 40,000 and revenue scale from $500m to over $16Bn. In Leyla’s role today, she leads the charge on extending the power of Salesforce with a full portfolio of mobile apps, and is responsible for driving product, go-to-market and other key programs around Salesforce’s mobile offerings. Prior to her current role, Leyla was executive vice president of the Salesforce AppExchange, where she launched a refreshed AppExchange storefront, a new partner program, and built an entire AppExchange-focused team, resulting in more than 4,000 solutions, installed nearly 6 million times. Beyond her day-to-day role, Leyla is also the executive sponsor of BOLDforce, Salesforce’s organization for expanding and empowering the black community at Salesforce. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: How Leyla made her way into the world of SaaS with Salesforce when it had 1,800 people and $500m in revenue? What were Leyla’s biggest learnings on people and business model through seeing the first hand hyper-scaling of Salesforce from $500m to $16Bn? How did Leyla evolve and scale as a leader herself in those 11 years? What advice does Leyla give to young people considering whether to found a startup, join a startup or join a hyper-growth company? Where do things start to break in the scaling of SaaS companies? What needs to be put in place to prepare for hyper-scale? What are the commonalities of where many founders go wrong in the scaling process?   What does Leyla mean when she says, “growing up in product, you have to lead through influence”? How does Leyla think this influence can be created and maintained? How does Leyla think about the balance between effective influence and excessive influence?   Why does Leyla believe that, “you can teach skills but you cannot teach empathy”? What have been her learnings from scaling teams when it comes to hiring and detecting candidates with true empathy? What can one do to nurture that empathy in the culture of the company? 60 Second SaaStr: What does Leyla know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning? What is the hardest element of Leyla’s role at Salesforce today? What does Leyla believe in SaaS that most around her disbelieve? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Leyla Seka

In this episode we will be looking at the action plan that a developer can follow to explore Salesforce Opportunities Links to some of the websites mentioned on the podcast Wordpress Hugo Gatsby JS Jekyl carrd.co Stackoverflow Salesforce Developer Forum Subscribe You can subscribe to my course at Salesforce Casts Links: My Gear Teja on Twitter Teja's Instagram

In episode 18 of Kimble-sponsored PS Insights Podcast Series, Salesforce’ Senior VP of AppExchange Marketing, Leslie Tom describes how the AppExchange is developing. It is becoming a marketplace not only for apps but for bots, components and other workplace technology. Analysts and VCs as well as customers go there to discover trends and new ideas.

Brandon Bruce is the Cofounder and COO of Cirrus Insight, the highest rated sales platform that connects Gmail & Outlook with Salesforce. Brandon has grown Cirrus as a lightly-funded distributed company with scrappy tactics in the same industry as billion-dollar software companies and competitors with tens of millions in funding! From his sales experience at Cirrus, Brandon wrote the book The Slow Sale. In this episode, Brandon shares how salespeople can win sales with context rather than speed.   Here are some of the topics covered in this episode: Time can also deliver and save deals Learning about the “Quiet Period” to close more deals How to best document your sales process Understanding when to be patient and when to move on   You can listen to this episode on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play or wherever you get your favorite podcast!   About the Guest: Brandon Bruce is the Cofounder and COO of Cirrus Insight, the highest rated sales platform that connects Gmail & Outlook with Salesforce. Since launching in 2011, it's been a roller coaster of success and setbacks, and Brandon's philosophy for operating Cirrus is similar to his love of competing in 500+ mile ultra-endurance races - you aren't going to win at the start or in a sprint at the end. Success is a war of consistency and persistence, and he has always enjoyed that. Today, Cirrus is in the middle of their biggest challenge yet - pivoting for the first time in seven years after losing their primary marketing channel as the #1app on the Salesforce AppExchange. Email: brandon@cirrusinsight.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbruce/   Listen to more episodes of the Outside Sales Talk here and watch the video here!

If you work in a regulated industry like banking or even if you don’t, understanding the risk that your IT systems pose is an important one. If Salesforce is implemented correctly I believe it can pose less of a risk in some areas than traditional applications. But AppExchange apps could expose your precious data to other ...

Brandon Bruce grew up in a tiny California town of 800 people where he only had one classmate at a school with no running water. He went from these humble beginnings to now co-founding and growing Cirrus Insight to $12 million in annual revenue, 65 employees, and #41 on the Inc. 500 list. Cirrus Insight is the highest rated sales platform of all-time for perfectly connecting Gmail and Outlook with Salesforce. Since launching in 2011, it’s been a roller coaster of success and setbacks, and Brandon’s philosophy for operating Cirrus is similar to his love of competing in 500+ mile ultra-endurance races - you aren’t going to win at the start or in a sprint at the end. Success is a war of consistency and persistence, and he has always enjoyed that. Brandon has grown Cirrus as a lightly-funded distributed company via scrappy tactics in the same industry as billion-dollar software companies and competitors with tens of millions in funding. Today, Cirrus is in the middle of their biggest challenge yet - pivoting for the first time in seven years after losing their primary marketing channel as the #1 app on the Salesforce AppExchange. Podcast Highlights Hire employees who want to be founders. They bring passion to the job Crowdsource new ideas from your clients that way become more relevant  Hire generalists because they can wear many hats Connect With Brandon LinkedIn Website

What would you do if your business suddenly lost its largest distribution platform? Brandon Bruce, COO and co-founder of Cirrus Insight, was thrown a curve when his company’s application was removed from the SalesForce App Exchange, its largest distribution outlet. While this blow might signal the end of most application’s lifecycle, Cirrus Insight’s branding and unique lead generation capabilities kept the app alive and well. What is CRM? Salesforce’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform allows salespeople to track their correspondence with clients, providing them with valuable data about leads, trends and relationship advancement. CRM systems typically require a significant amount of manual data entry, especially in regard to email correspondence. Brandon explains how this additional work required by most CRMs hurts user adoption, ultimately leading to a CRM’s failure. Software Architect and Co-founder Ryan Huff saw an opportunity to develop a Salesforce plugin that automatically maintains record of these communications, while connecting with email and mobile devices without leaving Salesforce. Cirrus Insight Prior to starting Cirrus Path, the parent company of Cirrus Insight, with Ryan Huff, Brandon worked in the advancement department at Maryville College in Tennessee. When Ryan approached Brandon with the idea of Cirrus Insight, Brandon’s background in both sales and CRM systems immediately told him they were onto something. Cirrus Insight lives inside of a browser plugin that automatically transmits data from Google Suite and Office 365’s calendar to the Salesforce ecosystem. Cirrus Insight launched on the Salesforce App Exchange in 2011 with great success, becoming the #1 application ranking on the app exchange for five months in 2012. The massive growth and success of the application even caught the attention of Inc. Magazine, placing them on the Inc. 5000 List three years running, peaking at #41 in 2016. Leaving the App Exchange Despite their high rankings, large userbase and stellar reviews, Cirrus Insight was removed from the Salesforce App Exchange without warning. Brandon shares his thoughts on how companies launching within somebody else’s sandbox should anticipate and prepare for critical situations like this, and how despite losing Cirrus Insights’ biggest distribution platform, it also opened the door to exciting, new opportunities with customers Supporters of Hope One of the greatest satisfactions for Brandon is finding good people with great ideas. Cirrus Path is always looking for the next opportunity, nurturing entrepreneurs primarily in the tech industry, showing them the company’s playbook for success and helping them launch their own businesses. In the tech world where there always seems to be “an app for that” to make life easier, Brandon cautions that this is not always true. Sometimes there’s no replacement for hard work, so you just have to hunker down and do the work, even if it’s manually. To those interested in seeing for themselves what Cirrus Path has to offer, Brandon invites you to be a guest at his weekly company lunch on Fridays if you are in Knoxville, Tenn. Connect with Brandon Bruce LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbruce Email: brandon@cirrusinsight.com Website: https://www.cirrusinsight.com/ 

Joining us this week is Val Bercovici, Founder & CEO of PencilDATA at KeyBank Emerging Tech Summit. About PencilDATA PencilDATA is a software-as-a-service startup embracing data governance allowing users to see and manipulate data easily. It achieves this with a blockchain ledger that accounts for all data activity, Highlights  0 min 48 sec: Introduction from Val Bercovici o Post – Blockchain in the Cloud by Rob Hirschfeld o Robotic Process Automation (RPA)  4 min 47 sec: What do you use Blockchain for? o Core to the value but is just an enabler  5 min 52 sec: Don't confused Blockchain with ICO/Crypto-currency o Blockchain rollouts in 2018 have paused ~ Gartner quote o HOMEWORK – Podcast with BlockChain Technology Partners o PencilDATA has built the S3 of Blockchains  10 min 08 sec: Blockchain Service or Acting on BC with distributed service? o Useful Zero Trust Solution o Autonomous Vehicle Taxi Service Use Case o Same workflow and processes needed for medical equipment  15 min 59 sec: Why Distributed Ledgers for these Use Cases? o Centralized authorities can be a single point of failure  19 min 51 sec: Data security issues around Veracity & Authentication o Data poison can train AI poorly o Explainable AI ~ Data Reproduce-ability; prove data is valid  25 min 54 sec: SalesForce Use Cases o Live on the SalesForce App Exchange o Launching at DreamForce 2018 with Customer References  27 min 18 sec: How PencilDATA provide value to SalesForce Customers? o SaaS Turnkey Solution that hides the behind the scenes work o Costs for Etherium usage  37 min 14 sec: Industrial IoT Use Case  37 min 31 sec: Wrap-Up

This week Nick and Dan chat with Ludovic Ulrich (@ludoulrich) – head of Salesforce+Start, about building an ecosystem that entices developers, the problems of not having an ecosystem and the opportunities developers have in growing ecosystems. In this episode, you'll hear tips for startups that are building their own platforms and ways to create flourishing ecosystems including: -Growth through Foo Fighters; how big events and having fun at them, in turn, can drive the growth of the ecosystem. -Creating gravity in the ecosystem, making people work with the platform but also with each other. -Enablement through self-service courses to enable developers at scale. Learn how Salesforce has increased innovation by building a successful incubator around their API, and hear why showing some business value can be stronger than hackathons when bringing on new devs. So tune in to this episode of The Xero Developer Podcast to hear a stunned Nick and Dan listen as Ludo breaks down the AppExchange story by the (big) numbers.

Matthew Schiltz. He’s an experienced, senior executive with a proven track record in building successful, high growth technology and cloud companies ranging from the private startup stage to public companies. He’s responsible for his current company, Conga, and its growth strategy which includes financing, driving global sales and expanding product offerings. His extensive executive management and leadership experience is driving strong company growth which has resulted in several Inc 500, Fast 50 and Top 100 Places to Work awards. Past CEO successes include Insightful Corporation, CourtLink, DocuSign, Tier 3 and Blue Box Group. He has received several industry accolades in recognition of his past successes and is considered an expert on software, technology, and cloud business practices. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People What CEO do you follow? – Dan Springer Favorite online tool? — Email How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-7 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Matt would let others know that SaaS technology is about the people   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:58 – Nathan introduces Matt to the show 03:07 – Matt is the first professional CEO hired for DocuSign 03:38 – Matt was also recruited by the board of Conga as their CEO 04:41 – Matt has worked with founders who are great in product and technology, but were not able to grow their company as a CEO 05:25 – The partnership with DocuSign’s founder was a successful experience 06:18 – Conga is one of the top 5 global ISV (Independent Software Vendors) in the Salesforce ecosystem 06:44 – Conga specializes in data and electronic contracts 06:57 – They take live, Salesforce data and turns it into dynamic documents that are automated 07:21 – Conga is pure SaaS play 07:45 – Renewal rate is astronomically high 08:08 – Conga has a negative revenue churn 08:44 – Conga has a mix of mid-market and enterprise customers 10:30 – The customers pay directly on the number of seats 11:05 – Customers can start with one product, then expand to five products 11:55 – Conga’s customer base is two thirds midmarket and one third enterprise 12:33 – Conga’s document generation product pricing starts at $200 monthly for 10 seats 12:59 – “It’s a pretty low risk threshold” 13:30 – The Salesforce AppExchange is the number one customer vehicle for Conga 16:06 – 80% of Conga’s customers regard them as offering a critical tool that they need to use 17:00 – Conga has over 9000 customers globally 17:30 – Conga is growing quickly 18:03 – Conga grew 200% last year and another 100% this year 19:59 – Conga is in a typical gross margin rate 20:10 – The majority of Conga is owned by Insight Venture Partners of New York 20:46 – Conga has announced Salesforce Ventures as a strategic investor in May 2017 21:15 – Matt shares how they decide which companies to acquire 21:50 – Is it a good strategic fit for Conga? 22:02 – Is it a great people fit? 22:30 – Conga has 250-500 employees 23:53 – Matt shares his thoughts on Conga taking the IPO route as a funding event 25:05 – DocuSign just announced their intention to go public 27:35 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: Not all founders can grow their business; the right CEO can be the answer. The growth of a company isn’t based solely on the product, but the people who are behind it. The IPO route for funding is a fantastic place to start.   Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Oscar Nelson. He’s the CEO of Musqot, the marketing technology and SaaS company he co-founded after spending 12 years in various marketing roles in small and large companies. Industry-wise, he’s had a mixed background from consulting, media, telecommunications and enterprise software. He considers himself a business generalist more than a specialist. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Five Dysfunctions of a Team What CEO do you follow? – Jason Lemkin Favorite online tool? — DocuSign How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – It is more important to focus on your cofounder than your business idea   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:52 – Nathan introduces Oscar to the show 02:18 – Musqot is a marketing performance management app 02:24 – Musqot helps their customers increase their marketing effectiveness and efficiency, enabling their marketing ROI 02:44 – ACV is around $25K annually 02:55 – Some customers pay 6 figures 03:04 – Musqot was founded in 2014 03:16 – On their second year, Musqot launched their beta product and just a year ago, they launched their real product 03:40 – Musqot was bootstrapped. They were able to sustain their first year without revenue through personal financial support and savings 04:05 – Oscar and his co-founder have initially put in around $100K for the company 04:47 – First year revenue 05:37 – 2017 target is $3M in ARR runway 06:12 – Musqot just recently passed their $100K MRR mark 07:06 – Musqot currently has 60 customers 08:14 – Musqot’s expansion is due to their support and onboarding efforts 09:13 – Team size is 25 with 20 full-time employees and 5 consultants 09:30 – 5 are in sales, 2 are in presales and onboarding, 1 in marketing and the rest are in development 10:45 – Musqot gets customers from different sources 11:00 – Musqot is on the Salesforce AppExchange 12:14 – Full weighted CAC 13:31 – Payback period is roughly a year or more 14:10 – Paid ads spend is around $20K monthly 14:50 – The bigger customers are happy and tend to stay longer than the smaller customers 15:32 – Logo churn is around 2% and revenue churn is negative 16:27 – Musqot has raised $1.2M 16:44 – Musqot’s HQ is in Stockholm, Sweden and Bangalore, India 17:40 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: A startup can thrive through personal savings and financial support if need be. Share your business ideas with your business partner and make sure that your thoughts and visions for the company are aligned. Plan carefully where you will place your paid ads.   Resources Mentioned: Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Today we get to know Natalie Kurr of CodeScience. CodeScience help SaaS businesses thrive on the Salesforce AppExchange. This episode is powered by the KIA Niro, https://www.kia.com/us/en/vehicle/niro/2017 A Smarter Kind of Crossover. Connect with us at womenintechshow.com. Tweet @womenintechshow and @EspreeDevora https://www.codescience.com/ http://twitter.com/womenintechshow https://twitter.com/espreedevora

Today we get to know Ashley Frasier of CodeScience. CodeScience help SaaS businesses thrive on the Salesforce AppExchange. This episode is powered by the KIA Niro, https://www.kia.com/us/en/vehicle/niro/2017 A Smarter Kind of Crossover. Connect with us at womenintechshow.com. Tweet @womenintechshow and @EspreeDevora https://www.codescience.com/ http://twitter.com/womenintechshow https://twitter.com/espreedevora

Ted Blosser is the founder and CEO of WorkRamp, the startup that is transforming how the best companies like PayPal, Twilio, and Optimizely train and develop their employees. They are backed by top investors like Initialized Capital, Susa Ventures, Liquid2, and Slack, in addition to prominent angels like Elad Gil, Adrian Aoun, Semil Shah, and Charlie Songhurst. As for Ted, he is a Y Combinator Alumni and was an early employee at the enterprise powerhouse, Box. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Ted made the move from early employee at Box to founding WorkRamp? 2.) What were the big takeaways for Ted from seeing the rocketship growth of Box? How has he applied them to starting WorkRamp? 3.) Ted has previously said, 'you should build your investor team like a sports team'. What does Ted mean by this? How did this affect what he looked for in his investors? What does Ted advise other founders when it comes to VC selection? 4.) How does Ted view the short term and the long term value add of investors? How does Ted look to leverage their abilities and connections and get the most out of having them on board? 5.) Taking a step back, many VCs want product market fit, how does Ted assess product market fit? What have been his learnings from YC that shape his attitude to PMF? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Ted’s Fave Book: The Last Lecture As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Ted on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC

Sarah Guo is an investor @ Greylock Partners, which she joined in 2013. Prior to Greylock, Sarah was at Goldman Sachs, where she invested in Dropbox and helped take Workday public. She advised pre-IPO private technology companies (as well as public clients including Zynga, Netflix and Nvidia) on strategic and financial issues. Previously, Sarah worked with Casa Systems, a venture-funded startup that enables cable operators to meet growing demand for broadband services. She is an advocate for STEM education for women and the underserved, as well as education more generally. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Sarah made her way into VC with Greylock Partners? 2.) Question from Josh Elman: What were Sarah's biggest learnings from taking key companies public with GS in 2011? Why is narrative so important? Who has done it well? 3.) How does Sarah view market size and market creation? What is a big enough market size to be attractive? How does this change with time and product? 4.) How does Sarah view the next fundamental platform shift? Where does conversational fit into this thesis? Will we see 'machine learning as a service'? 5.) What does the future of VC look like? What does the next generation of VC need to do to stay on top and ensure pattern matching algorithms do not outperform them? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Sarah’s Fave Book: The Most Human Human Sarah’s Most Recent Investment: Rhumbix As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sarah on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC

John Lilly is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of the world's leading venture funds of the past decade. At Greylock John has led investments in the likes of Instagram (acq by Facebook), Tumblr (acq by Yahoo) and Dropbox. John also sits on the board for Quip, Figma and ClearSlide just to name a few. Prior to Greylock, John was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, used by more than 450 million people. John also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007, where he served as founding CEO and later CTO.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How John made his way into the wonderful world of VC following his time as CEO @ Mozilla? 2.) John has invested in the likes of Quip, Figma and Dropbox, so why are we seeing such a rise in productivity tools beyond Office and Google Apps? Will it always be a market of consolidation like we have seen with the likes of Quip? 3.) Does John believe the first boom of mobile is over? What about sensors makes John excited for the future of the phone? Does John agree with Ben Evans in viewing the phone as the sun of the solar system? 4.) Question from Sarah Guo: How does Greylock to continue to invest in the next big markets, rather than in what has made them successful before? What does the brainstorming sessions and meta-thinking look like internally? 5.) Question from Josh Elman: How does John view growing one's tribe and then growing together through all of your careers? What are the challenges and what is required in order to be successful? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: John’s Fave Book: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, John on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC

Rishi Garg is a General Partner @ Mayfield Fund, where he focuses on new media platforms, disruptive financial services and new marketplaces. Prior to joining Mayfield, Rishi was as Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy at Twitter where he led the company’s most active M&A program, including the acquisitions of Periscope, TellApart, TapCommerce, and many others. Prior to Twitter, Rishi was the first Head of Corporate Development at Square. Rishi was also the Founder of a leading venture-backed startup, FanSnap and has also held roles at Google, Highland Capital Partners and Morgan Stanley.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Rishi made his way into VC following time at Twitter and Square? 2.) How does Rishi look to analyse the state of co-founder relationships? What questions get to the core issues? What are the signs that encourage and worry Rishi? 3.) To what extent does a co-founder leaving the company concern Rishi? In what circumstance is this understandable? How should this process be played out? 4.) How much of a role should VCs play post-investment in the relationship of the founders? What are the dangers of this? How should VCs balance helpful and over involved? 5.) Why is Rishi anti the rise of the very large Series? What are the inherent dangers of this? How does he convey this concern to founders? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Rishi’s Fave Book: The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying, Malcolm X Rishi's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Wait But Why As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Rishi on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC  

Tim Chang is a Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund and Tim was referred to me by many other VCs as 'the fittest man in silicon Valley', notable tech publications even write it. His eclecticness does not stop there as he is also a musician in 3 bands and a serious body hacker. As for his investments, he has had AdChina (acquired by Alibaba), Playdom (acquired by Disney) and Basis (acquired by Intel) just to name a few. Prior to Mayfield, he spent time at notable institutions including General Motors and Norwest Venture Partners. It is not only us that appreciate Tim’s skills though as he has also been named to ‘Top 100 Innovators’ on Forbes Midas List for 2 years running.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Tim made his way into the wonderful world of VC following Stanford Business School? 2.) How did Tim's perspective of starting VC around 9/11 shape his perspective coming into the industry? Why does Tim believe you need to see multiple cycles to be a good VC? 3.) Where are theWhy does Tim believe that startups need to be better capitalised than they currently are in the early days? Why does Tim argue for the existence of the Series B Crunch? 4.) How does Tim view the creation of a business model for machine learning? What are the 2 elements that founders need to consider before deciding in a pricing mechanism? 5.) How does Tim evaluate machine learning startups today in the plethora that have been created over the last few years? How does Tim determine true machine learning talent? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Tim’s Fave Book: Nexus  Tim's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Wait But Why Tim’s Most Recent Investment: Next Entertainment As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC, Tim on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC    

Maran Nelson is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Clara Labs, the truly human interface that uses conversational intelligence trained on high-quality data to schedule your meetings. They have secured funding from some of the best in the business including previous guest Kent Goldman @ Upside Partnership and Greg Brockman, Founder of the prestigious OpenAI. As for Maran, she is also the Founder of Interact, a community of 100 young makers and technologists coming together for an annual retreat in Tahoe.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Maran come to found one of the hottest AI startups of the day in Clara Labs? 2.) What is the right way to think about a digital assistant? How does Maran think consumer expectations and behaviours will change towards them in the coming years? 3.) Question from Shivon @ Bloomberg Beta: How does Maran think about building an AI company for the long term? How does Clara look to build scalable and transparent feedback loops? 4.) Why is Maran so bullish on the conversational interface? To what situation does this interface lend best? What other verticals and applications could this have in the future? 5.) Does Maran think that humans will always be needed in this process? At what stage will they become obsolete? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Maran’s Fave Book: East of Eden by John Steinbeck As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Maran on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC

Emily Melton is partner at DFJ, where she focuses on consumer and mobile technology, as well as healthcare technologies and marketplaces. Emily has made investments in the likes of BetterUp, Elation Health, Livongo, Redfin, Shift, and Wellframe. Early in Emily's career, she sourced investments in Box (NYSE: BOX), Meebo (Google), Kudo (Google), RichRelevance, and Flux (MTV Networks). She was also an advisor to Pulse Network (LinkedIn), Healthtap, and Poshmark.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Emily made her way into the wonderful world of VC following her meeting with Tim Draper? 2.) How does Emily view the importance of pattern recognition? Why does Emily believe that you should not invest from patterns? What is the difference between a pattern and an investing fad? 3.) Why does Emily hate analogies? Why does she believe it is simplistic thinking? How can this be mitigated for startup founders in describing their company? 4.) How does Emily view the portfolio approach to risk in venture? What questions need to be asked to determine the potential outcome of the business? 5.) Why does Emily get concerned by the rise of the 'celebrity investor'? How can investors build their brand in the proliferated world of early stage startup investing? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Emily’s Fave Book: Mindset by Carol Dweck, A Theory of Justice by John Rawls Emily’s Most Recent Investment: BetterUp As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC

Josh Stein is Partner @ DFJ where his current board responsibilities include Box (NYSE: BOX), Chartbeat, LaunchDarkly, LendKey, SugarCRM, and previous guests with me on SaaStr in Periscope and Talkdesk. He is also actively involved with the firm's investments in AngelList, Doximity and Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) just to name a few. Prior to joining DFJ, Josh was a VP at Telephia, where he managed a group providing strategic analysis and information to the nation's largest wireless carrier. Previously, Josh was a co-founder for ViaFone (NYSE: SY), a DFJ portfolio company and a leading provider of wireless enterprise applications. Josh met the DFJ team when the firm co-led ViaFone's Series A investment.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Josh made his way from the world of operations to Partner @ DFJ? 2.) How does Josh analyze the VC/ Founder fit? How does Josh look to build trust and transparency in that relationship? What is an example of how Josh has changed his style to fit the character of an entrepreneur? 3.) Question from Greg Sands: What did Josh see in the early days of Box with a young Aaron Levie, what was it that made him so excited? 4.) Question from Mamoon Hamid @ Social Capital: Looking at Box today, what will it take for Box to 10x their value? What needs to happen in the market? What needs to happen to the product roadmap? 5.) Question from Jason Lemkin @ SaaStr: How is it that we are seeing companies like TalkDesk and Twilio grow at a rate never seen before in today's SaaS environment? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Josh’s Fave Blog: TermSheet Josh’s Fave Book: Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success Josh’s Most Recent Investment: LaunchDarkly As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Josh on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC

Henry Ward is the Founder & CEO @ eShares, the No 1 cap table management platform providing equity management, 409A valuations and liquidity all in one place. They are backed by leading investors and past guests including USV, SV Angel, Spark Capital, Semil Shah, Manu Kumar, Tim Draper and Kamal Ravikant, just to name a few. Prior to eShares, Henry was Founder @ SecondSight, the first registered investment advisor to go direct to your brokerage and improve your portfolio. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Henry made his way into the world of startups and came to found eShares? 2.) How does Henry challenge the notion that investors should have such high fail rates? How does Henry believe investors can build a strong and sustainable portfolio without home runs? 3.) Why does Henry believe that investors will never accept market risk? How much of a role does Henry believe herd mentality plays in the VC ecosystem? 4.) How does Henry view the increasing exit horizons for startups? Is this a problem? How can we create liquidity options pre large exits? 5.) How does Henry view the role of regulation in private markets? How does this differ to public markets? What would Henry like to see change in the VC ecosystem? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Henry’s Fave Blog: Hacker News Henry’s Fave Book: The Essays Of Warren Buffett As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Henry on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC

In this episode, we discuss certifications, thoughts on working with dual screens, workarounds for visualforce bugs, IdeaExchange, Apple's App Store numbers and the Salesforce AppExchange, and Microsoft LinkedIn. Passing Parameters with a CommandButton Salesforce, Bugs & You Why LinkedIn Under Microsoft Is Doomed Demystifying the Numbers behind Salesforce.com’s AppExchange Apple's App Store sales top $28 billion LG Display's 65-inch OLED prototype screen doesn't need speakers Customer Collaboration With Salesforce's Mike Rosenbaum

Phil Libin is Managing Director @ General Catalyst and Founder and Executive Chairman @ Evernote. At Evernote, Phil took the company from idea generation to productivity powerhouse allowing millions of users around the world to remember everything and in the meantime, providing Evernote with over $160m in VC funding from some of the very best including Sequoia Capital. Now in the world of VC, Phil has a particularly fondness towards all things bots, a theme we discuss heavily today. Phil has also made several angel investments in the likes of Gusto, TellApart and Binary Thumb just to name a few.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Phil made his way from Founder @ Evernote to Managing Director @ General Catalyst? 2.) Niko Bonatsos, Managing Director @ General Catalyst asks: What were your biggest takeaways from your time with Evernote that lend to you being a better investor? What are the biggest surprises about the move into VC? 3.) Why have we seen an explosion of hype and excitement around the bot space over the past year? What was the catalyst for the rise of the bot? 4.) Why are we not there yet with bots? Should all be conversational? How does the infancy of messaging platforms affect the rise of bots? What unsolved technical challenges remain? 5.) Will the transition to bots and conversational interfaces represent a major point of disruption or more of an evolution in the interface paradigm? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Phil’s Fave Blog: The Economist Phil’s Fave Book: The Three Body Problem Phil’s Most Recent Investment: Sunflower Labs As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Phil on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don’t have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC

Charlie O’Donnell is the Founder and Sole Partner @ Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, the first venture capital fund based in Brooklyn, who manage $23m across 2 funds. Prior to founding Brooklyn Bridge, Charlie worked at the prestigious First Round Capital, with the likes of Josh Koppelman and Union Square Ventures with Fred Wilson. If that wasn’t enough Charlie is one of only a dozen to be named to Business Insider’s 100 Most Influential People in NY Tech five or more times and has served on the founding board of the New York Tech Meetup and is one of the group’s first 100 members. His blog, This is Going to Be BIG!, is one of the ten most widely read VC blogs in the country with over 8,000 readers.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Charlie made his move from college to venture and then struck out on his own from USV? 2.) Charlie has previously said that 'venture capital is humbling'. How does Charlie look to construct his portfolio with Brooklyn Bridge? How does he come to terms with the fact he will be wrong most of the time? 3.) What are Charlie's views towards follow-on funding and allocating reserves of the fund? How important is this from a return multiple perspective? How much of a difference does it make for founders to raise a next round with 100% of seed investors committed? 4.) Charlie has previously suggested the importance of being helpful and hard working. Is that really enough to build a brand in today's competitive VC environment? Is brand a form of defensible IP? 5.) How does Charlie react to Ben Lerer's suggestion that Jet.com and Dollar Shave Club are the first dominoes of an incoming wave of e-commerce M&A? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Charlie’s Fave Blog: Wait But Why Charlie's Most Recent Investment: Industrial Organic As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Charlie on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. The Simba Hybrid. The most advanced mattress in the world. With a unique combination of two thousand five hundred conical pocket springs and responsive memory foam, it offers the perfect support for two people. A mattress that responds to you and your partner’s sleeping patterns. Delivered free, with a one hundred night sleep trial, free returns and a ten year guarantee. Start your free trial at simbasleep.com Cirrus Insight is a plugin for sales pros who use Gmail and Outlook.  It automatically updates activities in Salesforce so you don't have to.  It was named #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies, and it has more than 1,700 customer reviews on the Salesforce AppExchange. Today, it serves over 150,000 sales people across 5,000 organizations using Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Cirrus Insight is perfect for sales, support, and success teams who want to save time, schedule 3x more appointments, track email opens and much more with Salesforce information at their fingertips in the inbox. www.cirrusinsight.com/20VC

In this episode, we discuss Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), single barrel whiskey, Salesforce's recent acquisitions costing an estimated $75 million, Apple Store app approvals vs Salesforce AppExchange approvals, Salesforce.com licenses increasing by 40% in the UK, follow up on Amazon Smile, questions Jim Cramer asked Benioff on his recent political stances, Benioff's comments on the Q1 2017 numbers, and Benioff's response to more buyout rumors.Accelerated Mobile Pages ProjectSalesforce reveals it spent $75 million on the three startups it bought last quarterAre Benioff's Crusades Hurting Shareholder Value At Salesforce?Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and the demise of the Reagan coalitionSalesforce CEO Marc Benioff responds to questions about a Microsoft takeover bidIs Amazon buying Salesforce?Jim Cramer: Salesforce CEO: Using the power of business for social changeJim Cramer: Salesforce CEO Benioff: Record numbers for a record quarter

While every department needs a strong leader within the company, it can be said that customer experience needs an exceptionally strong leader. The reason being it's not always intuitive for companies to invest in strong customer experience programs. Much of the budget goes to marketing or product or sales. That said, on the modern customer podcast this week we feature customer experience leader Leyla Seka. You might know the name Seka because she was a key influence on Marc Benioff's decision to make equal pay for women a priority at Salesforce, a Fortune 500 company. She was integral to the Women's Leadership Summit this year at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference. Whether it's conveying Dolly Parton's lessons about customer service or talking about empathy, Seka has a fresh and imaginative perspective on business that's infectious. In this podcast we hear leading ideas on modern customer experience, an exclusive look into Seka's views on career and much much more. Seka is a leader in the customer experience industry serving as SVP and General Manager of Desk.com, Salesforce's all-in-one customer service app for fast-growing companies such as Yelp, SnapChat, Munchery, Bonobos, Dot & Bo and Luxe Valet. Desk.com connects agents with email, phone calls and social channels. Salesforce had an immense impact on the way companies interact with customers, specifically how companies store and manage that customer data. Gone are the days where everyone in the company doesn't have the opportunity to touch that customer interaction, and collaborate around it. Desk.com plays a key role in the customer service side of customer experience. More about Leyla Seka Prior to her role as General Manager and Senior Vice President, Salesforce Desk.com Seka was responsible for building and growing the Salesforce AppExchange, the world's leading business apps marketplace. In her eight years at Salesforce, Seka has held a variety of positions across product management, product marketing and business operations helping to build a scalable infrastructure to support the company's business. Prior to Salesforce, Seka worked in product management and marketing organizations at Primavera Systems (acquired by Oracle), Evolve Software, Vivant and Eutron SPA. Seka also spent two years in West Africa as a Peace Corps officer in Mali. Seka holds a BA in International Relations and French from the University of California at Davis and a MBA from the Masagung School of Management at the University of San Francisco.  

In today's podcast we are speaking with Daniel Debow, Senior Vice President of Emerging Technologies at SalesForce.com. He's responsible for Salesforce Wear, the wearables initiative, which I imagine will become part of the Salesforce App Exchange at some point. We're excited to be speaking with Daniel, as he'll show us how he's applied the Lean […] The post Salesforce App Exchange, Lean, Wear Initiative: Interview with Daniel Debow appeared first on OpEx Learning Resources.

In today’s podcast we are speaking with Daniel Debow, Senior Vice President of Emerging Technologies at SalesForce.com. He’s responsible for Salesforce Wear, the wearables initiative, which I imagine will become part of the Salesforce App Exchange at some point. We’re excited to be speaking with Daniel, as he’ll show us how he’s applied the Lean […] The post Salesforce App Exchange, Lean, Wear Initiative: Interview with Daniel Debow appeared first on Shmula.