Finally, it happened.

We lived in our blissful world of an abundance of money that fuelled the illusion of eternal and unlimited growth. The stock markets knew only one direction for a decade. They were rising and rising. Venture capital was readily available. Valuations of all sorts of companies, profitable or not, skyrocketed. Growth at all cost over profitability has been the war cry. Acquisitions have been extremely expensive up to the end of 2021.

Logic never supported this illusion, the signs have been on the wall, yet we closed our eyes. 

Then, in 2022, reality knocked at our doors, and none too subtle.

In the “CX industry”, examples for this quite rude awakening include Zendesk. Zendesk went  private in June 2022 for $10.2 bn after refusing a $16+ bn offer in February 2022. Another one is Freshworks shares starting a steep decline in October 2021 after a very successful IPO in September 2021. These are only two examples and I by no means want to single out these great companies. Other signs included an increasing number of major layoffs throughout the first half of 2022, culminating in Salesforce announcing more focus on profitability due to a subdued outlook and subsequently laying off 8 thousand employees. Oracle already laid off more than 10 thousand employees of its CX division in August 2022. Amazon fired 18 thousand employees since November, 2022. Especially companies in the tech industry increasingly implemented hiring freezes throughout 2022.

This is to quite an extent a consequence of their optimism (or should we say hubris?) but also of companies across industries keeping their budgets in tighter control than before.

Another problem is that the definition of customer experience is not fully clear. In the words of Paul Greenberg, it is “how a customer feels about a company over time”. Dr. Michael Wu in a recent CRMKonvo gave a very pragmatic one: “The difference between customer expectations and the company’s delivery”. Still, business department continue to compete for ownership of their company’s CX.

At the same time, across brands, the Forrester Customer Experience index dropped in 2022.

As a result, spending does not grow as before – even somewhat declined – which “forces” vendors to lay off personnel, whether this is the right solution or not.

Now, what does this rant have to do with CRM or CX?

Why don’t customers buy from their vendors?

They do not see the value of the offers.

Based on the recognition that the true differentiator of every vendor nowadays are not product, price or promotion/placement but the customer experience, there are a few things that enterprise software buyers – customers – and software vendors can do. Software vendors clearly didn’t deliver up to their customers’ expectations.

This is something that can be changed.

Here some brief recommendations. Some of them have a short term impact, some a more long term one.

Enterprise software buyers

• At all times, be clear about where your CX pain points are.
• Develop models that help in the objective quantification of the benefit of improving on these pain points. These models mandatorily need to include a financial impact analysis.
• Invest where you differentiate yourself from the competition and not where it does not matter.
• Prioritize the pain points using the models regularly and frequently, to address the right ones first. This prioritization is a cross department effort that includes IT. It follows a think big – act small approach.
• Develop an IT strategy and roadmap that minimizes technical debt over time and helps to efficiently address the pain points.

Enterprise software vendors

• Be clear what your customers need and want and deliver exactly that in a way that it is fast and easy to implement. This way, there is an improved time-to-value for customers. This includes industry solutions that are more than current industry clouds.
• Establish pricing models that clearly show the value for the customer. What we still see far too often is the transposition of on premise pricing models into the cloud.
• Reliably include your partner ecosystem into the creation and implementation of industry solutions with fast time to value. My recent article on how to create winning industry solutions gives some valuable recommendations.
• Genuinely have your customer’s success at heart. Consider your own success as a consequence of your customer’s success. Reimagine your organization across this idea, starting with your customer success department.

While this sounds like a lot, it is actually not too hard to achieve.

Combine this with the three humble wishes for CRM, CX and customer engagement and let us all work on resolving these challenges.

One of the terms du jour is „industry cloud“. We hear it even more often than even platform or CX at this time. Why is that? Why do we speak about them only now and not for a longer time? After all, we have seen industry solutions forever, albeit on premise. Yes, the concept of vertical solutions is that old. What is the value of an industry cloud?  How does "industry cloud" differ from "industry solution"? And does this term really describe what industries need?

These are only some of the questions that we wanted to discuss with Vinnie Mirchandani as part of aCRMKonvo.

Hurricane Ian intervened and Vinnie had more important things to do than a CRMKonvo. Luckily, everything turned out well for him.

Good for the CRMKonvos team, that friend and Enterprise Irregular Jon Reed could jump in to what turned out to be an even more interesting topic than we hoped for. We will continue this discussion with Vinnie on a later occasion. He has quite something to say about industry clouds, and comes from another angle than Jon.

 The problem with industry clouds 

Most business applications have started their life as horizontal applications. This makes a lot of sense, as a good deal of the functionality that a business needs, and the application offers, is not exactly industry specific. Instead, it is applicable across a range of industries. Therefore, business software vendors at first concentrated on developing horizontal functionality, as this functionality is reusable across and customized for numerous industries.

Often with only little effort.

This applies to SaaS software as well as it did apply to on premise software back in the day.

So far, so good. One challenge is, of course, that it is not always that easy to configure a business app to specific needs that easily. This, on the contrary, often needs substantial effort and knowledge.

The result is that horizontal solutions often under-deliver, as one can see in soaring implementation costs, even in times of the cloud.

Another challenge is that an industry solution is first of all a solution, which means it regularly stretches across more than one business application. This requires integration between the involved applications. This, in turn, is something that not all software vendors can deliver. The same is true for many system integrators as there are many ways to integrate different applications.

These deficiencies, combined with one of the main promises of the cloud, led to increased silo'isation of the application stack that got (and still gets) implemented at businesses. In addition, ERP software has a longer history of targeting industries than e.g., CRM software or analytics software. When it comes to industry specific CRMs, Jon rightfully names the acquisition of Vlocity by Salesforce a milestone that brought this topic into the forefront of business software vendors' minds again. Again? Yes, again, as there have been Industry flavored CRM solutions already at the beginning of this millennium.

 The real value proposition 

Industry clouds target industries and therefore promise the delivery of specialized functionality at low implementation cost. This is quite a big and enticing promise, especially in uncertain times like these, when not only efficiency but, even more so, cost play a major role. Implementation projects need to be short and deliver value fast.

According to Jon, there is even more value. As this specialized functionality must include responding to new or changed regulations, the customers do not need to take care of this anymore. This also reduces technical debt in the customer systems. In addition, and this is a fascinating thought, in a multi-tenant cloud environment, a solution vendor can provide all sorts of (anonymized) benchmark data. This data can help companies discover where they can improve relative to their peers. The challenge is, of course, data ownership and privacy.

Do industry clouds live up to this promise, or are they really “a great way to advance your career in marketing and our industry by taking existing functionality, creating a nice sexy new term that gets everyone excited and then, when they start scratching under the surface, they get more and more confused” - as Jon put it provocatively?

Or is this not that provocative a statement at all? We need to acknowledge that businesses need to make revenues and profits. These come from markets and it is a job of marketing to create and/or nurture markets for their company.

Well, according to Jon, industry clouds do not live up to their promise, yet. One important reason for this is that they regularly replace software that is very mature and in use by businesses for a long time. In contrast to this, a newly built software just cannot cover the full breadth and width of functionality that businesses require. Sometimes this software even misses on functionality that is essential to run a business.

 Are industry clouds the right thing? 

Another reason is that "industry cloud" is not about technology, which is what the term industry cloud suggests. The term delimits thinking. Instead, we need to think about an "industry-ecosystem" that surrounds the software. The software is still important; but it is only part of the solution. An industry solution requires domain expertise, which is often not available within the software vendor. It requires the frequent or constant exchange of domain experts with each other to identify how to solve challenges best. Good places for this knowledge exchange are industry events or even gatherings that are part of vendor events. According to Jon, this can even work well for smaller companies.

These domain experts then need to work out with engineers and UX experts how to implement the solutions. This can create a winning proposition.

This is why I prefer to talk about industry solutions and rarely use "industry cloud". Industry solution does not have the strong focus on technical delivery that the term industry cloud has. It gives a more holistic view of the idea.

How to create winning industry solutions 

This leads directly to the question of how to fill the idea with life.

An industry solution always needs domain expertise.

Additionally, an industry solution requires a strong technical platform. This platform enables the building of industry specific functionality, based on horizontal functionality.  The exception is the vendor targeting a small number of industries.

Creating winning solutions requires the platform provider having the strength and honesty to not only say where they are strong - but also to state where they are not!

Why?

Because this is exactly the spot where industry play and ecosystem play overlap!

Furthermore, it builds trust. No company can be equally good at everything. Once companies admit weaknesses, an ecosystem around industries can emerge. Then they can bring together domain and software experts. Partner companies can fill in the identified gaps. Practitioners can design solutions that augment each other. All this becomes easier if the partners can trust the platform provider.

So, an industry strategy needs to be part of an ecosystem- and partner strategy.

This strategy needs three industry buckets.

The first bucket contains the industries that the platform owner delivers solutions for, or intends to deliver solutions for. These are the industries where the platform owner feels strong or already has a strong offering. Partner companies are not forbidden to provide solutions for these industries, but they are aware that they are potentially competing with a big company in any given deal. Partner solutions are still also free to augment these industry solutions for use cases that are not covered by the platform provider.

The second bucket has all the industries that the platform provider leaves to partners. They can build their own industry solutions without competing with the platform provider. The platform owner should even support the creation of these industry solutions. The important part of this is that this is not a temporary commitment by the platform provider but an assertion. This is about trust. Removing the risk of getting crushed enables ecosystem partners to confidently invest in a way that helps all stakeholders: customers, platform provider, partners.

The third bucket is the most interesting one. it covers the industries that the platform provider may or may not enter. The platform provider should also indicate the likelihood of its entry into these industries. While this involves some uncertainty for ecosystem partners, it also provides the transparency that is essential to take investment decisions.

These buckets need some stability. Still, they can and will change over time. However, changes should not come as a surprise to the ecosystem partners. Partnership requires mutual trust and respect to be valuable for everyone. The platform provider shows this trust and respect by committing to provide a stable framework. This gives the breathing space for the partners. These partners commit to providing complementary solutions.

The winner is the customer.

The result of the customer winning is that the other ecosystem members win, too.

Industry solutions are a platform play!

It is this time of the year and I want to extend a heart-felt Thank You! to all my readers who honour me by investing your time into reading my posts, sharing and commenting on them.

Thank You!

Below is the list of the top 10 posts read by you in 2021

#10: How to avoid the looming CRM crisis

#9: The Dirty Dozen of 2021 Trends (maybe I should revise this one for 2022?)

#8: CRMKonvo - Freshworks on Platform, CRM and useful AI

#7: Outlaw Spirit - Lessons from The Zoho Analyst Day 2021

#6: How to orchestrate customer journeys in real time at scale

#5: Digitization, Digitalization, Digital Transformation - A Stake in the Ground

#4: With Oracle Fusion Marketing into the Future of CRM?

#3: Together, Zoom and Five9 shape a new market (well, in the light of this merger having failed ... they could have shaped a market. Still, a very readable one)

#2: Nimble strengthens its ability to be where the user is

#1: Ecosystem Play, One Game at a Time

Obviously, I do not know yet in detail what I am going to write about in 2022. however, I strive to make it as valuable for you as this year - at least

Bonne Année!

Lately, we have talked a lot about ecosystems, in particular business ecosystems. Normally, business ecosystems follow a hub and spoke model rather than a network approach; one major player sets it up, and then adds customers and partners like independent software vendors, systems integrators, analysts, consultants, suppliers, or other similar entities. Good examples of successful ecosystems are the ones around the big four enterprise software vendors: Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. Sure, there are other ones, but these are easy reference examples.

In theory, ecosystems shall provide more value to customers, better serving their needs by making it easier for them to get access to information, knowledge, skills and productized enhancements to the core solution that they chose to implement. They also get a broader choice of possible enhancements, provided by different vendors in the ecosystem. Of course, this also benefits the other participating stakeholders.

Customers are, of course, an important group of every ecosystem. Treating them as partners helps the platform company to create a transparent prioritization process for delivering requested new functionalities that extend the own solution in an optimal way. Not all customers provide the necessary input, though.

For the platform provider, the ecosystem creates stickiness. Still, this company cannot develop and provide all the functionality that is ever needed by its customers. Nor can it provide sufficient implementation services.

And it does not want to, either.

So, it needs ISVs and SIs as members of its ecosystem to provide this functionality, either as products, or as consulting solutions. What these companies deliver on top of the core solution also increases the attractiveness of the ecosystem. 

ISVs and SIs are often smaller ecosystem participants. They get access to customers and other participants of the ecosystem that complement their expertise. They might also see themselves merge with the platform provider. Worst case, the platform provider sees an opportunity and provides functionality that is similar to the one provided by one or more smaller partners. In this case, the platform provider becomes a competitor. We all have seen this.

Of course, there are also situations where partners compete with each other. The ecosystem is a place where coopetition happens, which is something that is mostly healthy.

The question that arises is how can small companies, especially ISVs, thrive and grow as part of an ecosystem. After all, it is the platform company that makes the rules and that has all the data while the other ecosystem players only have a partial view on it. For these smaller ISVs, this inherently bears the risk of becoming a commodity, which is not a desirable  position to be in, as commodity providers can be exchanged for each other.

This means that the  providers in an ecosystem need to be distinguishable from their  competition. In addition to the diminishing importance of product, price and promotion, another key factor is the experience that the company does provide, how hard (or rather easy) it is to work with the company, how easy its solution is to implement, and how well it fits into the core software that is provided by the controlling company, to name a few relevant points.

This ties back to the pyramid of customer expectations.

On an individual level

• Information about the solution must be readily and easily available, accurate, and the solution itself must work as advertised, i.e. solve the customers’ problem
• The solution must be easy to implement and efficient to use, which works best, if it is fully developed in the platform’s software stack, because that way the installation will be  smooth and users do see a user interface that they are used to
  
• And it needs to be fun to use, which is a bit harder but goes in line with making life for the user easy by working like the users and not as if designed by someone who never did the job it shall help the user perform. Ideally, it is possible to work with the company to implement missing or additional functionality fast

And then, there is an additional stage that successful small ecosystem players master: They are capable of building temporary ecosystems, temporary partnerships with other ecosystem members to provide more value to customers. These partnerships may be limited to a single project but also involve joint product development and go-to-market. The important aspect is that these temporary ecosystems can generate further synergies

To give a concrete example, this is exactly what an ISV like Fastcall successfully does. Fastcall is a part of the Salesforce ecosystem. The company provides efficient CTI solutions that extend the Salesforce solution. The software seamlessly extends the Salesforce stack as it is a native app, which also makes it easy to install. Because of being a native app, it also seamlessly integrates into the Salesforce UI. The company uses the AppExchange, which makes it easy to find. The company is also very customer driven. This is shown, e.g. when it comes to implementing new requirements in a swift way, as Marshall Lager has recently described in his article Rising to Swift Challenges in App Development.

It is not that uncommon that a software company creates new software based upon customer requirements. Actually, this is the way things should be done; not exclusively, but to quite an extent.

Now, there are few software vendors who are truly independent. Most vendors are, and need to be, part of one or more other vendor ecosystems. This is simply a matter of scale, as there are only a few vendors who have the size and market power that are necessary to surround themselves with a good number of customers, ISVs, system integrators and other partners. And the number of these ecosystems is rather shrinking than growing. 

What this means is not that these few companies can implement and deliver what they want, but that the other ones need to carefully check two things.

First, which ecosystem(s) to belong to, be it one or more than one. And as the CEO of 3CLogic, Denis Seynhaeve in a recent CRMKonvo said: It is important to choose wisely, which ecosystem to commit to.

One of the fundamental consequences of this decision is the degree of dependency on other vendors that the smaller vendor has. This degree naturally decreases with the number of ecosystems it participates in, although they can never be truly independent - which is also not wanted when playing the ecosystem game. Conversely, participating in more than one ecosystem increases options and the potential reach.

On the other hand, there are some other factors that come into play. The software architecture and the software itself will become more complicated when different vendors’ systems shall get augmented. Deep knowledge in different technologies is required, if deep integrations are necessary. As a consequence of all that, the implementation and maintenance become more expensive. This has an adverse impact on pricing.

Different vendors at the core of an ecosystem prioritize the functionalities they deliver differently. This means a vendor that engages into enhancing core solutions cannot necessarily guarantee an equivalence of functionality across platforms, unless extending it outside the platform and integrating via APIs. While this is a viable option, it increases the complexity of the system architecture at the customer.

This is precisely where the wise choice that Denis spoke of comes into picture.

The choice is about which ecosystem or ecosystems to join.

And there is definitely a value in focusing on one ecosystem. One of these values is time to value for customers.

Let me provide you with an example of a company I regularly interact with at this point. The company is called Fastcall and builds CTI solutions that extend Salesforce. Fastcall is a so-called ISV (independent software vendor) and has fully committed to the Salesforce stack. Being a Salesforce-only provider, the company is by definition dependent on Salesforce but tied its success to the success of the Salesforce platform. Its management pays particular attention to Salesforce’s new feature releases. Those that show promise to add value to their customers then may be adopted in their solution. This can be started as early as the new feature is in a Salesforce beta program.

For Fastcall, this has several advantages. These range from being able to work within the Salesforce stack to being able to quickly leverage new features that are offered by Salesforce and to turn them into more value for mutual customers. One of these features being the Einstein Conversation Insights, which got released at the end of March 2021.

Einstein Conversation Insights is a framework that can be used to analyze call recordings to find predefined keywords and to obtain some metrics. One of the important aspects of this framework is that it is agnostic to the source of the call recordings. This means that it can be easily used by partners like Fastcall by simply uploading a call recording and getting results in return.

Well, this somewhat simplifies things.

Still, looking at the example of Einstein Conversation Insights, Fastcall was able to build, QA and deliver an integration with this new Salesforce functionality in less than a month. Fastcall recordings are made available to Einstein Conversation Insights in real time, which in turn delivers useful insights into the recorded conversation.

The message here is that partners who focus on one particular ecosystem, in this example Salesforce, can react with tremendous speed to offer more value to their customers. Especially, if these partners are smaller, they can, and usually do, prioritize their developments closer to the needs of their customers, which are often smaller in nature, too.

Earlier, we spoke of wise choices. What could be wiser than aligning product development to the needs of one’s customers?

Starting with the concept of blades we went across a number of different topics related to customer experience with our guest Denis Seynhaeve.

Denis is the CEO of 3CLogic, a company that is dedicated to 'pluggable' contact centers in the cloud, helping organizations to provide good customer experience via voice technology.

So, naturally a number of questions arises. What is blade technology (hint, it doesn't have anything to do with the blade runner but is closer to the blades used in data centers ...)? How does this technology contribute to a customer experience? Why choosing AWS and not another hyperscaler - or run out of own data centers? And, first, and foremost: Why the concentration without exclusivity on ServiceNow? Here, Denis clearly has a strategy that differs from the one pursued by Richard Rosen of Fastcall, who has an exclusive focus on Salesforce.

And, last but not least the fundamental question: How to choose the right ecosystem to play in, if one is not an 800-pound gorilla?

Answers to these questions and more in our CRMKonvo

Ecosystems is all I say - was his post in Linkedin. And as you can imagine, this sparked quite a discussion. Why? Because "he" is SAP's venerable Chief CX Evangelist Esteban Kolsky.

Not that it needs a reason to invite Esteban to a CRMKonvo (because he is always good for a well founded opinion) but this discussion and the topic itself certainly made it highly interesting to cover some ground and Esteban is always good for a lively discussion.

What is an ecosystem - and how does it relate to the word "symbiosis" - if at all? How does one get an ecosystem viable? What is fairness in that context? Is trust a factor? Fairness? Or is that all too fuzzy?

And - spoiler alert - as you can imagine by the title: They do not revolve around the customer. I will not tell you what it is though and leave that to Esteban himself.

Best of all: Some highly interesting insight in the comments as well.

Enjoy the CRMKonvo. We certainly did!

Ecosystems are a big topic. What makes an ecosystem successful? What hurts? Are there any key elements to ecosystems to make them succeed? Does it differ from communities? Can a vendor survive without one? Or even better: Can customers succeed without? There are lots of questions to be answered in the times of platform play.

The CRMKonvos team had a vivid conversation with Alan Berkson, Global Director of Community Outreach and Analyst Relations at Freshworks, who, as part of is job works with, and builds ecosystems - pretty well, in fact.

He has a lot of interesting things to say, also about the current rage, which is Clubhouse - will it succeed? Is there any good to it?

Enjoy the conversation!

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. 

In my recent article on how to improve collaboration with Fastcall CTI I summarized a number of requirements that need to be fulfilled by a solution. A good vendor needs to fulfil at least this set of requirements.

·  First and foremost: The software needs to do the job of making life for the employees easier

·  It needs to be embedded into the host software, and not run side by side

·  Ideally, the vendor is specialized on the software stack that your employees use and the software uses the same UI as the host software

·  The software needs to share information and data with the host software and write into the same database

·  The vendor needs to offer good support and regular, frequent updates to the software

The article was deliberately abstract and not dealing with any platform, as I wanted to make a general point. The way to do this is to keep it independent of any major (or minor) platform.

But what does it mean, specifically, to work with these criteria?

Let’s get our hands dirty

Imagine that you are a Salesforce customer and are looking for a matching CTI app to extend the footprint of your implementation with the goal of better and more efficient availability.

Then Salesforce AppExchange is your first point to start the search, as this is just the kind of use case that it has been built for. Still, there are some pitfalls to observe. Not whatever is on top of the list, is best for you. Salesforce AppExchange ranks and lists by popularity.

Popularity is calculated by how users interact with a listing i.e., whether they interact with the information available on a listing. AppExchange weighs the user activity according to a level of importance as indications of interest. It also tries to filter out attempts to abuse the system.

When looking at the criteria catalog above, what you want is a native Salesforce app. A Salesforce app is called native when it resides completely within the Salesforce platform, including all data, metadata, security, authentication, custom code etc. This essentially means that it is specifically built for the Salesforce platform and therefore does not need an API-based integration into Salesforce.

Why a native app? Because this is an app that is built by a Salesforce specialist and uses the Salesforce UI. This avoids a break in the user experience and avoids or at least reduces the amount of training necessary. Native also means that the data resides in the Salesforce database and does not need to be replicated anywhere else. On top of this, the customization effort goes down and is done in an environment that Salesforce admins are used to.

So, let us have a look at Salesforce AppExchange to find one or more apps that do the job. Salesforce AppExchange, at the time of this writing, hosts and offers around 3,800 free and paid apps that extend the Salesforce capabilities. Roughly one third of this are paid apps with a five-star rating and 216 of them are native to Salesforce.

Limiting this to CTI software the AppExchange search comes up with a selection of a little more than thirty apps, with five of them being native to Salesforce and three of them having a five-star rating. With Fastcall and Intercall, two of these three are implemented by Fastcall. The other five-star app has not been updated since 2011, while Fastcall supplies regular and frequent updates to its software.

Interestingly, with MaxCredible one of the five apps that are presented to the user, is not even a CTI app but a credit management app.

Figure 1: Salesforce Native CTI apps

Another interesting observation is that the two five-star apps by Fastcall are not the ones that appear topmost amongst the thirty-plus five-star CTI apps

Still, looking for CTI apps that are tightly integrated into, native to, Salesforce, leaves you with one single viable vendor, Fastcall, which is dedicated to both, the Salesforce infrastructure, and CTI solutions.

 What does this mean?

First of all, this exercise shows that the rankings that are provided by app marketplaces can be very intransparent. Although Salesforce gives an explanation of what goes into a ranking, the ranking itself is created within a black box and does not utilize crucial information. Users need to remember that marketplaces often are not curated, and the algorithm is probably opened to be gamed, in spite of measures to avoid this.

This does not only hurt important marketplace members, but in the long run also Salesforce as the owner of the marketplace. Software vendors, participants in the marketplace are likely to expect some better support. And from a customer point of view, it is not obvious that an app that has not been updated in nearly a decade ranks high.

The people that are responsible for the Salesforce AppExchange might want to have a look at this issue.

Second, it is really important to use your own set of criteria instead of blindly trusting a rating. Even in this simple example it becomes obvious that using your own criteria helps to significantly narrow down the list of possible candidates.

What do you think?