Build a Team to Support Your Business
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Structure your business to build, sell, and support your product successfully.
- Create a hiring roadmap to have the right roles in place.
- Build business triggers to know when to scale in key areas.
AppExchange Partner Critical Business Roles
It’s time to think about who’s going to implement all those plans you created. We aren’t going to list every role necessary for running your business. For example, we don’t talk about human resources or finance. We are going to talk about the roles critical to your product lifecycle and accelerating your business’s growth.
Even if you’re a jack-of-all-trades who plans to do it all by yourself or a scrappy startup with a few employees, read on. Certain roles are often overlooked, especially if you’re new to cloud computing.
Budget and Hiring
Don’t panic as we talk about roles. One person can often handle multiple roles, especially in the early stages of your business.
After taking into account the strengths of you and your team, consider hiring contractors, part-time employees, or consultants. For example, let’s say you’re a business wizard and have a great idea. Consider looking for a product development outsourcer (PDO) to create the app to your specifications.
Or, if you’re a technical wizard, consider bringing on contractors as needed for marketing and sales.
Think creatively to fill these roles—just make sure that everyone knows their responsibilities.
Critical Responsibilities and Roles
Partnerships
As an AppExchange partner, you’re working with Salesforce right away. As your business grows, you might also develop strategic alliances with other partners. An alliances director has responsibility for managing those partnerships.
Sales
Do you want your offering to be a commercial success? A common mistake we see is when a technical team with a great idea thinks they can focus on selling on the side. To close business and build revenue, we recommend having a trained salesperson who can communicate the business value of your offering to customers.
Then consider hiring someone for inside sales—those sales done over the phone.
As you grow, you want to build up your sales team. Consider these hiring suggestions.
- Additional inside sales and field sales roles for various regions
- Sales reps or business development reps who are responsible for qualifying leads
- Regional managers to oversee your field sales, and inside sales people to work with geographically diverse customers
- Sales engineers who can talk the sales talk but can also answer technical questions and show off your product to customers
We also recommend choosing an executive or experienced sales person to develop significant deals by meeting with key companies.
Marketing
Many aspects of your business plan require someone with marketing expertise. Start with someone who can develop and act on your marketing plan and build your sales kit content. As your business grows, think about specialized roles for handling public relations, events and sponsorships, and social media.
Development
Who is leading your technical team? That person is responsible for your product roadmap and making sure that development of your product is on track. That same person, or others, build and test the application. Your technical lead can assist you in determining other technical role needs.
Operations
You’ve sold your offering. Great! Who’s responsible for managing orders, provisioning, pricing, and licensing? That’s right, your sales operations team. They’re going to keep your sales team running like a well-oiled machine with all the right reports and dashboards so that you have visibility into your entire sales cycle.
Customer Success
Remember, happy customers are key to the SaaS business model. Customer success managers (CSM), as we call them at Salesforce, are responsible for ensuring that customers use and adopt your offering.
Are customers using the product? How often? Are they using all its features and functionality or only some? Have they provisioned all their licenses? CSMs use the answers to these questions as indicators of customer satisfaction. This information also helps in forecasting renewals.
Support
When customer questions and issues arise around your offering, support agents provide the first line of response. Have an SLA in place for your support team, and train them to prioritize the most critical customer cases.
Hiring Plan
We often see businesses grow to a certain point with their current business plan and funding. Then they plateau. To continue growing requires that your company invest in itself.
When you have the financial stability to continue to grow your business, it’s a good time to think about hiring more people. Ideally, to ensure that your team is ready to hit the next milestone, plan a few months ahead of your needs. And keep in mind that it usually takes a few months for new hires to be fully productive.
And don’t over hire. Use your plan and revenue targets as guides. Cultivate a network of people to join your team in the future. Having a pipeline of qualified candidates shortens your hiring process.
Here are some common reasons for expanding your team.
- You want to accelerate sales.
- Customers are providing lots of feedback and you want to address it.
- You’re ready to release to a new customer segment.
- You want to release a new companion product.
After you’ve determined why you’re expanding your team, focus on the roles that get you there. For example, to accelerate sales determine if you want to invest in marketing or sales and which specific roles within those departments you need the most.
Wrap It Up
You’ve now been introduced to the roles critical to a successful AppExchange partner, like an alliances manager and a customer success manager. We’ve also provided some recommendations on the responsibilities of the various roles that contribute to the product lifecycle.
It’s time to take that final quiz and then dig into your planning. Let the excitement begin!