Top tips for publishing...

The final stage of the process is actually getting your application published. Once it's live everyone will be able to see your application, see how it affects their salesforce implementation and compare it to other packages in your chosen categories. My top tips for a succesful publication are:

1. Breeze is beautiful
I am not talking about the capability here rather than technology (which is way way way too expensive in my opinion). But, as Salesforce.com kindly provides an environment for you to put up a breeze presentation I think every partner exploit it. I think it's the best collateral you can have so spend a little time thinking through your messaging.

2. Test drives CAN be good
In the early days of the AppExchange you had to have a test drive. The idea of letting people 'play' with a potential application is a great idea, but, as it's read only I am just not sure they work for every application. We have three apps on the AppExchange and two of them have test drives. Our major app doesn't. Why? Well, our main app, Clicktools for AppExchange is a generic capability that enables salesforce customers to build any custom form, survey or landing page and then automatically create or update information in to salesforce. Because people use this for many purposes including updating campaign member status records, sat surveys, Promoter, case, stay in touch... The read only test drive confused many people.

This was the case with many apps so now, like other, we just use a standard breeze presentation. Our other two entries are geared towards specific applications (a user adoption survey and a HR sales skills survey). For these two apps, we have pre-defined custom objects, reports and dashboards so the test drive becomes more valuable and is clear to users.

3. Free trials
We provide free 30 day trials of our product. It helps organisations understand how they can use our product but also helps faster transition to a working implementation. A lot of organisations use our free trials to build their actual intended solutions in the trial.. When they become customers a switch is flicked and away they go...