Why We Love the AppExchange

AppExchange

There’s been a lot of conversation over the last few years about the app economy. It’s been amazing to watch how businesses, and the odd guy in the basement, can get technology in front of consumers. While attention has largely been placed on consumer trends, I think the real story is in B2B and enterprise apps.

Business-focused app ecosystems, such as Salesforce’s AppExchange, have changed how companies such as Introhive bring new applications to market. For new technologies like Introhive, participating in these programs accelerates bringing our product to market.

Here’s why it makes sense:

Marketing Ecosystem: Participating in a program such as the AppExchange gives marketers more than an online storefront. It creates marketing scale by creating opportunities to reach large numbers of potential clients through events and contributing to the community. Smaller companies would never be able to create these on their own.

Customer Focus: When you launch new products finding a target customer segment is hard. If you have a new product you typically have to try across a number of fronts and hope that some stick. By targeting existing customers of a more widely adopted product it creates focus for your sales efforts.

Better Adoption: Business customers have app fatigue. No matter how useful your app is, it’s difficult to convince business buyers to deploy yet another app to their users. By integrating your app into products such as CRM, you reduce friction in adoption and increase your chance for success.

1 + 1 = 3: Combining our technology and data with existing technology creates more value for customers of both products. The combination of our relationship data with existing data inside platforms like CRM creates new use cases and added appeal for all partners in the equation.

So what about results? Since launching in the AppExchange we’ve seen our pipeline and sales increase dramatically. We still create our own demand and close our own deals, but the focus on a specific group of customers has accelerated our growth. It’s a strategy that more emerging businesses should try.