PDOs for AppExchange Success: A Salesforce ISV Partner’s Guide
In my past 15 years of experience building AppExchange Apps, I often encountered Salesforce ISV partners who burned a lot of cash and whose apps are still struggling to go live on AppExchange or failing to attract or retain customers post-launch.
In this post, we will see how PDO(Product Development Outsources) can help Salesforce ISVs in multiple dimensions.
Quick Recap - Who is a Salesforce PDO partner?
Salesforce Product Development Outsourcers (PDOs) are specialized partners in the Salesforce ecosystem that help organizations develop, build, and bring their applications to the Salesforce AppExchange.
These partners offer a range of services that cover the entire app development lifecycle, from the initial concept and strategy phase through design, development, and launch, including navigating the complex security review process.
Summary of Salesforce PDO Services
Any of the services quoted below can be a big leverage for a Salesforce ISV partner, depending on what size of company they are:
Strategic Planning: Guide app concept, positioning, market research, commercial viability, and strategy alignment with user needs and Salesforce standards.
Discover requirements, MVP, & roadmap: This is an artistic job to get correct, as it requires going forward 1-2 years and returning to a quick release in 1-3 months with an MVP.
Budgeting: Inefficient project spending can strain the budget of Salesforce ISV partners. A PDO guides ISVs in cost estimations, resource optimization, and risk management, ensuring cost and resource optimization for sustainable app development.
Finalise Engineering Team (Outsource vs. Inhouse): Setting up an engineering team for an ISV as a PDO involves assembling experts in Salesforce development, UX/UI design, and quality assurance.
UI/UX: Most Salesforce ISV partners bank on Lightning Design System guidelines for internal Salesforce Apps; PDOs can offer UI/UX assistance best suited for Salesforce customer adoption.
Architecture: Developing solution blueprints for scalable architecture and ensuring security compliance with Salesforce data protection and access control standards.
Tailored App Development: PDOs assist Salesforce ISV partners in AppExchange app development using Apex, Visualforce, Flows, and/or Lightning Components.
Dev Ops: Utilize Salesforce DevOps best practices to enhance release processes with faster, error-free deployments using CI/CD technologies.
Security and Compliance: Assist with navigating Salesforce's security review process to ensure app compliance with security standards.
Plan & Prepare Customer Success Teams: Forming customer support & implementation focused on user adoption and satisfaction and training them on required Salesforce and App functions.
AppExchange Listing and Marketing: PDOs support ISV partners in listing their apps on Salesforce AppExchange and provide marketing support to enhance visibility.
Documentation: Develop thorough documentation, including configuration manuals and knowledge bases, to guide users and support teams.
Post-Launch Support: Provide ongoing maintenance and updates to ensure the app remains compatible with Salesforce updates and market demands.
Implementation Support: For non-trivial ISV apps, PDOs can assist ISVs with complex implementations requiring Custom development, Data migrations, and API integrations.
Managing Licenses, Trials, and Orders: PDOs help ISV partners optimize LMA, COA, and Trialforce setups for efficient license management and improved market presence.
💡 Do experienced Salesforce experts need a Salesforce PDO partner?
Interestingly, I have seen many seasoned Salesforce professionals fail as ISV partners because they don’t acknowledge the unique nature of AppExchange apps, i.e., they are not meant to work in just a single org/edition.
💪 How an expert PDO can make a difference?
☘️ #1 Strategic Planning
Find your app’s market fit and niche before burning cash or time.
Most Salesforce ISV Partners get super excited to build an App on AppExchange, but they ignore researching:
AppExchange for a similar or competitor’s solution to understand market trends, competition, pricing, and what niche their app could offer, primarily if it targets a given country or geography.
Conflicts with Salesforce’s feature roadmap are unfortunate as the app will fail business approvals for AppExchange; the later it is done, the higher the damage is.
An experienced PDO can help you navigate both areas and save an ISV from the considerable frustration of wasting time and money.
👓 #2 Discover requirements, MVP, & roadmap
✅A good roadmap helps Salesforce ISV partners align their budgets with their sales, marketing, and support teams.
An expert PDO understands the nuances of Salesforce development, including the latest features, limitations, and best practices. An expert/experienced PDO helps ISV groom a requirements document that aligns with ISVs vision and the Salesforce features and cloud offerings.
A release roadmap that starts from an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or v1.0 that could go live on AppExchange. This roadmap helps ISV prioritize the most exciting features for key and initial customers/prospects, along with budgeting and release timelines of v2.0, v3.0, and vN.0.
💰 #3 Budgeting
The roadmap helps Salesforce ISV partners with the most crucial part of any business, i.e., budgeting.
Based on the App’s complexity and roadmap, engineering resources(Architects, Developers, PM QAs, etc.) can be planned. This is covered in more detail in Point #4 below.
A clear roadmap helps an ISV budget and plan/align/hire the Support, Marketing and Sales teams for essential product training.
An experienced PDO understands the end-to-end App release cycle to be a good help for ISVs to budget correctly.
👥 #4 Finalise Engineering Team
Plan whether to fully outsource, use an internal team, hire, or go hybrid
The Engineering Team comprises Salesforce Architects, Developers, QA, and PM(Product/Project Managers). Depending on ISV's skill, size, and budget, they could take a key role in engineering: forex. PM.
As quoted above, ISVs come in all shapes and sizes; they could be solopreneurs, SAAS businesses, Salesforce consulting partners, etc. The release roadmap created in the above step helps an ISV align the development team to deliver their long-term vision efficiently. ISV can set up an engineering team in either of the following models:
Fully outsourced: Salesforce architects, developers, QA, PMs, etc., are managed and deployed by the PDO.
Hybrid - Mix resources from PDO and hire a few on ISV’s payroll. Here are a few combinations
ISV has React engineers available. They hire Architectural and senior development engineers from PDO, and the React engineers work and train with the PDO team to be handy in the future.
ISV has PMs (Product/Project managers); now, these PMs could be ISV themselves or someone from their team.
ISV has Salesforce Admins/Engineers. PDO can augment Salesforce ISV partners with dedicated resources such as Salesforce Architects, senior developers, PMs, and QAs.
There is no black-and-white answer to the right engineering team structure; it varies considerably based on budget and the skills/availability of ISV and their team.
🌼 #5 UI/UX Design
✨Expert PDOs can ensure AppExchange apps meet technical specifications and deliver exceptional user experiences. This service is often done as part of or after discovering the initial requirement.
PDOs UI/UX services for ISVs are designed to create intuitive, engaging, and visually appealing applications that stand out on the Salesforce AppExchange. Here's an overview of the UI/UX services offered:
User Research and Insights: PDOs conduct thorough user research to gather insights into the target audience's needs, preferences, and behaviors.
Design Thinking Workshops: PDOs engage with Salesforce ISV partners and customer stakeholders in workshops to ideate and conceptualize the user experience, ensuring the app's design aligns with business goals and user expectations.
Wireframing and Prototyping: Creating wireframes and prototypes to visualize the app's structure and user flows. This early visualization helps refine the app's functionality and user experience before full-scale development. PDOs can use various Salesforce-optimised tools here to be cost-effective and ensure easy handover to developers at later stages.
UI Design: involves crafting the visual aspects of the app, including layout, colors, typography, and icons. The goal is to ensure the app is aesthetically pleasing and aligns with the brand's identity. UI design is primarily unnecessary for internal Salesforce apps, as they follow the Salesforce Lightning Design principles. As a PDO, we have seen ISVs innovate a lot on UX for both internal Salesforce users and External users on Experience Cloud.
Usability Testing: Via UI Mocks, PDOs can conduct usability tests with real users to identify issues or friction points in the app's user experience. Feedback from these tests is crucial for refining the UI/UX before launch.
Responsive Design: Mobile responsiveness is rare on internal Salesforce apps, but if a requirement is discovered early, it can help design UI components that scale well on various devices and screen sizes, catering to the modern, mobile-first user. For ex., a complex lightning component is supposed to work on desktop and on mobile in Experience Cloud.
🏗️ #6 - Architecture
The architecture of your app is the foundation upon which everything else is built.
The right PDO helps you design an efficient, scalable, and flexible architecture that works seamlessly across different organizations and Salesforce editions.
Solution Architecture: PDOs create a blueprint for the ISV’s application, outlining the technical structure, Salesforce cloud integration strategies, and data flow to ensure scalability and performance.
Security Architecture: They design the app with Salesforce’s stringent security standards in mind, implementing best practices for data protection, authentication, and authorization.
This includes making informed decisions about managed and unmanaged packages, designing for multi-tenancy, and ensuring that no odd or deprecated metadata locks you into a corner.
💻 #7 - Tailored App Development
🚀Once the above services are rendered correctly, this part is easy, as everything is decided and documented in requirements and architecture documents.
Here, Salesforce PDO partners assist with the following services:
Custom Development: Utilizing Salesforce's Apex, Visualforce, and Lightning Web Components for tailored app functionalities.
Integration: Seamlessly connecting Salesforce apps with external systems and platforms for extended capabilities.
Agile Methodologies: Employing iterative cycles for flexible, feedback-driven development, ensuring alignment with ISV needs.
Quality Assurance: Rigorous testing to deliver reliable, high-performing Salesforce applications optimized for user experience.
⚙️ #8 - Dev Ops
PDOs enhance the app development lifecycle through specialized DevOps services, focusing on efficiency, automation, and continuous improvement. Here's how PDOs leverage DevOps to benefit ISVs:
Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD): Implementing CI/CD pipelines to automate the testing and deployment processes, enabling faster release cycles and reduced time to market for AppExchange listings. are official Salesforce repos for popular GIT hostings:
Bitbucket Pipelines > https://github.com/forcedotcom/sfdx-bitbucket-org
GitHub Actions> https://github.com/forcedotcom/salesforcedx-actions
Version Control: Utilizing version control systems to manage code changes and collaboration, ensuring code integrity and facilitating easier rollbacks and updates.
Environment Management: Streamlining development, testing, and production environment setup and management to ensure consistency and reduce configuration errors.
Automated Testing: Automated testing frameworks are employed to accelerate quality assurance, identify bugs early, and improve the overall quality of the application.
Release Management: Coordinating the release process, from planning and scheduling to deployment and post-launch monitoring, ensuring smooth and predictable app launches.
By integrating DevOps practices into the app development process, PDOs help Salesforce ISVs achieve higher operational efficiency, faster deployments, and superior app quality, ultimately contributing to a successful presence on the AppExchange platform.
🔐 #9 Security and Compliance
🛡️PDOs provide indispensable support to ISVs in navigating the complex Salesforce security review process, a crucial step for any app aiming for listing on the AppExchange.
This support ensures that apps meet and exceed Salesforce's rigorous security standards, safeguarding user data and maintaining trust.
In this stage, key areas of focus include:
Security Review Preparation: PDOs guide ISV partners through the comprehensive preparation required for the Salesforce security review. This includes conducting pre-review assessments, identifying potential vulnerabilities, and implementing security measures to meet Salesforce's stringent criteria.
Best Practices Implementation: PDOs also help ISV partners implement best practices for app security, i.e., secure coding practices, data encryption, and user authentication and authorization mechanisms.
Remediation Support: In case of identified security issues, either during the preparation phase or as part of the security review feedback, PDOs assist in quickly addressing these issues.
Documentation and Evidence: PDOs help prepare the documentation required for the security review process, such as security test reports, data protection policies, compliance certificates, and false positive documents.
Compliance Advisory: Depending on the app's target market and functionality, they can ask ISV to hire experts to advise on compliance with relevant security standards and regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, etc.
🎧 #10 - Customer Success - Support / Implementation Teams
Mostly ignored while budgeting and planning by ISVs, which comes as a deep regret from customer churn.
ISVs need to prepare support engineers based on the MVP cycle for:
Pre-installation: Compliance concerns (data protection, privacy) for large customers.
Installation issues faced by admins.
Post-installation: Conflicts with critical flows, crashes, or errors in crucial features.
Using hybrid or fully outsourced models, properly trained support teams can achieve high CSAT scores on AppExchange. Prompt issue resolution is crucial to retain users. Budgeting for and training support engineers is essential. Here are vital considerations for ISVs:
Timezone Overlap: Align the support team's working hours with the client's timezone. Options include in-house or offshore hiring via a PDO.
Training Support Staff: Essential for success, including:
Utilize junior Salesforce admins/QA/developers familiar with the MVP for support.
Hire engineers towards the MVP cycle's end for training and onboarding before launch.
An expert PDO can help ISVs plan the correct support team/function, as this process can be overwhelming or new for some ISVs.
Learn more about this service in our expert article > PDO Strategies for Salesforce ISVs: Achieving 5-Star AppExchange CSAT.
👍 #11 - AppExchange Listing and Marketing
This multi-faceted support includes:
Listing Optimization: PDOs assist in creating compelling AppExchange listings that highlight the app's unique value proposition using engaging descriptions, feature highlights, high-quality screenshots, and explainer screen recordings based on good-quality demo data.
Marketing Strategy Development: Identifying suitable channels within the Salesforce community, such as social media, Salesforce events, and community forums, to promote the app effectively.
SEO and Content Marketing: PDOs can use their SEO and content teams to identify ISV’s marketing needs and back them with relevant blogs, case studies, success stories, and customer testimonials to build authority and drive interest.
Customer Engagement and Reviews: PDOs help implement strategies for collecting feedback and managing reviews, including constructively addressing any negative comments.
📃 #12 - Documentation
Configuration Manuals: These detailed guides provide step-by-step instructions for installing, configuring, and optimizing applications within various Salesforce environments.
User Manuals: User manuals focus on the end-user experience, offering clear instructions and tips for navigating the application's features and functionalities.
Knowledge Bases: An extensive knowledge base serves as a self-service resource for users, offering answers to frequently asked questions, troubleshooting tips, and best practices for using the application. This resource is invaluable for reducing support tickets and empowering users to solve problems independently.
API Documentation: Detailed API documentation is provided for apps that offer API integrations. This includes information on how to connect with and utilize the app’s APIs, including request/response formats, endpoint descriptions, and sample code.
Release Notes: With each new application version, PDOs prepare release notes highlighting new features, improvements, bug fixes, and any changes in functionality. These notes are essential for informing users about the app's evolution and impact on their use case.
Salesforce OEM partnerships are another great way to realize your AppExchange dreams. Learn how this option can propel your AppExchange success to new heights.
🚀 #13 - Post-Launch Support
🧩🔧After the successful launch of a Salesforce application on the AppExchange, PDOs offer vital post-launch support services to ensure the app remains relevant, functional, and successful over time. This ongoing support covers several key areas:
Regular Maintenance: PDOs conduct routine maintenance to address issues and ensure the application runs smoothly. This includes fixing bugs, optimizing performance, and updating documentation as needed.
Salesforce Updates Compatibility: Salesforce regularly updates its platform, so PDOs ensure that the app remains compatible with these updates. They adapt the application to work seamlessly with new Salesforce features and functionalities, preventing any disruption to the app's performance or user experience.
Feature Enhancements: PDOs work with ISVs to plan and implement new features and enhancements based on user feedback and emerging market trends. This iterative development process helps keep the application competitive and aligned with users' evolving needs.
Security Updates: PDOs provide timely security updates and patches in response to new security threats and standards. They ensure that the application adheres to the latest security best practices, maintaining the trust and confidence of its users.
Technical Support: Offering ongoing technical support to resolve user queries and issues is critical to post-launch services. PDOs may also train the in-house team of ISV partners, providing first-level support and ensuring quick resolution times. Read more in the “Customer Success Teams” point above.
Monitoring and Analytics: PDOs provide valuable insights into usage patterns by continuously monitoring the application's performance, reported errors, and user engagement. This data-driven approach aids in making informed decisions about future updates and optimizations.
⚒️ #14 - Implementation Support by PDOs for Complex ISV Apps
Most of these services can be required by ISVs as target customers don’t have in-house Salesforce engineers/architects.
Custom Development: PDOs recognize that off-the-shelf apps of ISV partners may not meet all the unique needs of an ISV's target audience. Custom development services could be needed for
Tailoring the app’s functionalities to address specific business processes, workflows, and requirements.
This could include writing Apex, Triggers, LWCs, Flows, or even building custom objects or other metadata in the client's organization to make the app work well with a customer’s business requirements.
Data Migrations: Migrating existing data into the new system is a common hurdle in implementing complex applications. PDOs assist with planning and executing data migrations, ensuring data integrity, security, and continuity. Example scenarios:
The customer is migrating from a competitor’s app. Relevant data across different objects/metadata must be mapped and migrated to the ISV’s app.
The customer is migrating a legacy system to ISV’s app, forex, leaving on-premise Inventory management to a cloud-based inventory app built by ISV on Salesforce.
API Integrations: Consider these points:
Connecting to external databases, third-party services, or custom applications.
PDOs manage the technical aspects of integration, including developing custom APIs if needed.
This ensures the ISV’s app can communicate and function effectively with other legacy or SAAS systems critical to a given customer.
📈 #15 - Managing Licenses, Trials and Orders
PDOs assist ISVs in setting up the License Management App (LMA), Channel Order App (COA), and Trialforce in a Salesforce Business Edition org. These tools are crucial for efficiently managing licenses, sales, and partnerships and providing trial experiences to potential customers. Here's an in-depth look at how PDOs support these critical setups:
LMA Setup and Configuration: PDOs guide ISVs through installing and configuring the LMA to track app licenses, installations, and usage. This ensures that ISVs can manage customer licenses directly from their Salesforce org, providing a streamlined overview of app engagement.
COA Integration: For ISVs using resellers or partners, PDOs assist in integrating the COA and automating the order capture and fulfillment process. This setup simplifies managing sales through channels, ensuring accuracy and efficiency in order processing and revenue share reporting to Salesforce.
Trialforce Configuration: Trialforce is a powerful Salesforce tool that allows ISVs to create templated trial orgs for their applications. PDOs help ISVs set up Trialforce, enabling them to offer customized trial experiences to prospective customers. This involves creating a Trialforce Management Org (TMO) and designing trial templates that best showcase the app's features.
Managing Trialforce Complexity: Setting up various Trialforce orgs involves navigating complexities, such as customizing trial templates to match different customer segments and use cases. PDOs provide expertise in managing these nuances, ensuring trial experiences are tailored to effectively convert prospects into customers.
Customization and Workflow Automation: Beyond basic setups, PDOs customize LMA, COA, and Trialforce workflows to match the ISV's business processes, automating operations like license provisioning, renewal notifications, trial conversions, and order management for efficiency and scalability.
Training and Best Practices: PDOs equip ISV partners with the knowledge to utilize these tools effectively, sharing best practices for license management, trial setup, order processing, and leveraging data for strategic insights.
Ongoing Support and Optimization: After initial implementations, PDOs continue to support ISVs in adjusting and optimizing LMA, COA, and Trialforce setups. This ensures that the ISV's sales and trial offerings remain dynamic, reflecting evolving business needs and market feedback.
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