Win Big as an ISV: Appinium’s Recipe for Buyer & Seller Journey Success [Part 3]
By: Stefanie Gesiorski
Tags: Salesforce Partners, Isvs, Entrepreneurship, Appexchange, Salesforce

In our Win Big as an ISV blog series, we’re exploring exactly what top-performing partners do differently and how ISVs can emulate their success on the AppExchange. In Part 1, we covered the importance of alignment (both internal and within the context of the ecosystem), clear product messaging, and establishing strong alliances. In Part 2, we looked at some of the ways ISVs can tailor buyer’s and seller’s journeys to increase close rates.

Building upon these paths to a signed, sealed, and delivered deal can uncover opportunities to refine your sales processes. But designing the buyer’s and seller’s journeys is just half the battle. What do these pieces look like in action?

That brings us to our third installment. Following along with the eighth and final episode of our Acting Like a Top 25 ISV webinar series, let’s look at how ISV partner, Appinium, implemented these strategies to ensure success alongside Salesforce and how other ISVs can carve a similar path to drive ACV growth for their business.

The 3 Pillars of the Trial Experience

The trial experience is never as simple as turning over your product to a prospective buyer. Taking a “set it and forget it” approach is arguably one of the fastest ways to undermine your sales cycle. Instead, it’s essential to view the trial experience as every step sellers and buyers go through from initial contact to closed deal and renewal.

As CodeScience CRO Sean Hogan explains, “What you need to do is align buyer’s and seller’s strategies to that buyer with a known budget” to drive outcomes for those individuals. “Those ISVs that do that succeed in this ecosystem. ISVs that lead with features and functions and want to talk about cool stuff and technology typically struggle because they are not connecting outcomes to personas and budget.”

Every trial experience rests on three key pillars. Sean clarifies this as the personas who are going to use your solution, the outcomes your solution is going to provide back to the business for those personas, and the exit criteria you establish for your sellers to help them incrementally improve their close rate.

“The difference between the top 25 ISVs and everybody else,” Sean adds, is that “leading ISVs connect these three pillars and repeat them throughout their entire organization.”

Measure, Adjust, and Innovate

What does this look like in real life? For the final webinar of our Acting Like a Top 25 ISV series, Appinium Founder and CEO Steve Jacobson once again joined Sean to share how his company has successfully designed and maintained the trial experience to great success.

For Appinium, the recipe for success began by grounding the entire organization in a deep, granular understanding of core buyer personas. By investing the time to develop and learn these personas, Steve and his team ultimately take a very human-centric approach to selling. Each time one of these key personas is involved in a sales cycle, the Appinium team knows how to tailor the trial experience to speak directly to their specific needs, motivations, and expected outcomes.

Steve explains one persona — Eric Simms — by saying, “I know exactly what Eric does. I know exactly what motivates Eric. I know exactly what to show to Eric and what not to show to drive Eric’s behavior. So every time Eric engages with our brand, he has an experience which is very personal to him, on what matters to him every day.”

Appinium has also been able to take components of their buyer personas and weave them into the actual trial experience, tailoring the dashboards a prospect will see to speak directly to their day-to-day responsibilities. This provides better context for the trial, while also showing a high degree of understanding of challenges and pain points, along with opportunities to streamline workflows. More importantly, these personas and dashboards can all be tweaked and evolved over time to ensure they remain relevant and accurate.

The Importance of Qualifying Out

It’s easy to think of sales as entirely a “yes” game. Head nods, handshakes, and signatures on dotted lines all the way to the finish. But as Steve points out, often the best decision a sales team can make is to qualify out an account. Why? Because the downstream revenue implications of a churned account can be worse than losing the deal in the first place.

Succeeding as a top Salesforce ISV is all about positioning your team to win. And sometimes that means saying “no” to a sales opportunity. In this blog series we have covered several strategies ISVs can implement to drive growth and win big. We’ve seen that aligning around value messaging and go-to-market strategy, designing buyers’ and sellers’ journeys, and tweaking the trial experience can prove significant dividends. Yet this is all for naught if you can’t understand who your best buyers are and your teams don’t feel empowered to say no to prospects that don’t fit the bill.

Appinium puts this into practice by requiring all prospects to go through a proof of concept. As Steve explains, “Our proof of concept is not negotiable. You might love the product when you see it on the AppExchange, but we will not sell it to you, under any circumstance, no matter how big or small a company you are, until you go through proof of concept.”

For Appinium, the proof of concept is an essential part of their sales process, along with creating a V2MOM (a structure coined by Marc Benioff, which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures) with every prospect. Each of Appinium’s exit criteria is non-negotiable, and the results of their disciplined, process-first sales methods speak for themselves: the company has seen an increased close rate percentage, consistency in deployment cost, and an increase in renewal rates.

Conclusion

The goal is to establish a deep, comprehensive understanding of your best buyers and their motivations, connect those personas to outcomes, track and measure all of the points it takes them to close, and rinse and repeat.

That’s it for our 3-Part “Win Big as an ISV” blog series. We hope you took away some valuable learnings and actionable techniques!

Ready to set up free trials on AppExchange? Learn how to set up with Trialforce today.

To learn more about strategies of winning ISVs, visit the Salesforce Partner Community.