FinancialForce has announced a significant enhancement to its partner network at the FinancialForce Partner Summit this week. The announcement was made during the week of its customer conference, Community Live in Las Vegas.
With around 1000 attendees, the numbers are not yet confirmed, visitors are welcome by the themes of Business unlimited. As part of this mission to scale up FinancialForce has decided to introduce a tier system for ISV’s (Independent Software Vendors). The tiered system is headed by strategic partners, this includes ADP, with whom it signed a strategic agreement with last year. The four tiers are:
- Strategic: Invitation-only, top global ISV partnerships with deep joint product development and strong revenue contributions
- Gold: Requires jointly developed solution, a formalized joint go-to-market plan, and revenue contribution while giving partners more exposure to FinancialForce product and sales teams
- Silver: Requires partner-developed solution, joint customer marketing activities, revenue contribution, and agreed growth commitments
- Registered: Requires partner developed integration or complementary solution for joint customers and enables partner to be listed on FinancialForce.com with access to developer tools and community
Enterprise Times asked Fred Studer, CMO Salesforce why it has done this now. He replied: “Everything that we are doing at this event is to take the next step in FinancialForce’s journey to scale.
“We have always had a great partner motion. Specifically had great partnerships with SalesForce we added ADP from both product and go to market. But we felt that it was time in our company’s evolution to be more specific about each one of the partner areas.”
The Salesforce platform already has a large number of ISV’s who might be attracted by this approach. It delivers clear benefits for each tier. For smaller ambitious ISV’s it gives them incentives to progress through the tiers.
Agree growth commitment
This is the first time that FinancialForce has set growth commitments as part of its program according to Studer. It is an interesting concept. While partners probably won’t slip between tiers, the investment of time and budget from FinancialForce is likely to flex appropriately. Growth is also not just about revenue growth.
Studer clarified: “3 breakdowns – one is revenue… , one is how much market pipeline we can generate together and the third is successful customer wins….Just like any goals we want them to be aspirational but achievable….
“This is the first time we have put those public growth target on and we will do it discretely for each partner…”
The goals, according to Studer would be aspirational and achievable. It is a sensible approach from FinancialForce. Without targets there is less incentive for companies to perform and it gives them something to measure themselves against. While the details of the actual commitment that FinancialForce will deliver is unclear. If an ISV together with FinancialForce is successful in bringing in business, FinancialForce are likely to increase their investments with them.
Who benefits most?
Avalara, the leading tax compliance automation service will become a Gold ISV partner. It has partnered with FinancialForce for five years and has several joint customers.
Greg Chapman, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Avalara commented: “We’re pleased to be a Gold partner of FinancialForce in their new tiered program, as it strengthens our partnership and continues to foster a mutually-beneficial relationship focused on customer success. We welcome the enhanced program that FinancialForce will be promoting to drive expansion of its partner network.”
The question is: what is the go to joint market plan for Avalara? It also has partnerships with other ISV’s. Will Avalara gain most customers through the greater visibility across the FinancialForce ecosystem or are FinancialForce hoping to draw in more customers through partnership with other vendors? In the past, Salesforce ecosystem companies such as RootStock have worked with FinancialForce. Will FinancialForce be able to attract other ecosystem partners and deliver more clients.
Johnny Ola, Vice President, Global Alliances and Business Development at FinancialForce. “The introduction of the tiered ISV program to the FinancialForce Partner Network builds on the success of our tiered SI Program. It provides expanded solutions for our joint customers and further platform innovation, which benefits our entire ecosystem. We have seen increasing demand from partners to build integrations and complementary solutions to FinancialForce. The new program will enable partners to engage and collaborate with us and our customers in a much stronger way.”
FinancialForce needs to announced these new partners to demonstrate the success of the ISV program. Ola referred to the success of the tiered SI program and FinancialForce announced some early results that bode well.
Are SI’s flocking to FinancialForce.
In recent months FinancialForce has announced several key agreements with SI’s. Probably the most important was with Appirio, one of the leading Salesforce consultancies, and the original authors of the FinancialForce PSA solution. They also announced the signing of Agilyx group, a UnIt 4 partner in Australia. The growth of Salesforce in Australia attracted them.
One name still missing from the list is Bluewolf, the IBM company. Studer commented: “Not at this event” when asked the direct question about them but went on to say that they are talking to other SI’s.
As users of FinancialForce and a significant Salesforce partners they would be a significant coup if it added.
FinancialForce also announced several statistics around partner success. It cited a tripling of SI partner referrals over the last 15 months. however, it did’t reveal the actual numbers. It also cited 100 customers going live on partner led implementations. These are separate statistics and many of those implementations may not have been from partner referrals.
What does this mean
The signing of both Appirio and Agilyx is significant. They should help FinancialForce land some larger deals. However, the lead time for those larger deals is probably longer than it has been historically.
For the new ISV tier system FinancialForce needs to demonstrate that the new program delivers mutual benefit with ISV’s. With the creation of open API’s to ADP it may also look to create partnerships with companies outside the Salesforce ecosystem. This announcement also encourage ISV’s on the Salesforce ecosystem into a mutally beneficial partnership.
If it can attract more companies then this could become a significant shift for FinancialForce as it should help increase awareness of the software and bring them into more deals. After all the reason it has made this announcement is to ultimately deliver more revenue and grow.
