You’ve gotta be boots on the ground, doing it yourself first before you build out a team to help you sell. He needed to be the one selling, partnering, and figuring out the messaging before scaling the team.
This episode of How We Got There, I am joined by Josh Koshy who is the VP of Sales at Appiphony. If you aren’t aware of Appiphony, they are both a top PDO and an ISV after launching their first app a few years ago with Josh at the helm of GTM the whole time. Josh shares lessons learned from their own journey of building their own ISV, which they also bring to their projects on the PDO side where they are building apps for other companies on the AppExchange….mostly around GTM. Drive Connect was their initial product and now it’s more of a suite of apps, including doc gen with esignature and storage of files in Salesforce from Google and Sharepoint. Their listings are excellent ones to check out on the AppExchange.
Founders and admins tend to stumble onto your listing on the AppExchange, but larger deals come from motions outside of the AppExchange. Partnerships have really been a force multiplier that Josh and team have been leaning in, specifically SI partners. Now most qualified leads come from that channel, about half of their revenue comes from partners - SIs, resellers, and Salesforce. Their largest deals tend to come from Salesforce AE/SE referrals, even if the volume of deals is smaller than from SIs.
Referral partnerships via SI partners is hard work to start but then gets easier as trust builds across successful projects. Some care about adding a competitive advantage with the ISV’s solution set, some value referral fees, and some value footing the bill for Salesforce AE-focused events by helping the SIs stay in front of their Salesforce counterparts. A really unique approach that makes sense!
One thing they overinvested in early was sponsoring events without a fully built out sales and marketing team, so the lesson learned here is perhaps waiting a bit longer before getting booths at those types of events.
Josh and his team is an example for ISVs to learn from. He brings a beginner’s mind to all of the gtm motions and is always willing to meet and share at events, make sure you say hi to him as you run into him at Dreamforce
This episode is brought to you by ISV Accelerators. ISV Accelerators is your inside guide to co-selling with Salesforce: activating the right reps, accelerating real pipeline, uncovering new revenue, and closing more deals together. Senior alliances leadership without the cost of a full-time hire, and speed to answers on whether that hire is even worth making. See what your Salesforce partnership could really do.
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