At the Appforce event yesterday a number of partners asked how they could participate in the salesforce.com community and promote their AppExchange Apps.

It goes without saying but the best way to start is by building a great product that makes customers successful. From there the news will spread like wildfire. When salesforce.com customers meet at local user groups, partners solutions inevitably come up. A great case in point is DemandTools. I don’t think I’ve been to a salesforce.com event where they haven’t been mentioned, and if you look at their AppExchange reviews you’ll see why.  

The next suggestion would be to attend the salesforce.com events where you can get to know the employees. If you can build relationships and help them understand your product, they’ll introduce it to their customers when the question comes up. Often times they are also a great source of product feedback.

Over the past couple months I've also seen several partners who have effectively used Blogs to reach salesforce.com customers. ArrowPointe, a Salesforce Consulting Partner has a blog called Perspectives on Salesforce which has built up a big following and we reference their best practice ideas all the time. Kieden, the AppExchange Partner who does search engine marketing is also putting out great best practice content to show how their product works with Salesforce.

Finally, we’d love for partners to participate on the message boards. For the good of the community we want to avoid spamming solicitations, but if a customer has a question and you think you’ve got a solution, we invite you to join the discussion. Here is a good  example by Charlie of Spanning Partners.

At the Appforce event yesterday a number of partners asked how they could participate in the salesforce.com community and promote their AppExchange Apps.

It goes without saying but the best way to start is by building a great product that makes customers successful. From there the news will spread like wildfire. When salesforce.com customers meet at local user groups, partners solutions inevitably come up. A great case in point is DemandTools. I don’t think I’ve been to a salesforce.com event where they haven’t been mentioned, and if you look at their AppExchange reviews you’ll see why.  

The next suggestion would be to attend the salesforce.com events where you can get to know the employees. If you can build relationships and help them understand your product, they’ll introduce it to their customers when the question comes up. Often times they are also a great source of product feedback.

Over the past couple months I've also seen several partners who have effectively used Blogs to reach salesforce.com customers. ArrowPointe, a Salesforce Consulting Partner has a blog called Perspectives on Salesforce which has built up a big following and we reference their best practice ideas all the time. Kieden, the AppExchange Partner who does search engine marketing is also putting out great best practice content to show how their product works with Salesforce.

Finally, we’d love for partners to participate on the message boards. For the good of the community we want to avoid spamming solicitations, but if a customer has a question and you think you’ve got a solution, we invite you to join the discussion. Here is a good  example by Charlie of Spanning Partners.

I just returned from the Partner Pavilion at the Appforce, the AppExchange User, Partner and Developer Conference. It was abuzz with activity and truly amazing to see the breath of companies showcasing applications they’ve built to extend saleforce.com functionality.

I was very impressed by Invisible CRM’s products. They’ve extended Outlook integration well beyond what you get with the standard Salesforce plug-in. The sales folder tool allows you to drag documents or email attachments directly onto a floating red s cube that hovers on your desktop. From there you can associate it with a contact, account, or other object and it adds it as an attachment in Salesforce. Their OutlookForce is also great. It overlays the Outlook UI on Salesforce data creating an interface that’s very intuitive for reps. The email and calendar integration are also much improved. If you’re users live in Outlook, I could see how these extensions would go a long way towards promoting adoption.  

On the data quality front, RingLead continues to improve their Lead De-Duplication service, adding the ability to do both contact and company matches. If you’re marketing team imports lots of lists or you have leads coming in off your website, this is a must have product. Having worked in inside sales and dealt with duplicate leads, I’d have to say that this is the single biggest thing you can do to boost rep productivity.  

At this conference I saw the emergence of a new set of partners focused on integrating search engine buys with Salesforce. SearchForce and Kieden were both showcasing how you can plan an execute Google Keyword advertising from inside Salesforce and how the Keywords that worked get tracked back into Salesforce as Leads and Campaigns so you can really close the loop. Very powerful stuff.

There were many, many more exciting partners at the Conference, all of which are listed on the AppExchange. Stay tuned for notes from today’s keynote. 

I just returned from the Partner Pavilion at the Appforce, the AppExchange User, Partner and Developer Conference. It was abuzz with activity and truly amazing to see the breath of companies showcasing applications they’ve built to extend saleforce.com functionality.

I was very impressed by Invisible CRM’s products. They’ve extended Outlook integration well beyond what you get with the standard Salesforce plug-in. The sales folder tool allows you to drag documents or email attachments directly onto a floating red s cube that hovers on your desktop. From there you can associate it with a contact, account, or other object and it adds it as an attachment in Salesforce. Their OutlookForce is also great. It overlays the Outlook UI on Salesforce data creating an interface that’s very intuitive for reps. The email and calendar integration are also much improved. If you’re users live in Outlook, I could see how these extensions would go a long way towards promoting adoption.  

On the data quality front, RingLead continues to improve their Lead De-Duplication service, adding the ability to do both contact and company matches. If you’re marketing team imports lots of lists or you have leads coming in off your website, this is a must have product. Having worked in inside sales and dealt with duplicate leads, I’d have to say that this is the single biggest thing you can do to boost rep productivity.  

At this conference I saw the emergence of a new set of partners focused on integrating search engine buys with Salesforce. SearchForce and Kieden were both showcasing how you can plan an execute Google Keyword advertising from inside Salesforce and how the Keywords that worked get tracked back into Salesforce as Leads and Campaigns so you can really close the loop. Very powerful stuff.

There were many, many more exciting partners at the Conference, all of which are listed on the AppExchange. Stay tuned for notes from today’s keynote.