This post is a guest piece from Richard Rosen, CEO and founder of Fastcall, a Salesforce CTI vendor and one of my clients. I was talking with Rich about customer focus for focused businesses in a crowded market, and our talk drifted into how limits aren’t a bad thing.

Our chat was fun. It was deep. Quotes from the Tao Te Ching and/or a Star Wars prequel may have been thrown around, and I didn't want to keep it private. To that end, I asked Rich to turn it into something applicable to other business readers. Fastcall is my client and it’s my job to show its strengths, so of course it’s the example in play here. But Rich presents a much-needed perspective whether you’re a user or developer of business applications. I turn things over to him now.

Representing your brand as an owner requires a tricky balancing act in an industry where integrity and thought leadership are highly valued. You want to attract new customers and shout the qualities of the product, of course. But that’s making a sales pitch, and nobody wants to read a sales pitch. Then again, integrity and thought leadership mean revenue in the future, when your company (especially a smaller one) needs revenue now.

I’ve been holding back from writing about what Fastcall is capable of—that’s what the website and the AppExchange listing are for—but this is an incredible company and there’s plenty for me to brag about. So here’s my plan: I will talk about what we at Fastcall do best, but with as little reference to our products as possible. It’s about why you should consider us, but not what you should get. It’s about why the specialized company is often the right one, and why boundaries—as represented by what Fastcall “only” does—are empowering.

Home Field Advantage

A discussion of which Fastcall products you should use would be a short one anyway, because we only have three apps. The word “only” is misleading, because having those three is a conscious decision to keep us focused on our core competencies. We know Salesforce CTI very well, it’s our home field. Why should we play on somebody else’s? We are very comfortable doing what we do, and I’m confident that our work will stand up against any other vendor.

Fastcall is only available on the Salesforce AppExchange. That’s our native environment, and everything Fastcall does was built exclusively for it. There’s no reason to go cross-platform; Salesforce is the #1 cloud CRM platform, and all the customers we could ever want are here. We are subject matter experts on Salesforce technology. Our certified developers know the platform, we know Apex and visualforce. Fastcall customers know that if they need solutions to a problem, we will always be able to provide the best.

These Shoes Fit

Finally, we will only sell you what you agree that you need. Our main product, Fastcall, has three pricing levels. The first one, Essentials, is about half of Fastcall’s functionality. The next step up, Pro, has twice as much and costs twice as much.

Our third level, Custom, is for customers who want to pick which specific functions they want without anything extraneous. We don’t charge a premium for that customizability, and why should we? One great thing about cloud computing is that each part of an application has an on/off switch. Besides, we only charge for usage.

The walls of a house are its boundaries, but they also hold up the roof. By knowing our business and channeling our efforts, we can focus 100% on serving our customers the most up-to-date CTI application in the Salesforce ecosystem. Those are the things that make Fastcall what it is, and what let us be the best at what we do.

For a few months now I have the pleasure of frequently interacting with Richard Rosen of Fastcall, a company that exclusively focuses on extending Salesforce with CTI software. Rich is a firm advocate of focusing on one ecosystem and to not serving multiple ones. As such he is a friend of Salesforce. Still, he makes some astute critical and important observations about the market place and the customer experience that it offers. He also has some suggestions. Here is what he has to say. 

It’s been a few months since I walked into Nordstrom but I do remember the experience. The store is nicely curated with classic brands I recognize and a few emerging brands. Nordstrom keeps their stores fresh and well designed. While our experience has moved more and more online the idea of merchandising has not changed.

Amazon on the other hand does a very bad job merchandising fashion. E.g. tThe search “shirts for men” results in “more than 30,000” results. When shopping I may be looking for one or two new shirts. Nordstrom does a great job suggesting a few ideas. I do not want to see or look at “more than 30,000” shirts. Amazon offers a few options to narrow down my search. There is a definite benefit in curation. 

How does consumer software deal with curation? There are approximately 2.87 million apps in the Play Store (Android) and 1.96 million in the Apple App Store. The strategy in the consumer app marketplace is “more is more.” They give top lists in many categories. These consumer apps’ Top n lists are not well curated; the consumer app marketplace relies almost entirely on reviews.  

The Salesforce AppExchange is the leading business app market, with over 6,000 enterprise applications and components. Salesforce also includes reviews, gives the app’s listing date, date of the last update and lists basic information about the application architecture. For example, is the application native to Salesforce? Salesforce requires these applications to pass a security review and has a growing team tasked with helping developers—Salesforce partners—optimize their application listing in the AppExchange. The AppExchange is organized into categories and there is a search function. 

It is a total mess. 

Think back to my Nordstrom example. I walk into the store and there are thousands of shirts. Some are mispriced—just as the AppExchange has apps with misleading pricing. Some shirts are years out of style—just as Salesforce lists applications that have not been updated in years. But then Nordstrom moves out-of-fashion items into its Nordstrom Rack stores, to save space for current fashion in the Nordstrom stores. The AppExchange marketplace does not. And in the software industry current “fashion”, achieved via frequent updates, is critical. 

Search results are not really in any specific order, other than “Popularity”. Some apps are native on the platform, others loosely integrated. But it's hard for the searching admin to know without looking at the app listing itself; and they cannot search for this important criterion but need to use the sidebar to filter after searching for solutions. There is no curation to drill into a specific solution. Let’s narrow the search for paid 5-star apps that are native by filtering. This narrows the results down to roughly 200. But then what?   

Salesforce wants a marketplace where more is more because—let’s be honest—vanity metrics drive enterprise software. 

I am here to tell you that this is going to end. 

When Salesforce first launched the AppExchange they wanted to fill the shelves and recruit developers. The keys with a marketplace are the balance between supply and demand and the creation of value for all three involved parties: The marketplace owner, the vendors (developers) and their customers. Too much supply (competition) combined with a too noisy and poorly organized environment and developers will not see the value anymore. They will leave the marketplace to focus elsewhere. To reduce the risk of this happening, Salesforce needs to reward its most aligned partners and kindly let the lesser aligned partners move on.

Back at Nordstrom there are category managers who are experts in their department. Shoes, of course—it’s Nordstrom. There is a category manager for accessories, as well as for men’s wear, women’s wear, home and gifts, beauty, and so on. This is what a maturing enterprise marketplace needs. They need to know their partner solutions beyond “paid, five stars, native = 200 apps. Go find the one that works for you.” No, no, no. Enterprise software buyers want curation. Help them find the right solution for their problem. Salesforce needs to identify the top 10 or 20 categories in the AppExchange and assign category managers. These managers will know their categories and the associated partners. When a Salesforce admin is looking for a CTI app, for example, the category manager can guide them through the options.  

Ten years ago, when I was first thinking about Fastcall, I met with a few Venture Capitalists (VCs). I told them Fastcall would only work in Salesforce. They said, “Good luck with that.” In 2021, if a start-up Zooms into a VC pitch with a plan to integrate with 20 APIs I bet they’ll hear, “Good luck with that.” Times have changed, and so has demand.

Enterprise Software is moving toward platform alignment. The days of plugins and integration to a ton of APIs will wane. Like so many trends in Silicon Valley, software APIs will give way to platform alignment. 

Salesforce will focus on solving business problems with its own solutions and a smaller number of highly curated partner solutions. The essence of Salesforce 360 is solving the customer’s problem. In an ecosystem-led growth model, there is Salesforce and closely aligned partners; the less aligned partners will have only a limited role as they add less value to the ecosystem. And Salesforce will have a more closely aligned relationship with a smaller set of partners. They will more intimately know the partner solution and therefore jointly deliver more value to Salesforce subscribers.    

What does this mean for software buyers in the Salesforce ecosystem? VPs of Sales Operations and Salesforce admins looking to solve current problems? They need to consider platform alignment when making buying decisions. If the software on your short list is not aligned with Salesforce it may not be around next year.