Business value #2 - it provides me with an opportunity to sell to more people

One of the key challenges facing most small and ambitious companies is increasing channels and routes to market. As soon as you become more successful, more people are willing to help and more people are willing to take your money. As we have built up a reputation as a company that knows about customer feedback and Salesforce, the number of offers of help increases. Unfortunately, most of these offers of help to “Increase my sales”, “Increase my profile” etc. come at a large cost with no guarantees.

In the early days of Clicktools we did very well at selling to some reference accounts. Most of those customers were in large corporates but we soon realised that SMBs were just as likely to buy. So, once those reference customers were in place our challenge, then just as it is now, was to figure out the best way of getting to masses of potential customers at a low cost. Where were/are those SMBs?

At the time of writing, Salesforce.com has something like 18,000 customers. It doesn’t exist in the minds of an analyst, it’s not a vague estimate based on a survey of 100 companies usage of feedback tools – it’s real and, in terms of my Salesforce integration – it’s my addressable market. Where else would I find such a contained, defined and clear marker? Business Link? Give me a break, Google Adwords..? No… Salesforce.com customers looking for an add-on for a particular solution will go to the AppExchange. Let’s face it, if you are a Salesforce.com customer and have not heard of the AppExchange you must have been on the moon for the past year so, the AppExchange it is!