aheadCRM - Blog #partnership

Platform Partners: A Question of Trust

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:00:06 -0400

The enterprise software world is one where few, if any, companies can stand alone. Cloud computing has greatly increased the availability and usability of business applications. However, no vendor can claim to supply a complete homegrown solution. The SaaS world is one of partnerships. Partnerships are best when all the partners are trustworthy.

Business software customers still need to pick a brand and stick with it for a while. That brand—the platform—represents a serious investment of time and trust. Sure, you own your data, and changing platforms is supposed to be easy. But ask anybody who’s done it whether they would want to do so again next year.

Platform customers have to weigh more than just the price and features of each platform provider. They must also consider what the future holds for that platform and its partners. None of the big platforms are likely to disappear or merge anytime soon, but their fates and fortunes are not constant. They also have histories and reputations. Increasingly, they have prominent social and/or political stances as well. Those issues matter enough to some business owners and investors to affect their decisions. There are also simpler matters, like whether the customer likes the feel of the software environment, or has concerns about possible changes.

Can I Trust You?

In the end, these decisions boil down to variations on a single question: “Can I trust you with my business?” Contracts and commercial laws deal with businesses that act in bad faith; this is more about responsibility, reliability, and safety. Examples:

Will you continue to support the applications I use?
Is my data secure?
Do you have good disaster plans in place?
How will your price structure evolve?
Will you expand your offerings?
How does the app marketplace work for developer partners?

Platforms give their users clear answers to these questions. The provider creates the rules for the platform, and any partner or developer that wants to associate with it has to stick to those rules. Thus, a customer can trust any vendor on that platform to adhere to its standards, or face consequences. Broader kinds of partnerships provide some protections, but the customer is still essentially shopping at a bunch of different stores rather than the platform’s one superstore.

App vendors who rely on a platform for distribution are probably among the most trustworthy businesses in all of enterprise software. They answer to their customers, their platform, and their own standards of excellence, all at once.

One good example is Fastcall, a CTI app developer on the Salesforce AppExchange. “We serve Salesforce customers and only Salesforce customers, so everything we do is focused on earning and keeping their trust,” says Richard Rosen, co-founder of Fastcall. As a dedicated AppExchange developer, Fastcall can concentrate fully on adhering to Salesforce’s standards and practices regarding security, partner policy, and app compatibility. “There is no other market for us, the AppExchange is our home,” Rosen says. “It’s just good business to be as easy to work with as possible.”

We all want to be recognized

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 12:52:10 -0500

Abraham Lincoln reportedly said “Don't worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition.” I am wondering how this applies to the companies we interact with. I would worry if I was not recognizing my customers, and I work to be recognized by them. Recognition is a concept that goes both ways. And as a customer, I worry when I am not recognized, or no longer recognized.
Technology has enabled amazing one-to-one marketing for businesses selling to consumers (B2C). But how effective is this marketing in reality? I am always shocked that I can walk into a car dealership and not be recognized. When I am shopping for a car I always point out what I have leased in the past. I am trying to help the car salesman recognize me. Another example might be Nordstrom. You could expect a shopping experience where you only see clothes in your size or even style. “Hey Rich - we know you - here is what we suggest.” Shoppers want to be recognized but it just hasn’t happened yet.
Companies selling to business customers (B2B) will find these in many different sizes, from small businesses to the Fortune 500. Very large customers are easy to recognize.There is complexity in selling to the company and its many divisions or departments, but you know they are large and important, because the deals tend to be bigger than deals with SMBs. Ford, General Electric, Starbucks - when selling to a big account the seller certainly recognizes the opportunity and treats the account accordingly by offering solutions to their needs.
Selling to small businesses is more like selling to consumers. To succeed sellers must sell in volume. In enterprise software most start here. Selling to a very large company is not always an initial strategy for a software company. We call this B2C2B (business to consumer to business). Start with smaller businesses and work up in account size. Nearly every software as a service company (SaaS) started selling to small and medium size companies.
As SaaS sales teams work into larger and larger accounts, what happens to the small business customers that were their foundation? Are they still recognized?
20 years ago when Salesforce was just starting the large competitors were SAP and Oracle. And 20 years ago a Fortune 500 company was not leaving SAP for Salesforce. Salesforce worked from the bottom and edges to build into the current market leader. Salesforce tries to recognize its smaller customers as it has moved up the market from a base of small business customers. The Salesforce IdeaExchange is where small business customers with a need not currently served post their requests. Salesforce small business customers can vote on these because they match their own. Salesforce product managers can use this website to know what customers are asking for. This is how Salesforce recognizes some of the needs of smaller customers.
Truth is, if you are a smaller customer - not a “logo” and not Fortune 500 - your needs may not be prioritized.
How does this impact your research for business software? You have a list of needed capabilities and are reviewing vendors. As you check off the boxes what is important to know is not just if the current needs are fulfilled. These boxes are checked, but you also need to know if your future needs will be fulfilled. Will you be recognized as important when you learn next quarter that your software needs have evolved? Will the software you chose also evolve with you? Do they offer custom solutions? Will they grow with you? Do they strive to be worthy of your recognition?
I am not a Salesforce developer but the company makes a great example, as it grew so fast. So I just talk about partnering with Salesforce here, especially since I regularly speak with a Salesforce partner, Rich Rosen, CEO of Fastcall. However, the same principles apply elsewhere. And as we can see in the example above Salesforce has become a very large company serving the largest of the Fortune 500 as well as many small businesses down to the single-user realtor or mortgage broker. It is truly remarkable to see a software company service such a wide variety of customers.
As a small company dealing with a very large company, Salesforce, you may want to think about the advantage of partnering with smaller companies as found in the AppExchange. The smaller Salesforce partners offset the largeness of Salesforce. Salesforce itself is not able to recognize and be very high touch with the smallest accounts, but smaller Salesforce partners are equipped to do so. You also have the choice of partners who are more experienced in your vertical or in a more convenient regional office.

More Nimble News

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 01:14:29 -0400

The News

In the past 5 weeks or so, there have been quite a few news items about Nimble, with the biggest product news dated September 28 and the most interesting business development dated October 11. The headlines include Nimble’s deeper collaboration with Microsoft and its channel partners, as well as product innovations intended to increase the value delivered to Office 365- and G Suite users. In particular, Nimble:

Now integrates with Circleback, an AI-powered contact capture and cleaning tool as well as their business card scanner. Nimble is now able to extract high quality contact information from email signatures and to add it to the Nimble contact record. This way it becomes easier to keep contact information current.
Has partnered with NeoCloud. NeoCloud is a managed cloud services company that deploys and manages Office 365. The company now bundles Nimble into all its Office 365 deals and thus offers business applications on top of its infrastructure- and productivity-focused solutions. This is based on the (valid) assumption that Office 365 users benefit from having a simple and powerful contact management platform that resides on top of the productivity suite.
Has become selected by Microsoft to join its Seattle Accelerator program.
On the product front released Nimble Prospector, a ‘powerful email/phone and address discovery engine that enables Nimble users to build outbound prospects’. According to Jon, prospector draws upon dozens of sources (not LinkedIn, so much he volunteered) to deliver contact information based on a company or domain name. Nimble also introduced an Add-In for Outlook on Android and, not surprisingly, support for Microsoft's Edge

Nimble also continues to pursue the strategy of embedding Microsoft products into the solution for efficient development of enterprise features as well as enabling channel partners to generate additional revenues. Addressing the Nimble Prospector first I, I must say that I really love the idea of it. And, judging by what Jon showed me, it is an exciting tool that can make life for salespeople a lot easier. Fellow analyst Rich Bohn – President and Chief CRM Analyst, Sell More Now, LLC is right when saying that “Too many CRM solutions still make the poor users do all of the work. This needs to end! These people are already way over worked. Thankfully, Nimble has been bucking this trend for a while. Nimble already does the best job of automatically finding your contact's social connections. Now, with the launch of Nimble Prospector, the program unearths even more valuable information about your contacts and automatically adds it to your contact record. Of course, my favorite is the email address that I need to have a genuine dialog with my contacts. Now, instead of searching my brains out, Nimble just finds the email address for me." But, having been offered a test ride, I also have a challenge with it as, being a browser plugin, it seems to work only if pop-up- and ad blockers are disabled. I think this is a high price to pay, unless it is sufficient to only whitelist nimble.com and app.nimble.com.

The Bigger Picture

All this shows that Nimble continues to pursue its "Trojan Horse" strategy to become the premier choice of ‘CRM’ system for SMBs. I have written about this earlier, most recently here. Apart from continuing on its path of simplicity and usefulness, Nimble strives to achieve this objective by becoming ubiquitous on the infrastructure and software stack that is very likely to become the premier business platform: Microsoft. Nimble’s close partnership with Microsoft helps to integrate the company deeply in the Microsoft partner ecosystem. As evidenced by the partnership with NeoCloud and by Microsoft’s decision to bring Nimble into its Accelerator program for late stage startups, Nimble’s deep integration with Microsoft’s tools makes it a natural choice for Microsoft Dynamics users. The next logical step after having embedded Dynamics, is to create a ‘Dynamics version of Nimble’ that is basically the entry point to Microsoft Dynamics business applications, offering a clear growth path from (SMB) Nimble to (Enterprise) Dynamics. On a side note, the partnership with Circleback is interesting. Circleback so far seems to have focused on Salesforce. In this case, Circleback’s partnership with Nimble – and by extension with Microsoft – could be considered a message about the growing strength of Microsoft’s ecosystem of business applications.

MyPoV and Advice

Jon Ferrara is repeating the strategy he pursued with Goldmine. He is betting on the Microsoft infrastructure becoming the dominant business fabric, surpassing AWS while keeping Google at bay. Deep integration with Microsoft enterprise applications and tools creates incentives for the channel to co-sell Nimble in order to sell more first party software. In combination with an easy-to-use contact manager and social sales tool that benefits Office 365 users, this strategy can rapidly build broad distribution. Getting selected into Microsoft's Accelerator program gives quite an additional boost, because Nimble can tap into Microsoft's vast technical and business resources, building broader access to its partner and customer bases. The deep integration into Microsoft’s go-to-market strategy and execution should be the biggest program benefits for Nimble. I have speculated earlier that Nimble is on course to be acquired by Microsoft. Now the company has taken another step closer to this possibility. And, Microsoft has opened the crucial door even wider into the S- end of the SMB market. The enterprise CRM market is largely saturated; the SMB market of companies with growth potential, which is still underserved, is where the opportunity lies. I would still label Nimble as a contact management solution rather than as a CRM but it is certainly a very valuable sales automation and intelligence tool that efficiently helps sales and marketing professionals acquire and nurture contacts. The system helps them to get over the hardest part of their job: getting the contact information and intelligence about the people they want to or need to contact with out spending a ton of time doing so. Having said this, if we were still using the term ‘Social CRM’ Nimble would be the archetype. With well beyond 100,000 users, the solution has traction. Business owners that heavily rely on Microsoft productivity tools and have the ambition to grow should certainly consider Nimble but should validate which customer service solutions inbound marketing tools to use integrated with it. Considering Microsoft is an ecosystem player, there should be some options.

More about Nimble

https://aheadcrm.blogspot.de/2017/07/nimble-news-from-ms-inspire.html https://aheadcrm.blogspot.de/2017/05/nimble-and-microsoft-are-getting-ever.html https://aheadcrm.blogspot.de/2017/02/a-love-affair-nimble-smart-contacts-for.html https://aheadcrm.blogspot.de/2016/07/nimble-to-crm-or-to-not-crm.html