24 Jun FSM Quick Sales Tips: Selling Salesforce as a Platform
“The reality of a company that’s about to hit a big growth spurt is that the only thing they know for sure is that there’s a bunch of uncertainty coming their way.”
FSM Senior Account Executive Barry Thomason explains how to help business leaders understand how point solutions vs. a platform can impact their growth.
The reality of a company that’s about to hit a big growth spurt is that the only thing they know for sure is that there’s a bunch of uncertainty coming their way.
One of the things to remember is that what they choose in terms of these system decisions is going to be with them for a long, long time. One of the things we see a lot with growth companies is what I’ll call the point solutions trap. Which is, a small growth company that ends up with 5, 10, maybe 15 systems that do various things. You wonder “How in the world did they get in that situation?” Because when we encounter them they’re trying to unwind it.
Part of it is, obviously, that they don’t have an IT department that oversees all this stuff and keeps everything in order. Part of it is that point solutions look really good – they’ve got a lot of features, they’re departmental-focused…it’s easy to get really mesmerized by that at the departmental level. So you go ahead and you do that…you get something for HR, you get something for sales, you get something for service, you get something for the next thing. What’s going to happen is that you’re going to try to integrate those systems, but integration drives technical debt. It gets to a point that you have all these point solutions and all this integration and the business is struggling to maintain systems rather than spending its energy on growth.
What we’re offering is a platform decision. What makes the Salesforce platform the right foundation for growth? For one thing, it’s clear it’s the market leader. Salesforce has all the core capabilities that you need that are native. And then within that, you have all kinds of options to extend the system. You can literally build whatever you want to on the platform. You’ve also got the biggest add-in ecosystem of any provider, by far. And of course connectivity – you’ve got a fully-mapped API stack.
So those are some things to consider when a business is about to make a decision. They’re either going to end up with a bunch of point solutions or with a platform.