Salesforce issues call to resellers as it eyes direct model shift

Tara Ridley (Salesforce).

CRM and enterprise software giant Salesforce has revealed its global ambitions to shift 10 per cent of its business towards an indirect sales model. 

For a company that transacts 100 per cent direct, 10 per cent is a sizeable goal. As part of a trial in New Zealand, Salesforce has engaged 10 resellers in the market, including Datacom and LavaBox, who were the initial launch partners in cloud reseller program, with Micado being the latest participant.

If the trial is successful in New Zealand, the vendor intends to open up its reseller pool to Australian partners.

The current makeup of Salesforces’ partner ecosystem consists of four streams – consulting partners involving global and regional systems integrators (SIs); independent software vendors (ISVs); agency partners in the marketing technology space and its newest stream:  cloud resellers. 

Currently, Deloitte and Accenture remain among Salesforce's top two global SIs in Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ). 

Salesforce A/NZ vice president of alliances and channels Tara Ridley told ARN and Reseller News that embarking on the reseller path was part of a strategy to access new geographies and markets, particularly in the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) space.

“I knew that in order to get scale in the SMB and mid-market areas a reseller strategy would serve incredible growth and because we're just starting out, we wanted to pick partners that had a very strong brand, customer propositions or present scenarios,” she said.

“We go through quite a rigorous selection process because we want to make sure that each partner that comes on, has got a unique value proposition in the market whether it's an industry focus or they might have a strong presence in South Island where we haven't got any employees or coverage.

“We have a dedicated team in New Zealand running that strategy and the focus has been on really onboarding and recruiting, and now this year is really around the pipeline and demand generation. We want to make it a huge success and then bring it across to Australia.”

All up, Ridley said it has about 200 consulting partners and 350 ISVs across A/NZ on the AppExchange.

“They're the partners that make the platform richer in terms of delivering customer experience and transformation,” she said. “Customer success is one of our core values as a company and customer success really only happens when the customer goes live on the platform. 

“So it's not just they bought the software, but it's the partners that light it up and actually transform the customer experience, so customer success is critical and so in order to do that, we need to ensure partners have the right skills, capacity and capabilities.”

In the A/NZ market, partners maintain more than 17,000 certifications across the different Salesforce platforms with about 4,000 certified individuals. 

Ridley said Salesforce was looking to continue to grow this incrementally by more than 25 per cent this year, in recognition of the demand for the Salesforce cloud portfolio. 

“We've got a number of different initiatives that are helping build our partners up from a capacity point of view - how we're attracting new talent into the ecosystem to get them certified and promoting career journeys,” she said. 

In 2019, Salesforce created the Talent Alliance in recognition of the skills shortage and talent diversity in the market. 

“When partners sign up to the Talent Alliance, they commit to at least 20 per cent of hires that are new to the Salesforce ecosystem," she said. "This year alone, we’re looking to drive an additional 500 net new individuals coming from diverse backgrounds into our partner ecosystem."

Ridley said the software vendor will also be launching Salesforce Days, offering instructor led training to help people gain certification. 

“We expect to get upwards of nearly 1,000 people through that this year.  We have to find new ways of attracting talent and this is how we're growing capacity,” she said. 

Ridley hinted Salesforce's go to market strategy this year was focused on key industries such as financial services, retail and consumer goods, communications, media utilities and public sector. 

“We're really encouraging our partners to specialise, create their own unique differentiation, build their own assets and use cases in those industries,” she said. 

Another element of the strategy is central to partner enablement via the Partner Learning Camp, as new innovations are introduced to the market. 

During the Salesforce World Tour in Sydney, new service and marketing cloud features, along with Customer Data Platform innovations, were introduced. Some of these new features include humanising the customer experience with artificial intelligence-powered conversational intelligence and mobile offline access to relevant information. 

“We want to enable our partners quickly when we bring out a new innovation and part of our strategy there is to partner with them under a ‘better together’ banner with our services team,” Ridley said. 

“We do have a small consulting team and we're very focused on how we work with our partners to deliver an outcome to ensure that Salesforce has skin in the game to deliver that customer transformation, but also do a skills transfer during the delivery.”