Show Notes
In today’s episode of How We Got There (which was recorded earlier this year), I talk with Ari Treuhaft, who is the COO of Litify.. Apologies for the audio quality but the conversation was too good not to share! He spent time at a law firm building an operating system for law firms on Salesforce and from there, Litify was born. They offer vertical SaaS for legal organizations, who think of themselves as unique and specialized organizations who need to build custom solutions. Litify has raised a series A pre-pandemic and now has over 200 employees and over 300 customers.
Litify is both an ISV and an OEM partner for Salesforce. Ari shares why being both makes sense for their business to align with buyers preferences in order to reduce go-to-market friction. They’ve found success in co-selling with Salesforce with OEM customers where the Salesforce sales teams was subsequently able to sell additional products, like Sandboxes and Marketing Cloud. And when a customer already has a footprint with Salesforce, they go the ISVforce route.
He talks about how he thinks about vertical SaaS and what they’ve learned from the likes of nCino and Veeva. One of the key learnings was around how to approach services internally and through SIs. Ari shares how they chose partners to work with in the SI realm and how you have to cut through a lot of noise in order to find the great ones. Align around values and mutual skin in the game….get into the single digits with target partners if you’re just getting started to go deep vs. going wide with efforts around enablement and training for your partners. As an ISV/OEM, you need to invest in these relationships.
Ari takes pride in providing a solution on the Salesforce platform in an underserved industry. On the flip side, he acknowledges that building out an internal Services team resulted in successful sales but a backlog of customers who weren’t getting live. They actually called up customers and shared candidly that they had to wait for kickoff for X months while they invested in their SI partner program training.
From a lead source perspective, for OEM leads they come from internal BD efforts and their SI partners. On the ISVforce side of the world, it is mainly the Salesforce AE/SE/RVP referrals. Ari shares some details about their SI partner referral program and how they share revenue with them in addition to having them perform the services. Across the board, focus on things that are working and do more of them. As you work to figure out what gtm channels are right for you, make sure you only run as many experiments as you can successfully measure. Once you start to see success in any of the experiments in the numbers, do more of it and maybe even drop the other active experiments.
Here’s a closer look at the episode:
0:16 How Ari found his way into the ecosystem?
3:36 Litify is both an ISVForce and an OEM? Why did they decide to go both paths?
6:20 As an OEM what have you learned from some of the other large OEMs out there?
8:02 What have been some of your learnings to share around that SI program?
10:24 You just need to find a handful that are really high quality!
13:55 What are good go to market examples?
12:21 What's been the biggest mistake along the way?
15:24 What’s been your top producing leads source for Litify?
16:16 Incentives program for referring business.
17:42 Experience with Tiger Capital
20:34 Program’s that provide Insight on tracking success?
More from How We Got There
What worked 18 months ago in the GTM org, doesn’t work any longer. Christina Scarmeas joined the How We Got There podcast for a fun and impactful discussion about Marketing in the Salesforce ecosystem. Christina is the CMO of Mogli for the last 4+ years after 4+ years as a marketing leader at Fonteva, another Salesforce partner. As a leading provider of texting on the Salesforce platform, Mogli thinks a lot about the buyer’s journey. Christina has worked with the team to suspend their long held beliefs on how to effectively market in the Salesforce ecosystem, on things as foundational as gating content to drive MQLs and moving more toward focusing on the buying group’s behavior. We talk about how she navigated organizational buy-in as the focus shifted away from vanity metrics to actual pipeline creation/closing, redesigning their playbook. Christina shares how organic and paid search has ebbed and flowed as they have refined their team, skills, and methodologies. As an example, they tried paid search again in the last 12 months….and it’s working well so they are leaning into it. On the flip side, the AppExchange Marketing Program used to work really well but they have greatly reduced their budget on it since results had softened. We touch on the role of LLMs, reddit (shoutout to the fickle world that is r/salesforce), and the AgentExchange/AppExchange in being present where the buying committee is. Inbound leads continue to be the strongest source, but we all know those leads are influenced by everything from events to partnerships to content to industry verticals and beyond. Mogli sees inbound conversion from initial conversation with the BDR team to opportunity at a rate of 80% and almost half of the initial conversations eventually move to a close won deal. Incredible conversion rates. Before wrapping up, we touch on ICP & Partnerships. If you are responsible for the top of the funnel, this episode is for you. This episode is brought to you by ISV Accelerators. ISV Accelerators is your inside guide to co-selling with Salesforce: activating the right reps, accelerating real pipeline, uncovering new revenue, and closing more deals together. Senior alliances leadership without the cost of a full-time hire, and speed to answers on whether that hire is even worth making. See what your Salesforce partnership could really do.
Sienna Quirk has worked on GTM motions and product marketing for at least 30 Salesforce apps, probably many more. On this episode of How We Got There, we speak with the Head of Marketing at Thread about all things Salesforce ecosystem for ISVs.
You’ve gotta be boots on the ground, doing it yourself first before you build out a team to help you sell. He needed to be the one selling, partnering, and figuring out the messaging before scaling the team.
Heather asks and helps answer “How do you create a point of view about your solution in a way that will talk to Salesforce about how it works together for that specific customer?” For ISVs so they can take a strong point of view about a specific customer vs. approaching with just questions. “It’s easier to find this information than it’s ever been. Don’t be lazy and use the tools and you will have much better conversations.” This episode of How We Got There features a conversation with Heather Mason, Founder of ISV Accelerators. Heather brings their clients her knowledge forged by experiences at an ISV (Insight Squared) and Salesforce themselves, 5.5 years at each company. Her company works with “high potential” Salesforce partners to assist their GTM motions in the ecosystem - Salesforce, other ISVs, and SIs - so the ISV can help make it easier for the customer to buy the solution. We talked a bit about the challenges her team faced at Salesforce within her focus on the Pharma vertical, which had a strong publicly traded OEM of Salesforce in Veeva to contend/cooperate with and the new-normal of fewer people at Salesforce focused on ISVs. Partners need to adapt to how Salesforce is changing their selling motion, aligning to Salesforce AEs with modern better together messaging. The challenge is Salesforce is still figuring it (it being Agentforce) out too. Heather shares insights around traffic on the AppExchange listing by most common personas and what it means to ISVs through the lens of who buys their solution. At the level, the Salesforce sales team aligned to a specific account can be over 20 people but at the SMB level it might just be an AE and their RVP, who will be VERY hands on with the deal alongside their AE. We touch on big strategy but also tactics around things like when is the right moment to reach out to the Salesforce account team in an opportunity cycle. It all starts with you having a unique value to share and if you do, you should expect an 85% positive response rate. If you are lower than that, I would challenge you to harden your messaging. Heather loves to connect with people in the ecosystem and takes pride in making herself available to meeting new people. I learned a ton from my conversation with Heather and am grateful she is actively helping ISVs and OEMs in the ecosystem. Connect with Heather at the Arcadia leadership experience in Montana run by the Yarboroughs. This episode is brought to you by ISVApp. ISVapp the usage analytics platform built specifically for Salesforce ISV and OEM applications. ISVapp is your central toolbox for reducing churn, increasing renewals, uncovering upsell opportunities, and closing more deals. #salesforce #isv #gtm #salesforcepartners #appexchange
This episode of the How We Got There podcast features a conversation with Mark Rutledge, Chief Storyteller | Global ISV Partner Solutions at Salesforce. The builder advocacy program that he works on is one that every ISV should learn about and explore if they might be a fit for working with them. Fun fact - I worked with Mark Rutledge when he as a client of my former business, GTM Guides, while he was building on the Salesforce platform for at Moody’s. Thanks to Codescience (now Bridgenext) for bringing us together.