On September 02, 2020, Our CEO and Co-Founder Mr. Priyaranjan Panigrahy and Business Development Manager Mr. Bipin Agarwal hosted a webinar “Transform your dream idea into a successful AppExchange enterprise app” where they covered the roadmap from the formation of app idea to AppExchange, the importance of working with a PDO partner, costs, and timelines.  

“It is my privilege to share whatever we have learned together for the past 10 years, with you all.” 

Priyaranjan

“We are going to cover some interesting topics around Salesforce AppExchange, How the platform can be a gateway to success, how to streamline this entire app building journey, the roadmap and what kind of business decisions you can make, along with the role and importance of a PDO partner” 

Bipin Agarwal

The webinar showed our audience that if you have a great idea that solves a particular problem within a specific industry like healthcare or manufacturing, it is a complicated process that can be complex. This is where Salesforce with its large community of nearly 200000+ users comes in, it becomes easier for organizations to have app reviews and hold demos for potential customers. 

The various stages before an application gets registered are:

• Ideation – The first stage
• Validation – During this stage, PDO partners evaluate the technology, adoption, and business feasibility. This includes the cost of development, what percentage of the revenue Salesforce will share, and the bottom line.  
• POC + MVP – In this stage, the proof of concept is done where the biggest threats are identified before the application can be built. This ensures that the development stage goes smoothly without major hiccups. After POC, the next part is the minimum viable product, which is determining how much customers will pay for it. 
• Sales and Marketing strategy – Once the initial pilot customers are pleased with the beta, then comes the sales and marketing stage, where the best channels for growth are discovered.
• Go-To-Market- During this stage, partners can find the best moves before going to market. This also includes building brand awareness and finding the right investor. 

Further after interacting with Bipin regarding the primary aspects, he spoke about the 3 primary things to consider from idea to AppExchange and how Salesforce makes it different:

Business – CEPTES has devised a strategy known as CAP strategy, which is Category, Audience, and Pricing for authenticating the feasibility of the business. 

“Once we are done with the basics of the business, we move onto the technology part, this is the beautiful part. I love Salesforce and that’s my passion, If you look at this platform, it is one which covers everything. Starting from your artificial intelligence, your analytics, blockchain, big data, IoT, and mobile, It takes care of your entire infrastructure platform” – Priyaranjan

Technical – Everything related to the technical aspects of the business, which is where the beauty of the Salesforce platform translates into functionality. From the cutting edge technologies like AI, IoT to analytics and mobile, everything required for app development. There are a lot of useful applications already available, like Chatter, some of which were developed without a single line of code. The platform is very versatile where onboarding of vendors or partners can be done in a matter of 2 or 3 days. Every module required for streamlined business processes is available on Salesforce. 

“The platform has been designed in a way that it allows users to design business processes without no code or very less code, but if you are building a big application the system is built in a way that you can connect to any other technology using the Heroku platform or using proprietary software like LWC or Appx” – Priyaranjan

GTM- This is the 3rd and final stage in the roadmap where the growth of the product mainly depends on. PDO partners at this stage analyze the data like who has come to your application, search criteria, have they look at collateral images or video, have they signed up for trials, from which marketing channel they’ve come in, etc. Based on this data analysis, PDO partners will suggest the best AppExchange marketing program which will help your application soar.  

The next and sometimes most important step is the security review, which without a PDO partner can take almost 4 or 6 months to get through. With one, however, the timeline is drastically cut to 2-4 weeks. There was also a presentation of cost overview for the entire project which can be viewed at the link below.

One of the key takeaways from the webinar is how CEPTES as a certified PDO partner helps businesses with guidance regarding best practices for getting listed. We have extensive experience getting internal applications listed as well as helping organizations get listed. This was a basic overview of the session, to get an in-depth look along with the interactive Q and A session at the end, you can view the recording of the webinar here.