Salesforce Channel Chief: Growth Opens Doors for Partners

Salesforce, the cloud computing giant, is experiencing rapid growth through both acquisitions and expanding its range of capabilities.

This week, the company completed its acquisition of Demandware, a provider of SaaS e-commerce offerings, for about $2.8 billion. Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chairman and CEO, said his company will be well positioned to “deliver the future of commerce as part of our Customer Success Platform and create yet another billion-dollar cloud.”

With all of that expansion comes growing pains as Salesforce adds partners and works to maintain an infrastructure that improves profit margins as the amount of sales increases.

In addition, Salesforce is in the process of unifying its partner programs to more easily distinguish partners that consistently deliver under their respective tiers and enhance the customer experience.

In a Q&A with Channel Partners, Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, Salesforce’s senior vice president of partner programs and marketing, talks about what the company’s growth means for partners and how enablement is a top priority.

Channel Partners: Can you talk about how Salesforce is creating new opportunities for partners, such as through acquisitions and new services?{ad}

Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh: What’s been fun for us and our partners is [that] Salesforce is growing both organically and inorganically in terms of some of our acquisitions. One example: A couple of years ago we made a very large acquisition of a company called ExactTarget, which is a big player in marketing — and that product set became the basis of our Marketing Cloud. ExactTarget had a number of partners who we integrated and brought into the fold. But for existing partners, there was a whole new area for them to learn. So that is new opportunity from an acquisition and we have continued to do that. It’s the capability of expanding their skill set into an adjacent area to their core skill set which, for many, started out as CRM.

Beyond that, organically, we’ve added a lot more functionality. For example, our analytics platform, if you’re an ISV, you can actually do an integration into analytics using Salesforce analytics in your app natively. So there [are] a number of areas of growth, and we’re at about a $8 billion run rate — and we are still growing.

CP: In May, your company reported that it is unifying its partner programs. How has Salesforce’s channel changed during your tenure?

NT: The announcement was to really bring the Marketing Cloud partners into the core Salesforce Partner Program … to increase access to technology. While before they just worked with Marketing Cloud, now there are a whole bunch of new areas for them to …

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… look at and to learn about.

Meanwhile, on the Salesforce CRM partner side, they’ve been really excited about being able to add in Marketing Cloud capabilities. A lot of synergy is going both ways.

So the biggest thing that I see in the last three years is that convergence and that fluidity, the adaptability of different partners materializing. And then we’ve also seen our partners partner with each other, so the ecosystem becoming more connected. Whether Salesforce knows about it or not, it’s different service partners working together, learning from each other, if each come from different backgrounds, and also bringing in ISE solutions to think about a complete cloud solution based on the Salesforce platform. {ad}

CP: What sort of feedback have you been receiving from partners? Are there things they like/dislike about the partner program?

NT: We just closed our annual partner survey and they’re tabulating the results. But the initial things I’ve seen [are] … partners were just used to talking to a person before and it’s a little bit harder now because Salesforce is bigger, so we’ve had feedback around that. And that’s a big focus for us in terms of being easy to do business with.

One of the things we’ve done is we now have completely centralized a single platform for working with partners, and that’s called the Partner Community. That really is the platform for content, collaboration and communication. What we found is you can go there, you can ask questions in there and Salesforce people are constantly in there, so that’s made it a little bit easier.

The other area of feedback is around enablement. We have a great self-service learning platform called Trailhead that has a ton of content around both product information as well as selling information, tips on management and a focus on the Salesforce culture. But self-service only goes so far, so our challenge is to be delivering training.

I’m actually in Asia right now and we are delivering some in-person training on how to sell like Salesforce, how to service like Salesforce for our partners. And then next week we’re doing a big round in India where we have a lot of partner resources. So we do spend a lot of time on it, but the face-to-face stuff is obviously tough to scale. So there’s a balance between that self-service and the face to face that we try to walk.     

CP: What are the biggest issues currently facing Salesforce and what role do you play in addressing them?

NT: Some of our biggest challenges, and it’s probably a good problem to have, are …

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… just around growth. It’s growing pains. It’s making sure that our infrastructure scales (and) that our processes are well documented because it has a huge impact on our partner ecosystem when we make changes. That whole scalability is our big challenge because we are still growing so fast and adding that scalable capacity is much more than just hiring people. It’s having an architecture that is very partner-friendly in terms of giving us leads, filing cases, asking questions, tech support, etc.{ad}

CP: In your LinkedIn profile, you say, “I love problem-solving in a fast-paced, high-change environment.” Can you give me an example of that with Salesforce and its partner ecosystem?

NT: I’ve been with Salesforce for seven years and there’s a lot of change. Remember, I came from an on-premises world [at Oracle], and part of it is just the flexibility of delivering in the cloud. Certainly we don’t change for change’s sake, but there is the capability of being very nimble, and innovation is a big part of Salesforce’s culture. So for me, even though I’ve been doing this job in the alliance and channel world for the last three years, the job has not been the same. We’ve worked with new acquisitions, tried to kind of reset the partner program in terms of being able to be more flexible to absorb new partner types, to absorb new companies that have been acquired; and then looking at various priorities, the top one now being partner enablement. All of that changes fairly frequently. So that’s one of the things I love about Salesforce. It is constant problem-solving and every week you look at the things you have to do and they’re not the same.

CP: How do you think your company’s channel strategy will change in the next three to five years?

NT: Much of Saleforce’s growth in the future will come from … emerging markets, and in those emerging markets, partners play an even more outsized role than they do today. And that is really related to the fact that when Salesforce enters a market – as I mentioned I’m in Asia – we are not as well known and we don’t have as many people … and so partners become even more important. So the trend for the future is really the growth, for Salesforce to maintain its growth. That emerging-market focus is paramount, and to be successful in emerging markets, we need partners who know the market, who have relationships, and who are able to advise us and sell on our behalf.