When building your team to launch a product on the AppExchange, there are key roles to consider. In order to be successful with the Salesforce Partner Program for ISV Partners, it’s essential to staff the proper roles to ensure all sales & marketing, technical, and operational activities have adequate coverage. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean “people”. For larger ISV’s, each role may be represented by a full-time, dedicated staff member. For smaller ISV’s, an individual might cover multiple roles (for example, one developer might function as the Lead Architect, Team Developer, and Release Manager). The breakdown of roles is as follows for each area:
Organization
Executive Sponsor – owns the full application lifecycle; project champion; serves as primary liaison (POC = Point of Contact) with the Salesforce Partner Program
Sales & Marketing
Sales Lead – drives lead & opportunity management, subscription selling
Sales Engineer – provides technical expertise during sales cycle, builds custom demos
Business Development Lead – develops new business opportunities for the commercial application
Marketing Lead – builds and executes the go-to-market strategy, coordinates events and sponsorships (Dreamforce, World Tour Events, etc.)
Technical
Product Manager – roadmap planning, feature design, & market research
Project Manager – manages the full application lifecycle
Architect – designs the commercial application
Team Developer – builds the commercial application
Quality Engineer – oversees testing and automation, test planning, regression testing during Salesforce releases
Release Manager – moves the metadata between organizations, builds the package, and uploads it
Operations
Operations Lead – oversees order management process and provisioning
Finance – Supports the invoicing process, accounts/payable
Legal – reviews terms of the contract with salesforce.com, assists with Service Level Agreements (SLA’s), & other legal services
Customer Support Lead – resolves customer issues, manages the Customer Console
CRM Administrator – customizes the salesforce.com CRM application to optimize business processes
Partner Community Administrator – manages users (and permissions) of the Partner Community
If you currently don’t have enough coverage with current staff levels, never fear. Consider a Product Development Organization (PDO) to augment your staffing. The PDO practice at CodeScience is a proven team of Salesforce experts that can accelerate time to market for your app at least 40%. Because we’re passionate about helping businesses harness the power of Salesforce, we run hard, fail fast, and always deliver—just ask any of our satisfied customers.
Most companies don’t have deep, in-house Force.com expertise. CodeScience lives and breathes Force.com every day, and we love it. Our PDO practice helps you avoid common pitfalls companies encounter when they grow.
When we shake hands to build your app, we guarantee our work will pass Salesforce’s security review. Most companies launch a product on the AppExchange every few years—at CodeScience, we launch multiple products every month.
Want to know more? Download our Quick Guide to Improving Your Odds of Building a Successful AppExchange Product. It includes the 9 Steps to Navigating the Salesforce ISV Process.
Remember – going from idea to launch can be daunting. There are many resources available at your fingertips. Don’t go it alone!
