Wednesday, February 27 at 1:00 PM ET/10:00 AM PT

At Dreamforce ‘17 we released our first State of AppExchange Partners report. We created this report because of the lack of third-party data on how partners were performing and where the AppExchange was going. Since then, we released our second report following up on the trends and hosted a panel session at DF18 focusing in on the report with some of our customers who are leading the way in the AppExchange.

As 2019 begins and companies are figuring out their largest opportunities, we are following up with two of our panelists in an upcoming webinar on February 27 at 1:00 PM ET/10:00 AM PT. Brian Walsh, CEO, CodeScience will talk with Tom Martin, CEO, Glance Networks and Angela Carter, Senior Client Partner, Korn Ferry.

[Register Now]

Two Perspectives of the Ecosystem

While both Tom and Angela have had success on the AppExchange and within the ecosystem, they each have a very different perspective. Glance Networks has been part of the AppExchange for nearly nine years, while Korn Ferry just released their first app at Dreamforce last year.

We’re going to explore some of the thoughts they shared during the panel session and take a look at what to expect in the upcoming webinar.

Glance Networks

As a longtime friend of CodeScience, Tom has worked with CodeScience since the beginning. Where their offering started on Sales Cloud, it has grown to the Service and Community Clouds as well. Glance Networks found a natural fit within the Salesforce AppExchange. They have created a product that “connects their customers with their clients by being able to see, show, and share anything.” The opportunity to provide visual engagement across sales, service, and onboarding all on Salesforce minimizes the need to switch applications and captures the impacts from the interaction back into the Salesforce platform.

Over the years, Tom has seen Salesforce’s consistent investment into delivering the best experiences for their customers, and their partnership has continued to drive opportunities for them — “we’re looking for the next 25 raving fans. We’re not looking to add thousands and thousands of clients.”

By leveraging and truly understanding the Salesforce channel, Tom has made it easy for the teams at Salesforce to use his product and demo it to prospective customers — sometimes without ever contacting Glance. By locking in and defining their combined product value (Salesforce with Glance Networks), the team at Salesforce knows which clients would be a good fit for Glance, which reduces the leg work needed to close the deal.

Tom’s insights show how a company can continue to grow within the ecosystem of a period of years and how the best companies take the time to learn how to partner with Salesforce.

Korn Ferry

As one of the newer members fo the AppExchange, Korn Ferry’s Angela Carter explained that, “Korn Ferry is a global people and organizational consulting firm. We help align talent and strategy because they are both really needed to impact business results.”

Having their product, KF Perform, brought up through Salesforce’s Ignite incubation program, which is part of Salesforce’s Office of Innovation, they have developed a solution to explore employee engagement and understand how to drive empowerment and growth better. Angela explained that “the technology certainly was there, [Salesforce] needed the domain expertise and the data science data to drive something really unique in the marketplace.”

It was through that partnership that Korn Ferry was introduced to CodeScience and we were able to bring their application to life in time for Dreamforce.

The number two challenge in our State of AppExchange Partners report for two years in a row is hiring developer talent. Considering that Korn Ferry has a unique perspective on this topic, Brian had Angela explore this topic more, “It is about thinking through, what are the real skills we actually need to have in-house versus what we can continue to partner and connect with from an ecosystem perspective or integration perspective.” She goes on to explain that retaining engineering talent is hard and as the landscape becomes more competitive, being able to articulate why people should want to work at your company will become that much more important.

Much like Glance Networks, Korn Ferry is leveraging the ecosystem to reach the customers who will truly believe in their product offering. Angela re-iterated Tom’s point around co-messaging and co-selling, “The ability to connect very clearly in the market’s perspective and communicate the true value of the two companies together is how we’re driving growth. And there is a natural segway between creating happy employees, creates happy customers.”

We’re looking forward to hearing about how 2018 ended for both Glance Networks and Korn Ferry and understanding what their projections are for 2019. We’ll also explore how to leverage network effects and how to create partner success within the AppExchange.

Those who register will receive a copy of our 2nd Annual State of AppExchange Partners Report and an on-demand version of the webinar — so register today!


Are you thinking about joining the AppExchange? Contact us today and learn how we’ve brought over 220+ products to market and continue to help partners thrive.